The Marquess Who Loved Me (8 page)

“Do you really believe that?” Prudence asked. “From the way he watched you in the ballroom, he looked more than a little interested in a reunion.”

“And I do like a reunited lovers story,” Madeleine said. “Almost enough that I wish Ferguson would go away for a bit so that I may have him back.”

Ellie and Prudence exchanged a long-suffering look. Madeleine’s love for her husband was nearly sickening in its perfection. But Ellie caught herself and shrugged. “No reunited lovers. There are enough men in the ton that I don’t need to repeat myself.”

Lucia ordered her to hold still as she shoved pins into Ellie’s unruly curls. Prudence looked at Ellie wistfully. “You truly don’t want him? Not even a little?”

Ellie had pondered that question all night, in between snatches of fitful sleep, and she was no closer to an answer than she had been when she had peeled herself off Nick and left the salon. The memory told her what her body wanted — it wanted Nick, as hard and often as possible, until it was sated enough to let him go.

She knew herself well enough to know she would have seduced him eventually. She hadn’t taken a lover in over three years, but she wanted Nick as she wanted no one else. He had merely beaten her to the seduction, albeit with a cruelty that still stunned her. That didn’t mean she wouldn’t enjoy herself.

But the stinging tears that had threatened to overwhelm her as she had lain in the dark told her what her mind wanted.

It wanted to escape before the floodgates crumbled, before everything she had done to rebuild herself into an inviolable fortress collapsed at her feet. Her body didn’t want to let him go, and her heart was torn between the two — but her mind knew she wouldn’t survive losing him again.

“There’s no going back, Prudence,” she said, after a pause that was a bit too long. “Staying now will only make it harder when we part ways again.”

“So you
do
want him,” Prudence said triumphantly.

Madeleine and Prudence both looked up at her with identical expressions of inquisitive delight. She knew they cared about her. They wanted her to be happy. They wanted to share in her emotion. Their friendship was still new to her, but it was what Ellie had dreamed of as a child, all alone on the country estate where her father had abandoned her. She had been exiled, raised by a series of nursemaids and governesses, for the crime of looking too much like the wife he’d adored and lost. With Ferguson similarly exiled at Eton and her other half-siblings in London, she had dreamed of having friends to play with, to laugh with, to share secrets with…

But she hadn’t realized then that secrets held a dark, dangerous kind of power. What danger had her secrets posed when no one cared about them but her? It was a lesson she’d learned, and learned hard, during her first season in London, when she had finally found other women her own age to talk to.

Suddenly, it wasn’t Madeleine and Prudence in front of her. Annabel and Clarabel Claiborne had been eighteen and seventeen during Ellie’s debut, while Ellie was already nineteen, but they were kind and cheerful — easygoing, charming girls whom Ellie’s father approved of her knowing. She wanted her father’s approval badly enough that she would have been friends with a lamppost if it had possessed the right pedigree and fortune. If the girls’ charm was a bit shallow, it was made up for by how nicely they tittered at her conversational gambits.

And so when they had asked her one night, when they’d all had too much champagne, whether she had found a man to pin her hopes on, Ellie had told the truth. She’d been giddy with the truth, sure of her own heart, confident that once the season was over, her father would let her marry Nick. He’d promised to let them marry, after all; Ellie just had to finish the season without marrying someone else.

So she had shown Annabel and Clarabel her heart. Wasn’t that what friends were supposed to do?

Friends in the ton knew better. Annabel and Clarabel hadn’t intended to hurt her — perhaps they never even knew that a word was enough to change the course of Ellie’s life. But they went off and whispered to their brother that his despised cousin had tricked a duke’s daughter into falling in love with him. And when Charles Claiborne, a marquess rather than a merchant, came asking the duke for Ellie’s hand…

Ellie shook her head. Madeleine and Prudence weren’t Charles’s sisters. She wanted to tell them what Nick had done. She wanted to show them how he’d hurt her, how confused she was, how much she still wanted him.

