The Marquess Who Loved Me (17 page)

“It will have to be Marcus,” Ellie said. “I’ve no intention of confessing my sins.”

He remembered how he’d promised to learn her sins in the carriage the day before — but this wasn’t the time or the place, even if their agreement was now in full force. Instead, he gave her a loaded glance. “Someday you will, my dear.”

She leaned back in her chair, but her eyes didn’t give an inch. “Unlikely. But if this is the best we can do for a list, so be it. Do you have a plan for it?”

“Trower is working to identify the dead highwayman. Perhaps that will give us a clue. Beyond that, I plan to talk to your houseguests. If one of them is behind this, I will ferret it out.”

Ellie nodded. “I shall see what I can learn from our guests as well. Lucia knows how to pry information from visiting ladies’ maids and valets. If any visitor has a secret, we stand a good chance of learning it.”

Marcus drained his second cup of tea. “I can talk to the tenants and see if anyone has noticed a stranger in the area.”

“I will come with you, if you want to leave now,” Nick said. It was too early to talk to most of the guests, but country farmers kept different hours. “Not a word of this to anyone, though. Our only advantage lies in keeping everyone here, and making the killer nervous about why we haven’t reported the highwayman. If the party disperses, we’ll be no closer to finding an answer.”

Ellie stood up, leaning over the desk to hand Nick one of the pieces of paper Lucia had brought her. “Before you go off looking for danger, sign this. If you demand that the party stay intact, we need some rules for our…other agreement.”

He took the sheet. It was their agreement — brief, direct, and in writing. It stated that if Ellie did as Nick wished until the thirteenth of June, her debt would be forgiven. But Ellie had added an addendum: no one could find out about their arrangement. If gossip started to spread, he would let her go immediately.

He looked up and met her eyes. “This is not what we agreed to.”

“No, but if you don’t agree to this, I vow I will murder you myself.”

She wasn’t teasing him. “Why is the gossip so important to you? From what I’ve heard, gossip has never bothered you.”

“Gossip has never bothered me because I was always able to control what they said. But I cannot control you, can I?”

Nick snorted. “I’m sure you’ll try. You didn’t answer my question, though.”

“It would be obvious, if you knew anything of the ton.”

That was a statement that should have insulted him, but he considered it a clue, not a barb. Realization dawned fast. “Your sisters.”

“My friends as well. And my servants, if you want all of it. They are so discreet because they know I can procure jobs for them anywhere they like — but if my reputation goes, so go those opportunities, and so goes their loyalty. I could risk any scandal I wanted at nineteen…”

“…Except for eloping with a merchant’s son,” Nick interjected.

She ignored him. “But I have other responsibilities now. I’ll give you what you think I owe you — as I said, perhaps atonement will help me. But if you are seeking to humiliate me in public, and ruin other lives along with mine, you’re not the man I once loved.”

The man she once loved
. She said it so matter-of-factly — both the love and the dead, past-tense nature of it. He didn’t want her love to be dead. He didn’t want everything between them to be the past.

But she was right about one thing. If he ruined her in public, it would ruin his honor along with it. And as much as he had dreamed of her groveling at his feet in the middle of Almack’s, a public revenge wasn’t worth the cost.

He stole the pen from her hand and signed both sheets with a bold, scrawling stroke — feeling almost like Faustus making a deal with the devil, but he was in too deep to stop himself. Public revenge was off the table — but private revenge, and all the ways he’d imagined taking her, were still open to him.

He handed her the pen. “Sign, my love.”

Her fingers brushed his. There was no hesitation, no fear, no regret in her touch. Her eyes were stark again, but if she saw visions of hell, they didn’t stop her from signing her name.

It was done. He ignored Marcus and Lucia, who both coughed at the same time, and went around the desk to kiss Ellie on the top of the head. “Tonight,” he murmured into her hair. “I will send you instructions later.”

She didn’t betray any curiosity. “Just don’t interfere with dinner.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. There’s no need to add your chef to the list of suspects.”

