The Marquess Who Loved Me

Chapter FOUR


Nick didn’t dance. He didn’t go in to supper. Beyond the one conversation she saw him have with Marcus, he didn’t speak to anyone at all.

The man was unnerving her. Ellie knew that was his intention. His actions were laughably transparent, but she couldn’t fight the effect he had on her. When she thought of being alone with him — for the first time since that awful conversation she’d wished, endlessly, to take back — her breath turned shallow and her hands went slick with sweat.

So she didn’t think of it, even though his dark presence on the edge of her vision wouldn’t let her forget.

She had painted him as Hades once. His pose now, with his arms crossed and his jaw set, matched the painting. The doors between the ballroom and the rest of the house replaced the gates of hell, separating the life she knew from the afterlife that awaited her.

He stood ready, waiting to take her there. Once the party ended, once she crossed that threshold, he’d have her.

Your hysterics are unbecoming, Elinor. She heard her father’s voice in her head, as clear and inescapable as the great bells of St. Paul’s on her wedding day. Her father — now there was a man she could hate and love safely, without worrying he’d one day reappear in her ballroom. Perhaps he should have encouraged hysterics in his children — if her brother Richard could have belly-ached over their father’s demands like a normal man, rather than snapping and shooting him, her father would still be alive.

Still, she didn’t like hysterics any more than he had. She straightened her shoulders. She couldn’t avoid Nick — but Ellie didn’t avoid anyone.

She’d made a critical error. She should have attacked, not retreated.

Most of the local gentry had left, taking advantage of the last of the moon to drive home. Some guests would leave in the morning; the rest would stay another week. It was the tamest affair she’d given since she had stopped mourning her husband — if mourning was the right word for cloistered celebration. But even among these guests, they wouldn’t miss her as long as the wine flowed.

So when her next dancing partner, Alex Staunton, the Earl of Salford, came to claim her, she demurred. “Lord Folkestone has returned. I should see him settled,” she said.

Salford cast a sidelong glance at the door. “Do you think he’d bed down there if you gave him a pallet? He seems to like the spot.”

She stifled a laugh. She had known Salford for years, but their acquaintance had deepened after his cousin Madeleine had married her brother. Salford was stuffy to some, but their mutual interests in art and antiquities had brought them close enough that she saw beneath his honor-bound façade. Tonight, his sly humor was a bit of balm that soothed her rupturing scars.

“Folkestone isn’t easily led,” she said. “But I’ll find a room for him.”

The servants wouldn’t have to air his room, if she gave him the master suite despite the door that connected it to hers. On her orders, they had aired it every day for a decade. But Salford didn’t know of her past, or how well she knew the man who had been her husband’s cousin and heir.

He eyed Nick, who watched them darkly. “I don’t believe he likes me, Lady Folkestone,” he mused. “Any idea why that would be?”

“None,” Ellie lied. “But he’s a strange man, to have stayed in India so long when Folkestone was his. Who knows what he’s thinking?”

“Shall we experiment?” Salford asked. He brought Ellie’s hand to his lips. It was an empty gesture — there was about as much romantic feeling between them as between a pair of coffee spoons. But Ellie saw Nick’s arms tighten, saw him draw a breath — saw the laughter in Salford’s eyes as he dropped her hand.

“The marquess seems taken with you, my lady. Your effect remains undimmed.”

“I’ve no idea why,” she said with a shrug.

Salford sobered. “If he looked at Madeleine or my sister like he looks at you, I’d have his head. But you’ve never wanted a champion, have you?”

Salford was too perceptive by half. “Thank you, my lord, but I can manage the marquess.”

“Promise me — if you can’t manage him, promise you’ll tell me.”

She nodded once. The gesture was a lie. Salford probably knew it was, but he didn’t call her on it.

She walked toward the doors, taking as direct a line as she could through the dwindling dancers. Nick leaned against a pillar, calm again — lounging ever more obviously by the second as she approached. He wouldn’t admit jealousy, just as she wouldn’t admit discomfort.