But when she opened her mouth, the words wouldn’t come out.

“Are you feeling well?” Madeleine asked, suddenly concerned. “Perhaps you should rest rather than going to London today.”

“I shall be fine in London. As for the rest of it…”

Ellie paused again. Prudence finally took pity on her. She stood and linked arms with Madeleine, pulling the duchess out of her chair when Madeleine looked ready to stay and pursue her questioning. “There’s no need to know your feelings today,” Prudence said. “But we are here should you need our help.”

It was a nice gesture. If Ellie were nineteen, perhaps she even would have accepted it — perhaps she would have been grateful for it, rather than immediately dismissing it. But she was thirty now, on a birthday no one other than Nick would acknowledge since she hadn’t told them the date. She knew the limits of her friendships.

And she knew the truth — no one could help her with Nick.

As soon as they left, she let Lucia pin her hat to her hair and took up her swansdown-trimmed grey pelisse before descending to the front hall. A drive to London was hardly relaxing, given the state of the roads and traffic, but at least she would have a few hours to herself. She needed to explore all the options that would buy her freedom, repair her shields before she saw Nick again — and somehow find the courage to leave him a second time.

Nick loved the City. India had held its own unique charms, and he had enjoyed it enough to stay years longer than he had intended. But no matter how long he lived in Madras, he sensed that he would never quite feel at home there. The Indian men whom he dealt most closely with were anxious to prove their loyalties, and so never shared their culture with him. The ones he didn’t deal with viewed him with suspicion bordering on hostility.

He was no stranger to hostility. The upper classes in London hadn’t liked him either. But he couldn’t entirely blame the Indian populace for hating him, or for wishing the British would leave.

But this corner of London, wedged between the City and the East End, felt like home. The mix of shops and warehouses drew laborers from the east and bankers and merchants from the west, and was ideally suited to supply the whole metropolis with the staples and luxuries the people demanded. Still, he knew most peers would rather die than soil their Hessians by setting foot inside a warehouse.

With his father’s breeding and his mother’s money, Nick could afford to spend his days somewhere far more salubrious. But salubrious climes required socializing with the people who could afford those climes. Nick wasn’t in the mood to be social.

Then again, he also wasn’t in the mood to investigate his own potential demise. But if he wanted to make progress, he needed to see if any threats materialized around his London offices.

And he couldn’t sit idle at Folkestone all day without breaking his promise to give Ellie a reprieve.

Marcus, walking next to him as they left one of the Corwyn, Claiborne and Sons warehouses, took a deep breath. Then he coughed. “The countryside always makes my lungs soft,” he complained when he’d regained his breath. “I am surprised you can stand the city air after six months on the ocean.”

Nick inhaled. London, and particularly this quarter of London, was an unholy potpourri of unwashed bodies, manures of both horse and human variety, coal fires, and cooking pots. The stench was almost a physical attack.

“The ocean is more pleasant, I’ll grant you that,” he said. “But by the fourth month aboard, when the foodstuffs are maggoty and there is only salt water for bathing, London seems wholesome by comparison.”

“For all that I’m jealous of what you and Rupert have seen abroad, I consider myself fortunate to have been the brother who stayed behind,” Marcus said. “There are advantages to a stolid life in the cleaner areas of the capital.”

Nick hailed his batman, who had lounged near the street watching the passing traffic. They waited near the curb as Trower fetched their driver. Their newest warehouse, only recently completed, was a temple to modern industry, with an imposing marble façade designed to impress buyers who came to purchase their imports. But its purpose was given away by its lack of street-facing windows. With the value of the indigo and spices stored in that warehouse, it had been made as impregnable as any fortress.

For all the abuse the higher classes heaped upon the trade, Nick thought there was nothing more exciting than seeking out new products and making risky deals, whether in the far-off reaches of the empire or in the trading rooms of the City. “Your London life never sounded stolid in your letters,” he said to Marcus.

“Utterly stolid, I assure you. Wouldn’t want our grandfather to think I was shirking my duties.”