Ellie grinned at that, just barely. Her amusement should have piqued him. He should have been annoyed that she was spiking his guns with her acceptance of his revenge — she almost seemed to want it, in a way that he had never predicted when he had imagined it before.

But he found he didn’t mind. Now that he knew she wanted him on some level, even if she denied it, he couldn’t imagine having her any other way.

Just as he couldn’t imagine how he was going to leave her at the end of it.

With every aspect of Nick’s arrival — from how he’d loved her the night before to the danger he now faced, plus all the uncertainty she felt toward him — Ellie was in no mood to trouble herself with her guests. After leaving the study with the contract they’d both signed, she evaded everyone during the breakfast hour.

She couldn’t be fully alone. For one, she needed to settle the menus with her housekeeper, which she did over tea in her salon. She couldn’t avoid her guests for a second full day, though. They would speculate that she was avoiding Nick. And that wasn’t a rumor she wanted to start.

But Ellie knew how to manage them. Give a group something unexpected and no one noticed anything but the spectacle.

“Are you ready, Maria?” she asked her younger half-sister.

Maria nodded. She lifted the bow and fitted the arrow against the string.

“A shilling says you can’t hit the target,” Maria’s twin, Kate, said behind them.

“Two shillings say you can’t do better,” Maria retorted, taking aim.

She let the arrow fly. It sailed down the portrait gallery, past all the generations of Claibornes who would be horrified to see such reckless hoydens in their house. The arrow hit the target with a satisfying thud, lodging halfway between the edge of the target and the red circle at its center.

The guests assembled behind Maria clapped. Sir Percival Pickett, perhaps the most eccentric of Ellie’s guests, was particularly effusive. “Brava, Lady Maria!” he exclaimed. “I vow a Grecian goddess couldn’t have done better.”

“She didn’t hit the center,” Kate scoffed, taking the bow from her sister. “It would be a poor goddess who couldn’t do that.”

She stepped up, took an arrow from the waiting footman, and fired. Where Maria had missed left, Kate missed right — by exactly the same amount, according to the servant they sent down the gallery to measure it.

The ribbing continued, good-naturedly, as Kate promised Maria three shillings out of her pin money. Ferguson teased that he would cut off their allowances for gambling. Sebastian Staunton offered them lessons — an offer that made the twins glow and Ferguson glower. Sir Percy stared off into space, no doubt casting the twins as heroines in his next epic poem.

Ellie smiled. The snows had finally stopped, but they’d received nearly seven inches the previous night. Setting up an archery contest in the portrait gallery when they couldn’t be outdoors had been inspired. Her younger guests were enthused. Her older guests were equal parts charmed and titillated. Archery was one of the few sports open to women, and something that both sexes could enjoy together. It was only the indoor nature of their contest that any gossips might find shocking, and they would have to be the utmost prudes to condemn her for it.

The long, narrow gallery on the floor above the ballroom was perfect for shooting, especially with a footman stationed on the other side of the far door to prevent accidental entry. And if a wayward arrow hit a painting or a window — well, it was Nick’s house, not hers.

Madeleine stepped up to the line they’d agreed to shoot from. Ferguson stood close behind her — whether to give his duchess pointers or to look down the bodice of her gown was unclear. Ellie ignored them and waved the twins over to a quiet alcove near the door.

“Are you enjoying yourselves?” she asked.

“Of course,” Kate said, as though the question was too obvious to be asked.

“Especially when I am winning,” Maria added.

Ellie couldn’t help but smile. The twins had seemed like a single unit the year before, when they had lived with their father and never saw anyone but each other. But since they’d come out into Society and moved in with Ferguson and Madeleine, they had become individuals — still close, but more likely to compete with each other than to unite against the world.

Kate wouldn’t concede defeat. “You aren’t a better shot, Maria, just a better gambler. And there are still other games to be won.”

Their eyes slid simultaneously to Sebastian, who had lost interest in the archery and was looking out the high, narrow windows to the snow-covered lawn. He had lighter brown hair than his brother Alex, with appealing brown eyes in a face tanned by the Caribbean sun. Why he was still in England, Ellie didn’t know. He had a plantation in Bermuda, but had been in England since November — the longest time he’d spent on this side of the Atlantic in years.

