The Marquess Who Loved Me (10 page)

“No.” He strode toward her. She held still, not willing to give up ground, and he reached her in four steps. “A prig would be a stickler for what’s proper.”

He slid a hand to her waist and pulled her close, close enough to whisper in her ear. “A prig would never let a tradesman such as myself soil your pretty skin with my dirty hands.”

His other hand stroked her hair, petting her like a prize he’d won at a backwater fair. His voice turned to a growl. “A prig would have known, from the first day that he saw you in that far-off country field, that a lady of your class would never have a man from mine.”

She opened her mouth to deny it, but his hand clasped over her mouth — not the tender shushing of a child, but a desperate, overpowering attempt to stop her voice. “I’m not a gentleman. I might have been, once, until you showed me what I really am. So say those words again, my love. Call me a peasant. Hold your nose at how I reek of the shop. Say how much I embarrass you. I don’t care anymore — it’s all true. But never,
ever
compare me to Charles.”

His hand against her mouth was another piece of the wall between them — a wall she couldn’t scale, or blast through, or burrow under, because she’d reinforced it just as heavily from her side as he had from his.
 

But she could shout over it, and hope that he heard the tone of her voice even if he refused to hear the words. When his hand slipped away, she said, “You are many things, Nicholas Claiborne. But you have never been an embarrassment.”

He slid a hand up to her hair, tentatively, like Socrates picking up the hemlock cup that would be his death. She tilted her head back and looked up into his face. She saw wariness there, hidden under his cold veneer, and it broke her heart.

His voice softened, but the steel underneath it didn’t. “Don’t pretend, Ellie. I never wanted to be part of your circles, and until I inherited a bloody title, they never wanted me. On some level you know that. And in your heart, you could never let yourself be with someone like me.”

He’d said the same words when she had told him of her father’s ultimatum years ago. The old duke had said that she could marry Nick if she spent a season in London and found no one better — a trade she’d been glad to make, never suspecting that her father would push her into marrying someone else.

Nick had known the pressures she would face, even if she hadn’t. She hadn’t suspected that her father would be that stubborn. She was sure that he, and everyone else, would welcome Nick once they grew accustomed to him.

But Nick had always been convinced that she would ultimately, inevitably, come to her senses and give him up. She opened her lips, started to deny his words, but he spoke before she could. “Don’t say anything, Ellie. I can’t believe you. And you won’t convince me.”

The unfairness of it was too much. It was unfair that the world had convinced him of the gulf between them. It was unfair that he wouldn’t listen to her.

But she was unfair for expecting him to. She shouldn’t have married Charles.

She especially shouldn’t have married Charles when she had still been in love with Nick.

Ellie didn’t say any of that, though. She pulled his fingers into hers. “I don’t remember your hands being dirty. I remember them being warm, and gentle, and forceful, and devious.”

With each word, she kissed one of his fingertips. His knuckles gripped hers with crushing force. She somehow found his strength comforting. As she kissed the last finger, she looked up into his eyes. She was only inches from him. But after ten years and thousands of miles, those last few inches felt like an insurmountable obstacle.

He massaged her neck lightly with his free hand. His thumb found the pressure point at the base of her skull and she tilted her head to the side, offering him a view of her throat.

“God, Ellie,” he whispered. The soft cadence of his voice sounded like a lament.

But when his lips met hers, there was no mourning there — only fire.

She’d loved him when she was nineteen. That hadn’t been a lie. And she’d enjoyed him, too. Enjoyed his hands, his mouth, his tongue — all the places where he was hard and she was soft. She used to melt under him like candlewax, and each time she cooled, she had formed back around him, pliant and yielding.

This kiss threatened to melt her again. She moaned as he sealed his lips to hers. He took her breath and she stole it back. She still held his fingers trapped within hers. They became her anchor as her head started to spin.

She knew she should stop him.

