The Marquess Who Loved Me (22 page)

She didn’t smile. If he wanted a goddess, he would get one — a vengeful, remorseless goddess, but a goddess nonetheless.

She nudged his knees apart, sliding into the gap he created for her. She unbuttoned his jacket, then his waistcoat, and slid her hands up his chest. His skin rippled and his muscles shuddered under her touch. She untied his cravat next, undoing the knot that made him look respectable, and tossed the cloth away. Then she undid the drawstring of his shirt, letting it gap a bit at the neck. With his jacket open and his neck bare, he looked dangerous in a way that appealed to some fantasy she hadn’t realized she had.

But the sharper the need in his eyes, the more she was in control.

Her fingers trailed down to his waist and the bulge that waited for her. He sucked in a breath as she unbuttoned his breeches, working slowly to maximize the effect of her fingers brushing delicately over his confined erection. When she was done, she pulled the tails of his shirt out of his breeches and pushed them aside. And then, like she was unwrapping a priceless artifact, she freed his cock.

He grabbed her wrist. “What is your plan?” he asked, in a voice gone gruff with need.

She looked up, hoping he saw reverence instead of ruthlessness. “Worship, Nick. Isn’t that what you want?”

He looked dazed. His blue eyes were dark. “This wasn’t what I expected.”

She tilted her head to the side. “Don’t you want to debase me? Show me that I’m not a goddess? Throw me from the tower you’ve placed me in?”

He scrubbed a hand over his mouth.

She snorted, low and mirthless. “If you remember what you want, tell me. Meanwhile, this is what
I
want.”

She licked her lips again, instinctively, and heard him groan as she lowered them to his cock. It strained toward her, not caring about whatever battle was raging in Nick’s heart. She licked him first, swirling her tongue around the head, before opening her mouth and taking him inside of her.

For Ellie, this was a new experience — one she’d seen others do, in the darker alcoves of her darkest bacchanals, but never one she’d deigned to do herself. But her enjoyment of it, of how Nick felt in her mouth and how his fingers clutched in her hair, surprised her. She’d meant to tease him — but as her tempo sped up and the stroke of her tongue over his shaft became less tentative, it felt like real worship, striking a chord with how she wanted to care for him, how she wanted to please him. She wanted him to be happy when he was with her. She wanted to give him pure, selfless pleasure.
 

But there was nothing pure and selfless about their arrangement. She pulled back. His hand pressed against her head as though he wanted to force her to finish what she had started, but he dropped it before she started to panic.

“Bloody hell, Ellie. I know what I want now — finish me.”

She laughed as she sat back on her heels and looked up at him. Somehow, his need now was lovely, not dangerous. “I will. But I want to finish us together. Will you let me do that?”

He nodded. She grabbed his hand and pulled him onto the floor, then stretched him out on his back. They hadn’t kissed all day, but this wasn’t a night for tenderness. She stayed away from his mouth, trailing kisses down his sternum instead, then pushing the sleeves of his jacket away. He had to sit up so that she could get his waistcoat, braces, and shirt off of him, and he tried to kiss her then, but she turned her head away. “No kisses, Nick,” she whispered, pushing him back down to the carpet once his shirt was gone.

“You aren’t good at worship, are you?” he observed, coming up on his elbows to watch her as she knelt at his feet to take off his shoes.

She tossed the first shoe away. “No one ever taught me how.” Then she slid off his second shoe, letting her fingers linger on the arch of his foot. He jerked beneath her, and she smiled. “But I’m a fast learner. And I shall worship every inch of you, Nicholas Claiborne.”

He exhaled, sharp and swift. “I have eight you could focus on first, if you want to speed up your lessons.”

She grinned. “Patience, Nick.”

In truth, she didn’t worship every inch of him — by the time his breeches were gone and he was naked beneath her, she was too hungry for him to indulge in endless exploration. But her eyes missed nothing, even if her fingers couldn’t move across him fast enough to keep her promise. Every bit of him was harder than it had been when he was twenty-two, as though the Nick she had painted then was an imperfect rendering of the god he would become. There were sinews and veins on his arms that she hadn’t seen before. His shoulders and chest were broader, which made the taper toward his hips even more dramatic. He had more hair, too — not too much, but the smooth chest of a boy was gone, replaced by dark curls that started, lightly, at his throat and led her gaze down, inexorably, to the manhood that still strained for her.

