The Marquess Who Loved Me (3 page)

Could it be called a smile, when all she saw was malice? The lips were in the right position and his teeth gleamed behind them — but more like a wolf about to take its prey than an old friend greeting her again. Ellie wished that the only reason he fascinated her was because capturing his feral appeal in paint would be a challenge. But her sudden flush, and all the heat building in her belly, had nothing to do with art.

She forced herself to take a breath. The musicians had, quite awkwardly, started another round of the processional. She was still aware enough of the crowd to notice the murmurs rippling across the ballroom as everyone turned toward her unknown guest. She smiled coolly, searching for the grace that had seemed unassailable moments earlier.

“I am sorry it took so long to recognize you, my lord.” Her voice was strong again. She would do anything before she showed how much it cost her to stay on that throne. “I had so nearly forgotten you, after all.”

“‘My lord,’” he repeated. “I heard in London that your father died a year ago. Pity. I would have liked to watch him as I took my place in the Lords.”

In another world, she might have liked it too.

“Why are you here?” she asked. “You vowed not to return until you had forgotten me, and yet you still seem to remember my name.”

“It would have been better if we had both forgotten.”

“You can forget me just as well here as anywhere else. Welcome to your home, Lord Folkestone,” she said, calling him by his title for the first time. She was gratified to see him flinch. “I’ll remove myself to London in the morning. If you’ve anything to say, please direct it to my solicitors.”

She stood, ready to descend to the dancing floor. She saw Lord Norbury hovering nearby — the escort she’d requested for the first dance, since he was attending without his wife and needed a partner. But Nick took her elbow before she could walk away.

“We have unfinished business between us, Ellie. Whatever else you may have forgotten, I assume you remember why I left. You owe me a conversation.”

He hadn’t come all the way from India to converse with her. The very idea was preposterous. And if anything,
he
owed
her
a conversation — or at least a chance to explain herself.

She couldn’t do it here, not in the middle of her —
his
— ballroom. He wanted something from her — something she would not like, if she correctly read the menace in his tone. But whatever he wanted, she couldn’t consider it when her heart still raced from his return. Changing the battlefield and giving herself time to regroup would at least put her on better footing.

She nodded, pretending that she was entirely unaffected by his touch on her arm. “The servants will see to it that you have a room and whatever accoutrements you require. Shall we adjourn until morning, my lord?”

He stepped closer, destroying the distance her words had attempted to create. For a dizzy moment she thought he would kiss her. His eyes looked the same as they had before past kisses — suddenly warm, intent, focused on her and only her. He leaned in, his lips almost touching hers. Hers parted of their own accord, ready physically even though she knew it was the worst thing that could possibly happen to her.

He wouldn’t — he
couldn’t
— kiss her in front of half the ton.

As it turned out, he didn’t kiss her. Her lips were impertinent enough to be disappointed. Instead, he turned and whispered in her ear. “I don’t wait for you — not anymore. Entertain your guests, but we will be having our conversation tonight.”

He was gone before she could protest, striding back up the carpet to the double doors. He didn’t leave, though. He leaned against a pillar beside them, as though guarding the room — or preventing her escape.

She shivered.

Norbury was at her side an instant later. “Is that man bothering you?” he asked. “I will ask the guards to see him out.”

Ellie shook her head. The final notes of the processional sounded again. She stepped over the mask that lay at her feet and gave her hand to Norbury. “It’s Folkestone,” she said briefly. “We’ve no cause to remove him, and even if he could be gotten rid of, I doubt those ornamental guards are up to the task. Shall we begin?”

Norbury was startled. It was evident from the sudden tightening of his grip on her hand and the chill in his voice as he said, “I thought he planned to remain in India.”

Ellie shrugged. “Didn’t we all?”

She feigned boredom, so well that Norbury didn’t press. He never pressed, at least not with her. They had never been lovers, but they had been friends for half a decade — and anyone who remained her friend knew when to leave well enough alone.