But his eyes burned even as his body relaxed.

When she reached him, she dropped into a curtsey, made even more grand by the way her heavy skirts pooled dramatically around her. “My lord,” she murmured.

“Lady Folkestone,” he drawled. “Never thought I’d see you curtsey to me.”

“I hope you enjoyed it,” she said, coming to her full height. “I shan’t do it again.”

“No?” he asked. “Then I’m glad you wore that dress for it. Your breasts are wonderful in it. Especially when you bend to offer them to me.”

Her pulse quickened. “I assure you — if I were offering them, you’d know it.”

He smiled, that cruel smile she hadn’t seen before tonight. “Save your offerings for someone else. If I want what you have, I’ll be taking it whether you offer or not.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Has no one in the last decade explained nobility to you? You are a peer of the realm, not a feudal baron. There’s no droit du seigneur that allows you to take any woman you want.”

Nick shrugged. He was dressed more modernly than any of her guests, by over three hundred years — but his devastating face belonged on a battlement, not a ballroom. “You know I wasn’t born to this. But I will take what belongs to me.”

This was quickly turning into a rout — and Ellie was not the victor. She stopped bantering. “Take your estate, then. I meant it when I said I will be gone in the morning.”

“And I meant it when I said you owe me. Shall the repayment start now, or do you wish to hide for another hour?”

The certainty in his voice confused her. Beyond their broken engagement, there were no other debts between them. “I owe you nothing. And I wasn’t hiding.”

“Don’t lie. Aren’t we beyond that?”

God, his voice was cold. When had it become something that could freeze her so ruthlessly? He must have had the seeds of this when she knew him, but he’d never used it on her.

But he wasn’t the only one who had hardened. She would match him, cut for cut, until he left her alone.

“I wasn’t hiding,” she repeated. “I was letting you stew. You’ve had a decade to stew, I know. But it’s ever so much more entertaining when I can watch.”

That was the final shove that broke through his ice. He grabbed her arm, his fingers turning to fire on her flesh. “Now,” he ground out, already propelling her through the door. “We talk now.”

She was right. Hell surely awaited her. Perhaps she shouldn’t have pushed him, tried to force a reaction out of him. She’d gotten what she wanted, though — a glimpse of his temper and, beneath that, the stubborn, passionate man she’d loved.

The man she’d loved and thrown away, when she was young and stupid and desperate for her father’s approval.

She’d waited forever for him to come back, wishing he would give her a chance to make amends. But now that he was here, she wasn’t sure she could stand seeing him again.

He dragged her through the foyer and past the servants she’d trained to stay out of her affairs. No one tried to save her. He pulled her up the stairs by instinct, but when he reached the landing, he paused.

“Left,” she said. “Third door from the end is my salon. No one will disturb us there.”

“Father always said this house was a rabbit warren,” Nick said. Were it not for his unbreakable grip on her arm and the thrum of tension in his voice, he might have been any visitor receiving a tour of the estate.

“It was. The servants’ domains in the attics and basements could still lose you for a week. But your brother and I renovated the public rooms and bedchambers in a more modern style. You never seemed partial to older modes of living.”

“How thoughtful of you,” he murmured.

“Yes, well, I hope you enjoy it as I have. It’s a good house, Nick.”

He spun her into her salon and let go of her arm, not responding to her inane ramblings. The room usually soothed her. Even more so than the rest of the house, every decoration, every scrap of fabric, was chosen to suit her. The large, overstuffed chaise-longue, identical in shape and size to one she kept in her house in London, was upholstered in rich navy velvet. Two chairs stood across from it, complementing the velvet with a gold fleur-de-lis pattern across their seats. Books of prints and engravings lined the shelves, interspersed with objets d’art from her collection.

