Her gaze flew to him.
“I like your eyelids very much,” Mordecai said softly.
A blush suffused her face again. She looked hastily back at her plate. After a moment she said, “You said one of your requirements for your mistresses was a sense of humor. You don’t know that I have one.”
“You have a sense of humor,” Mordecai said. “You just don’t let it out very often.”
Eleanor glanced at him, a dubious frown on her brow. “How can you know that?”
“I’ve seen you make your cousin laugh.”
“In public?” She shook her head. “I would never do that.”
“At that balloon ascension in Hyde Park. I don’t know what you said to her, but it sent her into whoops.” Eleanor Wrotham had laughed, too, and she hadn’t looked like a duchess at all, she’d looked full of mischief and merriment—and then her father h