As the music started, she felt Nick watching, and frowning, from the opposite side of the room. She let her mind go blank. Her thoughts flowed away like water, as she had trained herself to do in those awful months after her wedding and sudden widowhood. She would dance the country dance, then a waltz, then a reel — every dance she had the stamina for, if it kept Nick away.

He would come, though. And when he did, she would find a way to be so calm, so remote, that he couldn’t possibly affect her again.

How was she more beautiful than he remembered? She’d been pretty at seventeen, even lovelier at nineteen — the toast of the season in ’02, when her father had belatedly, begrudgingly brought her out in a bid to make her forget Nick. She’d vowed that nothing could induce her to marry someone else. But by the end of the season, she was married to — and, three days later, widowed by — his cousin. And Nick was somewhere in the Atlantic, wishing he could drown his love for her as effectively as she had suffocated her love for him.

She had been beautiful that season, even on the day when she’d tossed him aside for a title. But beautiful wasn’t quite the right word now. She was too fierce for mere beauty. Her hair was down, shockingly so — an homage to the famous portrait of Queen Elizabeth, surely. He knew it was a coincidence that it was exactly the way he liked it. As she navigated the turns and dips of the first country dance, her hair flared around her like a curtain of fire. She was pale, though. Paler than she had been before he removed his mask.

The Virgin Queen would not show weakness. But he’d seen the first tiny cracks in her armor.

Ellie — beautiful, traitorous bitch that she was — hadn’t forgotten him.

Nick leaned against the pillar, searching for a comfortable angle. Women had frequently danced for his pleasure when he visited the Hyderabadi court. This dance wasn’t for him. None of it was for him, unless Ellie’s memory for dates was as good as his. But it was somehow more seductive than anything he’d seen with bells and scarves. Ellie moved through the patterns perfectly, effortlessly, tantalizing him every time she disappeared behind another couple.

Tormenting him every time she smiled at the prig who was her partner.

Those who didn’t dance gave Nick a wide berth. He heard the whispers, though, and knew they guessed his identity. Whether they avoided him because they hadn’t been introduced or because of his heavy involvement in trade didn’t matter — he didn’t mind their aversion, at least not tonight. The less others disturbed him, the more he could look his fill.

One guest, though, found him almost immediately. The man, two inches shorter and much slimmer than Nick, wore an elaborately embroidered doublet and breeches that would have done a young Henry VIII proud, and the disbelieving look of one who has seen a ghost.

“I should kill you for coming back without so much as a warning letter,” his brother Marcus said, clapping him on the shoulder.

“You know the vagaries of communication,” he replied. An exact account of why Nick had returned now, and the possible threat he faced, could wait until morning. Instead, he offered a more innocuous reason for his return. “I trust that with Grandfather Corwyn’s death last year, you’ll be happy to have me back at home despite my lack of notice.”

Marcus laughed. “Of course I’m happy to have you home. Rupert would be happy too, if he weren’t still in the West Indies. With you here, perhaps I can finally take a holiday.”

Marcus was Nick’s middle brother, and had managed the London office of Corwyn, Claiborne and Sons, Ltd., with their maternal grandfather while Nick focused on their India operations and their youngest brother, Rupert, concentrated on the Caribbean trade. But after their grandfather’s death the previous year, the burdens on Marcus would have increased substantially.

“Take all the holiday you want, if it makes you happy,” Nick said. “But when have the Corwyns — or Claibornes, for that matter — ever been satisfied with idleness?”

“Never in my memory,” Marcus said. “But I would be more satisfied if we could have this conversation in my office — or rather, your office — and I wasn’t dressed like a prime fool. Come have a drink with me and escape this nonsense.”

The lure of a drink with his brother, after years of inferior libations taken alone, was strong. Ellie’s pull was stronger. “You’re not the only one the marchioness has turned into a fool,” Nick said, gesturing at the dancers.

“I would say the same, but I doubt for the same reasons.”

Nick’s gaze had unerringly found Ellie, but he pulled back to look at his brother. “Gone over to the enemy, have we?”