“Be careful, my dears,” Ellie said in a low voice. “If you catch a man like that, you won’t know what to do with him.”

“I have some ideas,” Maria whispered.

Kate giggled as Ellie sighed. “Why the concern, Ellie?” Kate asked. “We are merely flirting. By the time you were our age, you were already married, widowed, and well on your way to bedding half the ton.”

“It wasn’t half the ton,” Ellie protested with a laugh. “Whoever told you that was mistaken.”

“Father did tend to exaggerate when he was angry,” Kate said, pausing to clap too enthusiastically when Madeleine hit the wainscoting behind the target. “But still, you can’t begrudge us a bit of excitement after all the years he kept us locked away.”

Ellie didn’t begrudge them. She’d only taken four lovers since her marriage — not the regiment her father had assumed, although she’d worked hard to cultivate her dissolute reputation to keep him from setting her up with another husband. And she hadn’t regretted them — they were all rakes with secret sweet sides who kept their own counsel and expected nothing from her. None of them had equaled Nick — but then, she hadn’t been looking for love.

She wanted her sisters to find love, though. They’d had little enough of it, raised by their tyrannical father; at one-and-twenty, it was past time for them to have some happiness. “Don’t sell yourselves too cheaply,” she warned. “There are good men in the ton if you are patient enough to find them.”

The twins gave noncommittal nods, then wandered toward Sebastian as though they shared a single mind. Ellie sighed again. They were smart enough — and Sebastian elusive enough — that none of them were in any danger.

But she would rather see them make safe, happy matches than play the game she’d entered with Nick.

Madeleine gave up her bow with a laugh after hitting the wainscoting a second time and joined Ellie by the wall. “If Ferguson ever upsets me, remind me not to shoot him,” Madeleine said. “I’m more likely to injure myself than him.”

“You should take lessons,” Ellie said. “Your cousin seems eager to give them.”

Madeleine wrinkled her nose in Sebastian’s direction. “He’s even more of a rogue than he was the last time he came home. I hope your sisters know he’s not the marrying kind.”

Ellie’s reply was interrupted when Lucia slipped into the gallery. She held a small slip of paper and wore a grim expression. Ellie raised an eyebrow at her in silent question.

Lucia shook her head.

Damn
. Ellie had tasked Lucia with adding up the original value of Ellie’s collection from all the ledgers of her acquisitions. She took the paper and read the note like it was a prison sentence.

Nineteen thousand, two hundred and twenty three pounds, six shillings, and four pence.

Her stomach twisted. She might be able to sell most of it. But she couldn’t sell everything. Some pieces would bring more than she had paid, but some were already out of fashion. Her Chinese collection, for example, was not entirely
en vogue
. If she sold every painting, every sculpture, every scrap of wall hanging, she couldn’t possibly pay Nick in full. All she could do was shorten the length of their arrangement.
 

And unless she wanted to auction it all publicly — and humiliate herself in the process — it might take months to sell everything.

Ellie didn’t have months. She wasn’t even sure she had minutes. She had always thought she knew her own heart, but last night’s passion and this morning’s regret had surprised her.

Somehow, while she had worked so hard to reforge herself into a woman with no weaknesses, she had made a critical error. Her heart, guarded and locked and left unexamined in the dark, hadn’t healed during its decade of solitude.

It had festered.

The face she showed the world was a dressing expertly applied over her wounds. Her heart, though, couldn’t bear to be touched. Stripping away even a bit of the covering, as Nick had done the previous night — as he would likely do again that night, and every night after that until she repaid him or killed him — caused her unbearable pain.

She recognized the pain. She had sometimes let herself feel it on those rare occasions when her painting drew from the deep well of her heart. She could let the blood flow into her painting without thinking about where it came from or what monsters waited beneath it, then shut it off when she was done making art. But shutting it off wasn’t the same as healing it.