The Marquess Who Loved Me (5 page)

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.”

Ellie felt all the questions, all the anger, all the tears of the last ten years eating their way out of the secret places where she had buried them. His silent judgment had affected her more than she realized. She damned him for it. She tried to pull her hand away, but now that he was in a position to claim something of her, he didn’t seem willing to relinquish it. She couldn’t match him for strength.

But she would never let him see her cry.

“What good is conversation?” she asked, her voice bitter. “I broke our engagement and married your cousin. You inherited when he died, yet chose to stay on the other side of the world. I think we’ve made our intentions to each other quite clear.”

“And yet,” he said. His fingers tightened on her wrist. “And yet the fact that I haven’t forgiven you means that I haven’t forgotten you, either.”

She dipped her head, unable to look in his eyes anymore. She could have said the same to him. She had imagined saying it on any number of nights, when she had lain awake and wondered if he would ever return, if he dreamed of her as she dreamed of him.

His free hand came up and brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes, tucking it behind her ear. He had done that frequently when they were younger, during their secret courtship, when they’d rambled the countryside unchaperoned and her hair had turned to shambles in the wind.

If only he’d eloped with her when she had begged him to, before she went to London and was lost to the social whirl. If only she’d eloped with him at the end of that season, rather than giving in to her father’s threats and promises.

She raised her head. His hand slid naturally to the curve of her cheek. She waited just a moment too long to tilt her face away, but she didn’t examine her reasons. “Let me go, Nick.”

She heard the pleading note in her voice and hated herself for it. If he heard her desperation, though, it spurred him on. He released her wrist — but only long enough to sweep the table away with his foot, sending it crashing to the floor.
 

Ellie stumbled backward, the sudden violence surprising her. Her whisky tumbler missed the soft landing of the thick Axminster carpet and shattered against the nearby hearth, covering the stones with glistening shards of glass. She saw the damage in an instant, then turned back to Nick. His eyes matched the wreckage, with the warmth of a fire and the cruel edge of a razor.

She should have been frightened as he uncoiled from the chair, a cobra about to strike. And maybe she was frightened — but it wasn’t the intensity in his eyes that scared her. She feared the hot swirl of emotion rising up within her. She’d learned how to control it all, locked it away where it could never hurt her again. But it only took a few minutes with Nick to sweep the first of those barriers away.

She wouldn’t survive if her barriers disappeared entirely.

So when he touched her cheek again, she jerked away like his hand was a brand. “I cannot do this, Nick,” she said, forcing the words out through clenched teeth.

“Marcus said you’d given up on me coming home. Are you looking for another Charles amongst our guests?”

Ellie frowned. “Did you come back because you thought I might marry again?”

He laughed, dark and dangerous. “Marry as many men as you like. I’m not here to leg-shackle myself to you.”

She pretended, even to herself, that his statement didn’t disappoint her. “Then why are you here?”

“Business, of course. I’m still the merchant you threw over for a marquess, even if I have the title now.”

He brushed a kiss across her forehead. It was leagues away from the chill in his words. She leaned in, letting herself be seduced by what she knew lurked beneath all their feints and insults…

Then he whispered in her ear. “I am in the market for a mistress, though. And I’d take you whether you are married or not.”

She snapped her head back. How did she keep fooling herself into thinking that he wasn’t utterly ruthless?
 

“If you’ve come to find a mistress, you’re in the wrong room.”

He clucked his tongue, as though correcting a headstrong pupil. “I’m in the only room I want to be in. And I
will
have you, Ellie — depend upon it.”

And then, as his lips descended on hers, she realized he intended to prove it.

*
   
*
   
*

When he had first kissed Ellie, twelve years earlier, she had tasted of berries. They had been picking blackberries together in the hot August sun, far from the lax guardianship of Ellie’s governess and the nearby country cottage where Nick’s mother was in the final throes of her last illness. Ellie had taken her gloves off, heedless of freckles and thorns, and her fingers were stained purple with juice. She laughed at one of his jests, and her lips were purple, too. She freed her glorious red hair from her hat, and strands of it whipped around her face.

He had reached out to smooth the hair away from her mouth. Something in her blue eyes, the hopeful tilt to her smile, urged him forward before his better self could dissuade him. He was gentle, so gentle, not wanting to hurt her, feeling like he’d somehow stumbled across a princess who had been waiting for him to rescue her. She’d grown up alone, left in the countryside by her uncaring father, and Nick wanted to be the one who showed her happiness. She tasted of berries, of innocence, and as her hands clasped hesitantly around his neck, he had lost himself.