Marcus adjusted the ruffled lace at his neck. “My vow to you comes first — always has. But at least she was here the last decade.”

Nick’s eyes slid back to Ellie. “You never told me she’d become such a…topic of conversation in London.”

The whispers he’d heard about her in London over the past five days had made her into an almost legendary figure — a goddess with the beauty of Aphrodite and the appetites of a female Dionysus. He’d been disbelieving enough — and angry enough — that he had to see for himself.

He wasn’t disbelieving anymore.

Marcus sighed. “You left me here to manage your estate, but I won’t spread tales about people.”

“How many of them are true?”

“Ask her yourself. You might not like the answer, though.”

Nick’s anger flared again as he watched her dance through all her admiring, worshipful guests. He hadn’t been this angry in years. On the ship, he had even thought he might be able to see her again without betraying any feeling at all. But knowing that she had been here, in his house, holding court while he had rotted in India alone…

He turned back to Marcus. “Tell me you still kept to our plan.”

It wasn’t a question. Marcus sighed. “Yes. But Nick…”

He trailed off. Ten years, and the responsibilities for their grandfather’s shipping empire and Nick’s Claiborne estates, had stripped away the boy his brother used to be. If Marcus still laughed as much as he had as a boy, there was no sign of it. He was somber now, and slightly wary, as though Nick’s homecoming was something he had looked forward to until he had realized what it might mean.

Nick sighed. “I didn’t come seeking revenge tonight. Let’s talk of something else. I’d rather hear about you than her after all this time.”

It was partly true. He’d returned from India to determine whether someone wanted him dead, not to take his long overdue revenge on Ellie. He’d even told himself he wouldn’t follow through with the plan he’d hatched with Marcus, in a fit of madness, on the way to the docks a decade earlier.

But seeing Ellie now — a jaded, rich, indolent aristocrat, with the title she’d left him for and a cold, fickle heart that refused to give him satisfaction — made him itch to break her.

Marcus’s eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t rather hear about me. Don’t pretend you’re not here for revenge. I think everyone in the ballroom sensed your intentions.”

“I haven’t decided what I will do yet,” Nick hedged.

“You have. If you hadn’t, you would have warned her you were coming. Warned
me
that you were coming. You couldn’t risk that I’d tell her and she would flee, could you?”

Nick hadn’t warned him because there was no time to warn him — he’d taken the first ship out of Madras after realizing that the attacks on him and his interests were not coincidences. But Marcus’s tone sounded uncomfortably like censure.

Nick leaned in, speaking low, but forceful enough to make himself understood. “She brought this upon herself. I can’t take away the title she spurned me for, but I can take everything else that marriage gave her.”

Marcus held his gaze for a long time, longer than anyone did. Whatever he saw there made his forehead crease.

“At least talk to her first. She’s changed, Nick. We all have. Perhaps not for the better…”

“I vow she hasn’t changed for the better,” Nick interjected. “The Ellie I knew never cared for spectacles such as these.”

“The Ellie you knew is dead,” Marcus shot back. “If you need proof of it, look at yourself. You aren’t the same man who waved goodbye to me on the docks.”

He wasn’t the same man. He still remembered the docks — a mercilessly cheerful June sky, when all he wanted was rain. And Marcus, who didn’t beg him to stay even though he seemed inclined to. Marcus had been the one who was supposed to go to India at the tender age of twenty, while Nick should have stayed to manage the London office. But Nick couldn’t stay, not when Ellie had married Charles — and especially not when she had been widowed three days later, since he might have begged her to take him back.

So he’d gone to India, leaving Marcus to set in motion the revenge that Nick one day intended to finish. The revenge Ellie deserved, even if Marcus now thought otherwise.

Nick shook his head. “When did you become so forgiving, little brother?”

Marcus smiled thinly. “I’m not forgiving. But being present makes me more qualified to play the judge.”

Nick couldn’t recall a single time that Marcus had sneered at him in quite that way. He’d boasted, teased, bedeviled — but never sneered.