But she didn’t. She wanted the memories — the memories she’d relived endlessly, obsessively. She wanted them to be real again, not just ghosts that tormented her in the darkness.

Maybe he wanted the memories too. This kiss wasn’t reverent, the way he used to kiss her. But it wasn’t angry, either. His mouth was gentle — not a brutal conquest, but the renewal of a longstanding claim. His hand lingered at her neck, lightly, light enough that she could break away at any time. But his fingers clasped hers just as fiercely as she did his, until it was no longer clear who was holding whom.

She slid her other arm around him and stepped into the space between his feet. His hand slipped up, teased her ear, caressed her cheek. She did melt then, sighing against his mouth as her body molded to his. It felt right, this kiss, in a way that nothing and no one had quite felt since Nick had left.

The kiss lasted endless minutes — slow, smoldering, a carefully controlled fire. When one quickened, sliding toward a breast or hip, the other slowed, slipping away, changing the angle — keeping things the same, balanced on the edge between memory and reality.

Between who they might have been, and what they really were.

Nick pulled away first. But he didn’t step back — he held her against his chest and leaned his chin on her head. She burrowed her face into his jacket. He had held her like that once before, and the lingering ache of memory punched her in the gut.

She had sought him out the day after her first ball, giving her groom all of her pin money so that he would look the other way while she rode with Nick. They had stopped in a far corner of Hyde Park, and she confessed how she had stood, shy and uncertain, on the edge of her first ball — and how much she had wished he could be invited to such events so that she would have someone to dance with.

He had reassured her, told her that she would conquer them all, and pulled her off her horse to dance with her until she could laugh again. Then he had held her like that, just for a moment, in an embrace that had felt like a goodbye even though she hadn’t understood it at the time.

She’d gone back to her governess then. Several weeks elapsed between that embrace and the day she had broken their engagement. But in the years that followed, she would have done anything to go back to that moment in the park. She wished she had begged him to run away with her instead of standing aside and letting her slip away.

She was finally back in his arms — just where she’d thought she would never be again. It was different now. He felt different, all muscle and resolve instead of youthful worship.

Her thoughts raced, but her brain was unwilling to pin any of them down for fear of finding a truth she didn’t want to confront. Could she pretend that he was a malevolent stranger — that the Nick she had loved wasn’t the man who was determined to destroy her?

Or did she want Nick to be real, no matter how he had changed?

She felt him draw a breath. “I missed you, Ellie,” he said.

All her racing thoughts crashed into each other. Whatever she really felt was buried under the wreckage. But there was one truth she could share.

“I missed you, too.”

*
   
*
   
*

She felt right in his arms. He’d held others after her, and even enjoyed most of them. But she was perfect there, curved around him until he didn’t know where he ended and she began. He’d missed that in India, more than anything else from home — the feeling that somewhere, somehow, one person in the world knew him, fit him, wanted him.

Wanted
him
, despite everything he was.

Still, he couldn’t forget what she’d done.

“I thought you wouldn’t want me to return,” he said.

“You could have asked, you know. I trust you still remember your letters. Unless you’ve spent so many hours counting your fortune that you’ve forgotten how to write?”

She hadn’t moved an inch, but he felt the gulf expanding between them, a tide that carried them further apart with every heartbeat. “You could have written just as easily, Ellie my love. Unless you’ve forgotten your letters with all the men you’ve let sniff at your skirts?”

She’d tensed when he unintentionally used his old endearment for her, then flinched as his barb struck home. She glared at him. “Don’t be crude, Nick. It’s beneath you.”

“But that’s what I am, isn’t it? The crude tradesman who can never have you? Good enough for a quick fuck, but not for your breakfast table?”

“You’ve had me before, and you’ll have me again. I wouldn’t worry so much about being a tradesman — it seems to have served you well.”

He’d wanted to insult her, to draw a reaction from her. But he’d unearthed the weary, jaded woman whom he’d seen the previous night, in the instant before she had recognized him.