Tonight, in the house he owned but she inhabited, she had the fierceness of a queen, not the hesitating dreaminess of a cloistered princess. He had thought he could do this coldly, emotionlessly, cruelly — as cruelly as she had destroyed him. But there never should have been cruelty between them.

He claimed her mouth. This time, her lips were pale and her mouth tasted of whisky. He’d never tasted alcohol on her before, but the intoxicant somehow fit the woman she’d become. There was no innocence between them anymore.

He couldn’t be gentle, and he refused to be kind — but he had just enough control to keep from throwing her to the floor and taking her like a beast. All he wanted, all he could handle, was a kiss. A single taste of her, before he remembered why he had lost her.

Before he put his long-dormant plan into action and ruined her happiness as comprehensively as she had ruined his.

He wrapped his arm around her back and crushed her against his chest. She whimpered against his mouth. The sound almost brought him to his senses. But then her mouth parted, and the dim corner of his brain that could still think knew that whimper for what it was.

She wanted him in spite of herself.

That knowledge was dangerous, adding the barest trace of triumph to his growing need. Ellie might not love him, but he could still make her want him.

Her hands came up around him. She was no longer a tentative girl. She knew what she wanted, and she made it clear in the way she pulled him down to her, in the way she opened her mouth and welcomed his plunging tongue. Her fingers were rough, digging into his scalp as she anchored herself in his hair. Her arms dragged his shoulders down, adding sweet pressure to the need he already felt for her.

He hadn’t thought he cared whether she wanted him — for his plans, it was almost better if she didn’t. But as she flared to life around him, his own desire exploded. How had he thought that a kiss could be enough? They would both be bruised in the morning if he didn’t pull back, but that dark need for her urged him on. He’d never wanted to mark a woman before, but he needed every man in the house to take one look at her and know that she was his.

The warning bells started up at that thought, but he ignored them. He could never keep her without wondering if she accepted him because he had inherited a title. But if he was careful, he could have her again without getting his heart involved.

Just as he decided to kiss her senseless, perhaps take her hard and fast against the wall as he’d dreamed of any number of times — perhaps ignore his revenge until morning — she pulled back.

“Nick…I can’t.”

All those years ago, kissing her amongst the blackberries, he was the one who had stopped first, too cautious for her sake to risk more than a kiss. She wanted him just as badly now as she had wanted him then — perhaps more, now that she knew exactly the pleasure that their kisses would lead to. But even though her body screamed for him, her voice broke. He could kiss her again, try to coax her…

Her eyes, though, stopped him cold. He had never seen her cry before — not when they had started their secret engagement, and certainly not when she had thrown him over for his cousin. But the tears were there now, threatening to spill over her lashes, turning her blue eyes into fathomless pools.

This wasn’t his plan. The Ellie he knew wouldn’t come undone over a mere kiss. He wanted her tears — or thought he did. But he wanted to wring them from her in a way that left no doubt he’d won.

She blinked furiously. All her armor slammed down over her like a prison gate. When she looked at him again, the tears had turned to glaciers.

She walked toward the door, saying nothing as she reached for it. He caught her in two strides and slapped his palm against the wood.

“I’m not done,” he said.

She stiffened her shoulders. In a different mood he might have admired how she turned to face him. Another woman would have fainted, or at least cried, at the menace in his tone. But Ellie didn’t flinch.

“Your actions over the past decade say you’re done,” she said. “Why else would you have stayed in India all this time? Unless you knew you couldn’t see me without changing your mind?”

He couldn’t answer that. She reached up to stroke his face. Not a greedy, full-palmed caress — more a whisper, one fingertip trailing down the line of his jaw. Her nail scraped against his skin, and he shuddered.

“Why are you not done, Nick?” she asked. Her hand dropped to his chest, unerringly flattening against the rapid crescendo of his heart. “Have you come back for me?”

Yes
. His heart screamed yes. Did her skin soak in that scream? Did her blood carry it to her heart, her mouth, her soul?

His heart screamed yes.

But his mouth and soul were liars.

“I’ve come back to take what you owe me.”

She dropped her eyes to his chest, to where her hand curled into a fist before falling away. Her mouth tightened — confused that his words contradicted what she felt?