Nick laughed. Their maternal grandfather had remained very much in command of most of the London operations until his death a year and a half earlier, but Marcus was no idle gentleman. “You had the old man in your pocket from your first steps. And he was hardly a Puritan. I doubt you’d be half so debauched without his influence.”

“It is a shame you weren’t more often in London to partake of Grandfather’s generosity as a youth. The fair ladies at Madame Patrice’s were worth any number of hours spent counting tea chests.”

Nick had gone to Eton, as his father had before him. But unlike his father, who had been perfectly aristocratic until he fell in love with the wrong girl, Nick was mocked from the start for his ties to the trade. It might not have been so bad — there were other, lower born boys who took the brunt of the bullying — but Nick and his cousin Charles, who was two years older and already the Marquess of Folkestone, hated each other on sight. And even the youngest boys knew to side with a marquess over a merchant’s son.

Nick had refused to back down and hadn’t left despite their years-long conflict, but his parents hadn’t made the same mistake with Marcus and Rupert. Where Nick had grimly survived Eton, his brothers had stayed in London, learning the trade from their father and grandfather. Little wonder they were inveterate rakes. Nick sometimes felt like a brooding monk by comparison.

He shrugged. “I’ve had my share of pleasure without needing Grandfather to be my procurer.”

Marcus snorted. “Grandfather never had to procure for me, brother.” Then he cast Nick a sidelong glance. “If you want me to point you toward some prime houses, though…”

“No need,” Nick said.

There was a finality in his voice that would have warned off lesser men. But he and his brothers had been raised as equals. The Folkestone title had seemed destined to stay in Charles’s line, and primogeniture did not apply to their shared inheritance from their grandfather. Marcus wouldn’t yield to him just because Nick now outranked him.

“Please don’t say you went through with your revenge last night,” Marcus said.

They had avoided talk of Ellie for five hours — longer than Nick had expected Marcus to refrain from the subject. “She’s not my mistress yet,” Nick said, sharing a truth that, at midnight, would be a lie.

Their carriage pulled up and Trower jumped down to open the door for them while the driver held the horses. Marcus waited until they were seated and the carriage was in motion before saying, “Your lack of compassion with her surprises me.”

“It shouldn’t.”

Again, Marcus plunged past the warning in Nick’s voice. “After everything you’ve done for me and Rupert? Granted, I’d begun to accustom myself to the idea that you would never come home, but you gave me more room to make decisions than most men would have. Hard to believe you could be so kind to us and so…unkind to her.”

Nick had lain awake the previous night, in the giant bed that had once been his cousin’s, separated from Ellie by a locked connecting door and ten years of regret. She had tried to stuff him into a small room as far from her as possible, but he’d taken a single look at the lumpy mattress and ordered the butler to put him in the master’s chamber instead. At the moment, disregarding her wishes had given him a visceral kick of satisfaction.

But in the dark, the question of kindness had haunted him. He had always been kind to those who depended upon him — it was his duty and privilege as a gentleman, even moreso when hundreds of people relied upon him for their livelihoods.

And he had always been kind to Ellie. Even on the day she had destroyed him, he hadn’t done what he wanted to do — couldn’t toss her onto his horse and ruin her publicly just to keep her. When his rational self had considered his revenge on the ship home from India, he had thought that he couldn’t do it. The Ellie in his head was still, always, nineteen, all meek adoration and pretty, fragile need. She’d hurt him badly, irredeemably, and he wanted to do the same to her — but he hadn’t been sure that he could follow through. Ten years was more than long enough for his anger to cool, and while he still hated her for what she had done, destroying a woman was beneath him.

The Ellie in his house, though — she wasn’t the Ellie he had remembered. He had been so shocked by the transformation that he hadn’t even fully grasped it before the feral, maddened beast within him had marked her as an opponent deserving of his revenge.

Now, though, he wondered. Did she deserve it? Or was he pursuing her because he had realized, on some level, that she could take it?