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.
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