The Marquess Who Loved Me

Chapter THIRTEEN


Dinner that night was not the glittering success Ellie was accustomed to hosting. For one, her head still ached, even though the bruise was smaller than she had expected. It seemed to throb in time with the grating titters of the ladies around her. They hung on Nick’s every word like he was a Hottentot curiosity whose kind they had never seen before. They wouldn’t snub him — only a fool would snub money and a title — but they wouldn’t stop examining him, either.

Which meant, of course, that none of them missed the way he watched her, or the way she ignored him. She should have flirted like he was any other male, but she was too raw for flirtation. She flirted with Norbury instead. He was amenable to it, but the concerned look in his eyes said he knew what she was doing.

So by the time Ellie could take refuge in her bed — perhaps her final night alone, if Nick held true to his plan — she was in no mood for sleep. Not a single word had been said about highwaymen at dinner, but she wasn’t ready to dream about them. Instead, she let another maid prepare her for bed, since she had ordered Lucia to rest after their ordeal. As soon as the woman was gone, Ellie threw a cloak over her delicate peignoir and nightgown and took the servants’ stairs up to the former nursery.

The rooms had once housed the scions of the Claiborne family, including Nick and Marcus’s father. But with no children in residence and no plans to produce any, she had taken over. The long windows lining the south wall would have provided ample light for childhood lessons, but they were even better for painting.

Not that she’d painted anything that had pleased her in an age. Nor could she paint tonight, not without lighting every lamp and candle in the house. But she also couldn’t sleep — not when she saw the highwayman’s ruined skull when she closed her eyes.

She carried a taper with her and lit the lamps that hung on the walls. There had been fires in the grates earlier in the day, as there always were to protect the paintings in the room. But now they were banked, and the snow that had begun to fall outside no longer melted on contact with the windowpanes. She was glad for her cloak now, even though she would inevitably cast it aside, unthinking, as she sketched.

The blank canvas on her easel taunted her. She turned away from it to stand at her work table. There were great sheets of foolscap there, places for her to test her inspirations before committing them to canvas. She chewed on the end of her pencil, considering.

Wasn’t she beyond Nick as a subject? After the last time, she’d vowed not to paint him again. But those vows had failed before, and the neat row of canvases leaning against the far wall mocked her. She’d last given in four months earlier — surely she could withstand the temptation.

Temptation. She’d once thought she would be tempted to murder Nick when he came home. One of her first paintings after he left was a shamelessly derivative copy of Jacques-Louis David’s “Death of Marat,” with Nick taking Marat’s place in the bath and Ellie herself, added as a vengeful Fury, wielding the knife.

But there had been whole months when she’d managed to keep him out of her thoughts. It was only the past year, seeing her brother find such happiness with Madeleine, that had brought everything back. She hadn’t come to Folkestone since Ferguson’s wedding. Painting there, in a room that might have held her children, was enough to make her ache.

She pushed back the tide of memory and sketched. If she took Lucia’s advice and tried to make a living from her art, it would have to be more commercial than this. But she would be damned before she painted other families’ portraits, even if they sold better than more experimental fare. And thoughts of money could wait until she knew just how far Nick would go in his bid for revenge.

Her pencil flew across the paper in swift, sure strokes, with less hesitation than she’d felt at her work in weeks. She usually preferred working from myths instead of fairy tales, but for some reason, the old French tale of Persinette called to her. On paper, the tower took shape, rising up from a dense and twisted forest. A woman stood in the window at the top of the tower, in profile, her face just barely recognizable. The full moon peeked from behind a shroud of storm clouds to glint off her impossibly long plait of hair.

In pencil, there were no colors, but Ellie knew how she would paint it — dark, and tempestuous, with the woman’s red hair as a beacon. Her beauty would lure the prince to her tower, and her hair was the key to her prison. But they were destined to pay a terrible price for their love, wandering apart for years before finding each other again.

She chewed on her pencil again, her hand starting to cramp after half an hour of unrelieved sketching. Nick wasn’t in the painting — and yet he was the painting. She didn’t want it to be an omen. But her art was the one part of her life, other than Nick, that she couldn’t fully control.

She heard footsteps outside the door, both too heavy and too hesitant to be a servant. She flipped over the paper, then bowed her head like a child hoping to avoid a storm, leaning forward over her sketch as though compressing her size might keep anyone from violating her private space.

She failed. The door opened. “I thought it might be you,” Nick said behind her.

She turned. “Why are you here?”

The door closed. He turned the key in the lock, barring the door as she should have done. “I heard movement up here, but knew it wasn’t the servants’ quarters — I’d heard nothing last night or this morning to suggest this section was inhabited.”

“I would say I’m sorry for disturbing your sleep, but you should have stayed where I put you.”

“You knew better than to expect that.”

She scowled. “You shouldn’t wander alone at night if you’re in danger. What if I had been your murderer?”

He held up his walking stick. “I thought of that. This isn’t a dandy’s affectation.”

“And if he had a gun?”

Nick patted his pocket.

“Dare I ask if you have any other weapons? Perhaps a broadsword in your trousers?”

