Page 21 of How to Tempt a Duke

“And how did you feel after?” he prodded.

Foolish.

Embarrassed.

“Exposed...” she breathed, almost choking on the suffocating memory.

“Ah, yes.”

This time she did glance up at him and found him nodding to himself.

“You do realize the appeal of such openness?” he asked.

“No,” she said slowly.

“The stiffness of your formality is what you’ve conformed to. It’s not who you are. The feeling of exposure is what comes when you let your shield slip and grant others the opportunity to see who you are.”

His explanation served to heighten her sense of vulnerability.

“I don’t think I like that.” No, she knew she did not like that.

“Because it feels foreign?” He paused. “Lottie once asked what you were afraid of. Perhaps this is your answer.”

“Perhaps.” It was all she would allow. The full truth would stay locked within her.

A gentleman tilted his hat to Eleanor from a passing carriage, catching her eye. Only then did she realize it was Hugh, with Lady Alice. Clearly they had been in her line of sight for some time on the road ahead and she was seeing them only now.

Interesting...

So, too, was the lack of heady anxiety seeing the two of them typically produced in her.

“When the shield slips away,” Charles was saying, “it lets a man glimpse the true woman beneath.”

“And you saw me?” she queried.

“I did.” He said it softly, as if he were considering something.

“What did you see in me?”

Her pulse ticked wildly. After their last conversation, did she truly want to hear this?

“You’re bold...you meet challenges head-on rather than cowering back from them. And there is passion in you. It’s simmering below the surface, but it’s there and it’s beautiful.”

“Do you find me beautiful?” Eleanor immediately regretted the brashness of her question.

Lord Charles stopped walking. Improper though it might be for him to stop her rather than her stopping him, the offense fell away when she met the blue of his eyes and felt the way they seemed to swallow her whole.

“I do,” he said earnestly.

But Lord Charles was not a man she ought to want. Not a man who should make her stomach flutter with such confusing emotion. Certainly not a man who stayed in the company of a beautiful courtesan.

“Do you think other men will find me so?” she asked.

A muscle worked in his smooth jaw and he stared down at her for so long she felt all the hope in her begin to wilt.

“Yes,” he said at last. “Yes, I do.”

She breathed a sigh of relief and gently nudged them both forward into a walk, to avoid attention after being gone too long. Already she knew her mother would have more questions about the mysterious man at Hyde Park.