How To Tempt a Viscount (6 page)

It was barely an hour later when Marcus returned to his town house, having arranged at Westminster what he should have arranged when they had first been married. He took the stairs with a lightness in his step. The torture of the past seemed unimportant. He could see things differently now and that was all because of Ellen. She was an amazing woman. He still could not believe he had not seen it right from the start.

At the top of the stairs he halted—two footmen were carrying Ellen’s portmanteau out of her bedchamber. And he knew instantly what she was doing: she was leaving him…again.

He felt his eyes narrow, felt his blood rise. He was a man about to do battle. A man about to fight for his woman. Something of it must have shown on his face for the footmen stopped, offering stuttering explanations.

‘Lady Stanley—‘

‘Leave the portmanteau where it is,’ he said in a quiet voice that belied the storm within.

The footmen did as he bid and scurried away.

He walked into the room.

The maid was holding Ellen’s cloak, ready to fasten around her shoulders. He looked at the woman and she fled with the cloak still in her hands, closing the door behind her.

He saw the marginal widening of Ellen’s eyes and knew she had not thought him to return so soon.

‘Running away again, Ellen?’ he asked and raised one eyebrow as he walked towards her.

She gave a gasp of incredulity. ‘How dare you?’

‘Oh, I dare,’ he said. ‘I may have been fool enough to let you go before, but I will not do so again.’

‘You think you can keep me here against my will?’

‘Against your will? You want me as much as I want you.’

‘You are mistaken.’ She held her head up, faced him like a combatant.

He walked right up to her and stared down into her stormy grey eyes.

‘Are you denying what is between us, Ellen? Denying the passion and desire and love.’

She glanced to the side. ‘There is nothing between us, Marcus. There never was.’ Her voice sounded hard but behind it he heard her pain. He touched his fingers to her chin, moved her face around that he could look in her eyes; touched his lips very gently against hers and felt her momentary yield before she pulled away.

‘Your words may lie but your lips and your eyes cannot.’

He saw the truth in her eyes before she looked away again trying to hide all of her hurt from him.

‘Why will you not let me talk to you, Ellen? Why will you not give me a chance to explain?’

She was silent for so long that he thought she would not answer him. And then she looked up at him, her eyes so stark and honest that it seemed he could see into her very soul.

‘Because I already know, Marcus.’

There was a silence in which there was only the fast thud of his heart and a cold prickling down his spine.

‘I know that you married me only for my money. I know that you were forced to it against your will. And I know that your heart lay with another. You should have had the courage to stand up to your father. It would have saved us both much anguish.’

Every muscle tightened. She knew, and he was going to have to tell her all of it in its full glaring ugliness. ‘Ellen, you do not understand—‘

‘But I do, Marcus. I understand too well. That is the problem.’

‘It was infatuation, not love, although I believed it such at the time.’

‘You would have married her!’

‘Yes, fool that I was! It was why my father took such drastic action.’

There was a pause.

‘Then she was right,’ he heard her whisper and a shiver of foreboding stole down his spine.

‘Ellen, who was right?’

‘Amanda,’ she said quietly.

His heart sank into his stomach. He felt a terrible sense of dread. ‘You have spoken to Amanda?’

‘At Lady Carruthers’s ball. Two months after we were married.’

‘Just before you left for your parents.’

‘She was eager to tell me how it was her that you wanted to marry all along, that you had been betrothed and forced into breaking it off by your father, purely because of my money.’

His blood was pounding. He knew how dangerous Amanda could be. How malicious and conniving and manipulative.

“‘Poor Marcus,’” she said, “so desperately in love with me when he walked down the aisle with you.” I did not want to believe her. I thought you too honourable a man to have married one woman when you were in love with another. But I was wrong.’

‘It was not like that! Hell’s teeth, Ellen!’

‘She was right about that. Was she then right about the rest of it?’

‘What did she tell you?’ He dreaded to think of the lies Amanda had spun in her bitter determination to wreck his marriage. He knew she wanted to hurt him, he just had not thought she would go after Ellen.

‘That when you were making love to me it was her you were thinking of. She asked me if you cried out her name when you found your pleasure in me. I did not tell her that after those first few times you could not even bring yourself to share my bed! But at least I then understood why.’

‘Amanda would say anything to hurt you. Because it is the only way that she can hurt me.’

‘You are lying.’

‘No, Ellen. My father deemed you a good match for me. Yes, your fortune was a consideration, but there was much more to it than that. He thought we would suit. He thought you were everything a wife should be…and he wanted to get me away from Amanda.’ He paused. ‘So he went behind my back and offered her a settlement. It was bad enough to discover what he had done, but then to learn that Amanda was only too willing for the right price.’

‘She accepted money?’ Ellen felt a little ripple of shock.

‘She was everything that he said she was. He paid her the entire Stanley fortune. A few weeks later she was Marsdon’s mistress.’

Ellen was reeling from what he was telling her.

Marcus continued on, his voice low and controlled, yet she could hear the emotion within it. ‘My mother was forced to sell the family jewels. My sisters denied their come-outs. They were unable to afford the upkeep of Tollerton. Living like paupers in one room.’

Ellen listened and it all fell into place. ‘He did it as a means to make you marry me?’

‘Yes.’ She barely heard his whisper. ‘He knew I could not leave them in such penury.’

And she understood. At last. He
had
married her for her fortune. He
had
wished to marry another. But none of it had been as she thought.