Suddenly, she didn’t want patience either. She pushed him flat and moved over him — something else they hadn’t done when she was nineteen and too naïve to guess that she could find pleasure without being on her back. He was hard enough, and she was wet enough, that it was no test at all. She used her hand to guide him to her opening and slid down his shaft, feeling herself stretch as she took him to the hilt.

Nick burned for her. He had asked for worship, and he was getting it — but it felt more like an attack than a seduction. He put his hands on her hips, trying to get her to move faster, but she shook her head wickedly and pushed them away. “Patience,” she whispered again, leaning forward so that her hair fell around them like a curtain. “Let me worship you.”

He slid a hand up to her breast, and she accepted that easily enough — although it annoyed him that she had somehow stripped him naked without removing anything of her own. Even her shoes were still on, and he felt the heels grazing against his legs. He didn’t care, though. He didn’t care about anything except the feel of her stroking up and down on his shaft. He closed his eyes and dropped his hands, hoping that he could last long enough that she might find her pleasure too, but knowing it was a losing battle…

Until suddenly, shatteringly, she stopped. His hips surged up automatically to try to recapture the momentum, but she held fast. He opened his eyes just as she bent over to look him in the face. “Beg me, Nick,” she whispered.

It was an echo of what he had done to her the night before. And it wasn’t how their game was supposed to be played. But neither his heart nor his cock cared to put up a fight. “Please, Ellie,” he grated out, mad at her, mad for her. “Finish.”

She slid up, then down — and stayed down. She tilted her head. “That didn’t sound like begging.”

“What do you want me to say?”

She wiggled a bit, as though she were settling in for a story. He groaned. She wiggled again — she seemed to know just how much she needed to move to keep him on edge without letting him go over it.

Then she smiled. He didn’t see any worship on her face. He didn’t see any love, either. Despite the fact his cock was buried inside her, she was just as impenetrable as she had been an hour earlier. Her voice, when she spoke again, had all the condemnation of a priest calling an Inquisition. “Say you love me, Nick.”

“Love you?
Love
you?” Something primal snapped, and even though he knew she’d pushed him into his anger, he couldn’t stop. He reared up, flipped her on her back, and drove into her. “I hate you. I loathe you. I despise you. You
destroyed
me, Ellie. How could I ever love you?”

He couldn’t speak anymore. He could only plunge into her, mindless, savage, needing the satisfaction of her body so he could stop his awful thoughts. She moaned, and he felt her tighten and shudder around him, but he was too far gone to care whether she’d found her pleasure. He buried himself within her and came, hard, before collapsing. He had just enough presence of mind to roll them onto their sides so he didn’t crush her before his energy ran out.

When he could think again, he found Ellie leaning on one elbow, stroking his hair and gazing at his face. She didn’t seem upset by anything he’d said — a little sad, perhaps, but the tears he’d planned to take from her that night were nowhere to be seen.

“You destroyed me, Nick,” she whispered. “But if having you was a sin, I will never repent.”

He’d thought she had smashed his heart a decade earlier. But some piece of it must have survived, because he felt it break again. He brushed his hand across her face and felt a track of moisture on her cheek — her tears weren’t visible, but there had been at least a few in the time between the words he’d hurled at her and the moment he had awoken.

“I’m unrepentant myself,” he said.

That drew a laugh from her. “How shocking, my lord.” Then she dropped her hand to his chest, covering his heart. “I hate you, too. For destroying me then, and for coming back to do it again.”

She sat up before he could grab her. It was only as she moved that he remembered that he had spent himself inside her — against every plan he had and all common sense. He reached for her hand, but she swatted it away. “We’ve hurt each other enough for tonight, don’t you think?” she said briskly, pulling herself up to stand over his naked body.