It was a small, lush room that no one used but her. And it was exactly the opposite of the room where they’d had their last conversation, when she had told Nick, for the second time, that she could no longer marry him, and then insulted him to make sure he got the message. In her memory, everything in that room, one of her father’s cold, cavernous drawing rooms, was white — white walls, white upholstery, white hothouse flowers, her white gloves clenched in the lap of her white dress, Nick’s white face as his blood leached away while she cut into him. Only Nick’s flowers had been red, as though it was his heart he’d flung at her instead of his roses.

She shivered. This was not that room. She was twenty-nine, not nineteen — and her father wasn’t here to remind her of propriety and bloodlines. She walked straight toward the row of decanters on a shelf in the corner, not waiting for Nick to follow. She would rather have wine, but she hadn’t thought to send her butler for a bottle, and she wasn’t of a mind to wait. “Brandy or whisky?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Whisky.” He locked the door. The sound was a warning shot. Her hand shook as she tilted the decanter toward a glass, and she splashed liquor on the tray beneath it. She bit the inside of her cheek, hard, striving for control.

She poured a generous amount of whisky into his glass, then poured herself the same amount. Turning, she discovered that he was closer than she thought he was — close enough to reach out and take the glass from her hand. His eyes were hooded under his brows. She couldn’t read the expression there.

She used to be able to read every expression on his face. The fact that she couldn’t now, even though she shouldn’t have expected to, hurt. She thought she had felt every pain over him that it was possible for one to feel, but she discovered a new one — the pain of realizing that she no longer knew him quite so well as she thought she did.

It felt like a death. Ellie raised her glass to him, silent, one hand still holding the shelf behind her as though it could keep her upright.

He raised his glass as well. “To old friends,” he said.

“To old friends,” she echoed. Perhaps he felt what she did — the shock of knowing that ten years had passed, even though when their eyes connected over the rims of their glasses, it felt like nothing at all had come between them.

She sipped her whisky, welcoming the burn of alcohol as it slid over her tongue. It no longer made her cough. He raised an eyebrow. “I never thought to see you drink whisky so easily, Ellie.”

“There are many things I do easily now,” she said, pushing off from the shelf and sliding past him to her chaise. “I’m no longer nineteen.”

“No, you’re not,” Nick said, turning to watch as she took her seat. She regretted it immediately — alone, she would have lounged against the sensuously curved arm. She couldn’t relax like that in front of him, though. And the chaise was backless, which meant she would have to sit ramrod straight, as though she awaited his favor.

He felt no such constraint about his posture. He flung himself down into one of her chairs, facing her, his long legs spread out in front of him like he was at his club rather than in a gently-bred woman’s home.

Then again, he probably didn’t have a club. No club would have had him before he left, when he had obscene wealth but refused to bow to all the indigent lords who thought themselves above him. He hadn’t been back long enough to use his title to gain entrance. And he was in his own house, not hers.

Ellie sipped her whisky again, too quickly. Her thoughts kept scattering, bouncing between present and past. She tried to anchor herself to the present and the question of why he was home.

Nick didn’t say a word. In her dainty chair, sipping whisky out of her delicate tumbler, he still managed to look like a predatory animal. He watched her, though, as though considering what to do with her — whether to toy with her or kill her swiftly, perhaps?

She inhaled sharply and told herself to stop being dramatic. She couldn’t let him unnerve her again, or she might never regain control.

After three minutes of silence, three minutes of him staring at her and her looking at some point over his shoulder, her patience flared out. She tossed the rest of her whisky down her throat, standing before the burn reached her belly. “If you won’t talk, I have guests to see to. Perhaps in another ten years we can repeat this charming scene. Until then, I wish you very happy.”

She leaned down to set the glass on the small table between them. His hand shot out to grab her wrist. He kept her pinned there, bent awkwardly at the waist, her face mere inches from his.

“This isn’t the conversation you promised me,” he said. “And this time, I won’t let you leave until we’ve had it.”