‘I felt humiliated and hurt, a damned fool. I felt powerless as to my own fate and betrayed twice over. And angry beyond words. So angry, Ellen.’

Everything that she had felt. He had been hurt and humiliated as much as she. And she was ashamed of what she had set out to do to him.

‘I could tell you nothing of it. You were so tender and innocent and, besides, what man could tell such things to his new bride? It would have hurt you beyond reason. I did not know what to do so I threw myself into my work to try to forget.’

All the hours he had worked. All those meetings when she had thought he was avoiding her.

‘I did my duty to my family. And I tried to do my duty to you.’

‘I did not want duty, Marcus.’

He looked at her and felt his heart ache with regret.

‘You were so distant. And always with that underlying current of resentment. I tried to talk to you…I tried to reach you but it felt like there was a breach between us that I could never cross.’

‘I thought I was protecting you from the angry feelings I felt towards my father and Amanda. I knew I had made a mess of things—I just did not realise how very badly.’

She closed her eyes.

‘I’m so sorry, Ellen. I never meant to hurt you.’

‘The anger and resentment are gone,’ she said slowly.

‘I’ve grown up. I realise my father did what he did only to save me from the biggest mistake of my life. And I see now what he saw then—the truth of Amanda…and of you, Ellen. I was a fool not to see what was before my very eyes. A fool not to see what was between us.’

‘But after we made love, you left, went to your office. I thought that having had what you wanted from me it was all going to go back to as it had been before.’

‘I went to my office to tell them I was taking you away on honeymoon first thing in the morning. Arlesford has a snug little hunting lodge up in the country near Amersham where we can stay undisturbed by the world. I have a lot to make up to you, Ellen.’

Their eyes met and held.

‘If I had not come back to London…’ she said.

‘Did your father not tell you?’

She shook her head.

‘I was coming down to Southampton to fetch you at the end of the month. I wanted us to start again.’

She could hear the thud of her heart in the silence. ‘I have not told you why I returned to London.’ She swallowed down the boulder lodged in her throat and screwed all her courage to the task. She knew she had to tell him so that there was only honesty between them. No matter what it cost her. ‘I came to seduce you, Marcus, to make you desire me. I planned to walk away and leave you unsatisfied. I wanted some small semblance of power, some salve to my pride. I wanted to show you how it felt, how very much it hurt. So that you would understand.’

‘But you did not stick to your plan.’

‘No.’

‘Why not, Ellen?’

She looked up then, met his gaze directly.

‘Tell me,’ he said.

‘Because I realised that I still love you.’

He took her in his arms and stared down into her face. ‘As I love you, Ellen.’ And then he took her mouth with his and kissed her with such infinite tenderness and all the love and passion that was between them welled up and overflowed. He scooped her up and carried her to the bed.

They made love all night and when the dawn came Ellen remembered that she had not quite told Marcus everything.

‘Marcus?’

His hair was bed-ruffled, the rough shadow of beard stubble covered his chin and cheeks. He looked sleepy and very, very sensual. ‘Ellen.’ He stroked her hair and smiled at her, and she felt him grow hard against her belly.

‘There is something I have not told you. Something very bad.’ She bit at her lip.

His eyes held hers, dark and passionate and yet gentle.

‘When I was in Southampton…’ It was difficult to find the words. ‘I knew I could not seduce you as plain Ellen Henshall. I did not think you would notice me and I had no…knowledge of how to do it. So I did something very shocking. Something that would ruin my reputation were it ever discovered.’

He raised an eyebrow.

‘I… I paid a courtesan, a very expensive courtesan, to teach me how to seduce you.’

She saw his eyes open wider.

‘I could think of no other way.’

‘So that night in the theatre…?’

She gave a nod, and bit her lip again.

‘And the
Volse
?’

‘Yes.’ She squeezed her eyes closed.

‘And the visit to the corsetiere?’

‘That, too,’ she whispered and felt her face flame with embarrassment. ‘Kitty promised me it would work.’

‘Kitty?’

‘Miss Kitty Bradshaw of Southampton.’

‘She was right,’ he said and there was a pause. ‘And were Miss Bradshaw’s lessons theoretical or…practical…in nature?’

‘Purely theoretical.’ She blushed all the harder. ‘Are you very shocked?’

‘I confess to being a little surprised,’ he said. And when she lowered her eyes he took hold of her chin and tilted it up so that she was forced to meet his gaze. ‘Ellen, you had no need to take lessons from anyone else. All you needed was to have confidence in yourself. You are a beautiful woman. A sensual woman. The only woman for me.’

She felt her heart swell with love for him.

‘You were very good at seduction,’ he said.

‘Was I?’

He smiled and kissed her lips. ‘Very, very good.’

She smiled. ‘I love you, Marcus Henshall.’

‘I love you, Ellen Henshall.’

And she raised her lips to his and seduced him into showing her just how very much.

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How to Tempt a Viscount,
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Margaret McPhee
loves to use her imagination—an essential requirement for a trained scientist. However, when she realized that her imagination was inspired more by the historical romances she loves to read rather than by her experiments, she decided to put the ideas down on paper. She has since left her scientific life behind, retaining only the romance—her husband, whom she met in a laboratory. In summer, Margaret enjoys cycling along the coastline overlooking the Firth of Clyde in Scotland, where she lives. In winter, tea, cakes and a good book suffice.

ISBN: 978-1-4592-2138-3