He stood up to join her, not bothering with his breeches. “I am sorry that I did not remember the consequences. I will be more careful.”

She looked confused for a moment. He dropped his eyes, pointedly, to her belly. She rolled hers. “Never fear. If I must, I’ll take your bastard to the Continent when our arrangement is over.”

He could see her, suddenly, heavy with his child. In that dream she was in his bed, in his home, laughing. She would imagine herself on an island, alone, where he could never touch her again.

He reached for her. She stepped back. “Let’s cut bait, Nick. We hate each other, we’ve behaved abominably to each other for over a decade, and we wouldn’t even be discussing a pregnancy if you hadn’t arrived motivated only by revenge. I’ll grant you, the physical pleasure is wonderful — you’ve gotten better, Claiborne,” she said, in a condescending tone that made him wish he could throttle her. “But until you stop either worshiping me or dragging me through the mud, there is no future I see in which I would want to give a child over to you to be raised.”

She wasn’t even talking about marriage. She was talking about a bastard child —
their
bastard child — as though its bastardy would be inevitable. His anger rose. “I’ll stop worshipping you and dragging you through the mud when you stop shutting yourself off and pretending you’re the coldest bitch in Europe,” he shot back.

She lifted her chin. “I
am
the coldest bitch in Europe.”

Nick would have laughed, or strangled her, if he hadn’t seen the flash of despair in her eyes. But he let her go rather than pressing her. She wouldn’t crack tonight — in his effort to crack her, he had cracked himself instead.

So he bade her a stiff, kissless goodnight, pulled on his breeches, and poured himself another whisky. Ellie was a mystery — and he wanted to solve her.

But the bigger mystery, without hope for a clean outcome, was why he had told her he hated her — and why his heart still screamed the opposite.

The next morning, Nick wasn’t in the mood to discuss his impending demise. To be fair, he wasn’t in the mood for much of anything beyond finding Ellie and trying, again, to unearth whatever feelings she hid behind her mask.

But even though Nick had spent more time obsessing over Ellie than pursuing whoever wanted him dead, he could still force himself to consider that issue instead. It had taken a renewed urgency overnight. While he had lain in his chamber, mostly sleepless, his would-be assailant had struck a different target.

“Have there been any other fires in the area?” he asked Marcus.

Marcus had just joined him the breakfast room, and he speared a forkful of ham from the sideboard before replying. “No fires. I rode into the village after you dragged me out of bed this morning. No one has heard anything suspicious. The timing is good for someone wanting to escape notice, though. You’re the most interesting bit of gossip around. It is easier for a stranger to pass through unremarked when everyone is more interested in what your return might mean for them.”

Nick raked a hand through his hair. It was only eight a.m., and he had been in the breakfast room for half an hour waiting for Marcus’s report, but his hair still smelled of smoke. His batman had awoken him at six with the news that the shed where they had kept the highwayman’s body was on fire. The staff had contained the blaze, thanks to a stableboy who smelled the smoke before the fire spread to other outbuildings. But the shed, and the body it housed, were destroyed.

“I sent Trower to London to make enquiries about the tattoos,” Nick said. “But the threat surely lies closer than that. The roads are better this morning than they were yesterday, but I find it unlikely that anyone in London ordered the fire.”

Marcus placed his filled plate on the table and sat down next to Nick. One of the ubiquitous footmen poured his coffee and refreshed Nick’s cup, then busied himself with tidying the sideboard. Nick didn’t recognize the footman, but he could have passed him in the house a dozen times and not noticed him. Ellie’s servants were innumerable, and they were meant to vanish into the background.

Marcus wasn’t watching the footman, though. Nick couldn’t fully trust a staff he didn’t know, but Marcus had no qualms about speaking in front of them. He shoveled a bite of eggs into his mouth, pausing to chew before continuing his report. “No one is missing anything. Not horses, not clothes, not even foodstuffs. In the dead of winter, families would notice if preserves or seed were stolen. But the pub owner hasn’t fed anyone he didn’t know since you came through before the party.”