Ellie shouldn’t be jaded. She should be laughing.

He raked a hand through his hair. “What happened to you, Ellie?”

Her blue eyes were genuinely confused. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve changed. You used to be all fire. But there’s ice now — why?”

She pulled away from him, as though his touch suddenly pained her. “I’m old, Nick. We both are.”

“Older, but not old. And that’s not what I meant.”

She turned, walked toward the window, and peered out over the barren gardens beyond the glass. “Winter always follows summer. Perhaps that’s what happened to us.”

“You know I don’t like riddles.”

She laughed darkly but didn’t look back at him. “You don’t like explanations, either. So if I can’t tell you the truth, and I can’t speak in riddles, what’s left? Runes? Tea leaves?”

“What truth is left to tell me? Your intentions were clear when you broke our engagement.”

She leaned her forehead against the glass. Her breath fogged the window, and she pulled back to trace a pattern in it — their entwined initials, the cryptic design she had used to sign her paintings of him.

Then she turned to face him. His heart skipped a beat. His Ellie had been a pretty, well-contained fire, the kind that cheered a man on an autumn evening. This Ellie was a bonfire, burning from within as though her very heart was the fuel. Her eyes were stark, her mouth was tight. In the stormy grey of her dress and the muted light of a winter afternoon, Ellie burned for him.

He’d heard of widows throwing themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres in India, although he’d never seen the
sati
act himself. Ellie was still alive in front of him — but she burned, with an intensity and a depth his Ellie had never shown him.

“Do you want the truth?” she asked. “Or do you want revenge?”

Who
was
she, this woman he’d bought and paid for?

“The truth,” he said.

“The truth,” she repeated. “I was young, and stupid, and would have done anything for a chance to please my father. You were young and stupid too, and thought it was all about your shortcomings rather than my father’s demands. You should have known — you knew how Father browbeat me. And I will go to my grave regretting that I let him.”

Then she straightened her shoulders. “But I will also go to my grave before I let another man force me to change just to please him. You can have your revenge. It may even make me feel better to repay you — I’ve heard atonement helps, although I’ve never found it so. If it works, I suppose I should thank you for that.”

She paused, and he saw the weight of the words she wasn’t saying press against her cheeks as she compressed her lips. But those words, when they finally escaped, surprised him. “Just…just don’t ask me to fall in love with you again, if revenge is your only reason. Not because I can’t feel it for you, but because I can’t survive it a second time.”

Her fire burned through his resolve more effectively than any tears could have washed it away. This Ellie was stronger, deeper, more mature than the Ellie he had loved — and the Ellie he had loved was dead, in some brutal and final way that he hadn’t realized until that moment. But the Ellie in front of him was alive and vibrant in a way that the Ellie who lived in his dreams could never be.

He nodded once. Really, what could he say? That he wouldn’t let her fall in love with him? That he would let her go?

He’d asked her for the truth. He couldn’t lie in response.

Ellie exhaled, then inhaled, swallowing whatever else she might have said. The moment passed, like a freak thaw in January, and her eyes reverted to ice. “Thank you, my lord. Now if you’ll excuse me, I wish to return to Folkestone. I shan’t waste my last day of freedom with you when I could enjoy my friends instead.”

He kept his hands clenched behind his back, not letting them reach for her. “Enjoy your day, Lady Folkestone.”

“Will you return for dinner, or do you plan to stay in London?” she asked.

Dinner — with all those bloody aristocrats. He would rather dine in hell, but he had found no evidence of a threat on his life in London. The threat, if it existed, may have been born at Folkestone. It was his duty to return.

Even he knew that he was making an excuse to stay close to Ellie. But he didn’t stop himself. “I’ve a bit of business to attend to yet, but I shall return for dinner.”

“Good. My chef would be displeased if he killed the fatted lamb for nothing. He is very French, and very angry when a plan changes. If you don’t come tonight, we will all be eating porridge for a week.”