He grinned, slow and satisfied. “You can conduct as thorough a search as you like, my lady.”

She blushed. She always meant her innuendoes now, but this one wasn’t planned, and it somehow embarrassed her.

“Your…weaponry is no concern of mine.”

Her attempt to regain control, to play the jade, fell on deaf ears. He set his walking stick aside and carefully laid his jacket — and the gun it presumably carried — on the chair where she’d thrown aside her cloak in the heat of her drawing. “What are you painting these days? Flowers still, or have you moved on to trees?”

She’d painted endless flowers when she was eighteen, for want of any other models on the estate where her father had dumped her. “I’ve more varied subjects now,” she said, leaning back against her worktable.

She crossed her arms as she watched him walk around her studio. She almost ordered him to leave. She rarely invited anyone inside, except the maids who lit the fires and swept the floors. But the part of her that didn’t want his scrutiny couldn’t override the part of her that hoped, stupidly, for his praise.

He clasped his hands behind him, his shirtsleeves rippling over the bunched muscles of his back. The first time they had made love, when she had still lived in the country, was after he had sacrificed an entire day to play her model. It had been illicit, exhilarating, and utterly forbidden — but her governess had been sick with pneumonia, and didn’t know that Ellie had given up painting flowers in favor of something altogether more dangerous…

She shifted and pressed her nails into her palms. Forget, forget, she chanted to herself.

He was quiet as he walked around the room. Some of her paintings hung on the walls, but he gave those only a cursory glance. It was her failed efforts, leaning frameless and unloved against the walls, that drew his gaze.

“What will you do with these?” he asked, craning his neck to examine one that sat on its side.

“Paint over them, if I’m ever in need of canvas.”

He kept walking. She forced herself to stay still, to not turn and watch his progress, as though she wasn’t trying to read every reaction on his face. She hoped he would keep moving, that his knowledge of mythology would fail him, that he wouldn’t see himself in the canvasses where her will had broken and her heart had bled into the paint.

But she knew, somehow, when her hopes were dashed. His steps stopped. A floorboard creaked as he shifted his weight, perhaps to lean forward and see a painting more closely in the dim light. The silence stretched on, endless. She was sure she’d already cut crescents into her skin, but she dug her nails deeper into her arms, feigning oblivion.

“I’d have brought manacles up with me if I’d known you wanted them,” he said.

If she had blushed before, this was an inferno. She’d had more suggestive conversations — why should this be any different?

“Artistic folly, nothing more,” she said.

“Did Odysseus have to be chained to do Circe’s bidding?” he asked. She could almost hear his head tilt to examine the painting from a fresh angle. “If Circe had your hair, I vow Odysseus would have been lost immediately, chains or no.”

In the painting, Circe did have Ellie’s hair. Why had she painted Nick as the legendary hero and herself as the goddess who enslaved him? She should have burned it years ago.

She squeezed her eyes shut. “The painting was an interesting exercise, but I doubt the market would have it.”

“I don’t know. I find myself quite…moved.”

His voice could cast a spell as seductive as anything Circe might have tried. She finally turned to face him. “Why are you here, Nick? I know it’s your house — your right. But why now?”

He still looked at the painting. It was too late to burn it, even if her blush could set it alight. In a distant voice, he said, “I came back to find a murderer. I shouldn’t have disturbed you tonight, Ellie.”

“Haven’t we always disturbed each other?”

Her voice was low. His answer was even lower. “Always. The gods could not have devised a more perfect punishment than you.”

“Punishment? For what?”

His spine stiffened. “For wanting you. For having you. It never ends well, mortals falling in love with goddesses.”

She shivered. “I’m no goddess.”

He turned. “To me you were. Are. Still. I thought you’d have fallen to earth by now. But when I walked into your party last night and saw you, even more beautiful than before…”

She curled her fingers on the edge of her worktable. “You know I’ve fallen to earth. I’m not an innocent anymore.”

“It had nothing to do with innocence. Unless you regret losing it?”

“I didn’t lose it — I gave it to you,” she said. “Do you regret taking it?”

He closed his eyes. His hands were still behind his back. Circe might have held him like that, awaiting her pleasure. Somewhere, swirling through the moment, Ellie felt a bolt of pure, possessive lust. She wanted him to want her, with something savage driving her to make him say it — even if they both might have been happier forgetting.

“I’ve never regretted it,” he said. “Even if losing you was inevitable.”

She didn’t like that word. It hung between them, frozen and immutable in the chilled air. She wanted fire, not ice — the present, not the past.

Her hair was wrapped around her head for sleep. She removed the pins, catching Nick’s gaze as she did so. She set each pin on the table, but his eyes never left hers. Her braids fell to her waist. She threaded her fingers through the plaits, unraveling them. Her hair would be a riot, messy and bold — the way he liked it.

She had hacked it all off when he left, but she was glad to have it back.

She shook her hair out, and she didn’t miss how his mouth tightened. She could have him again. Starting tomorrow, he would demand it — but she could have him tonight, on her terms. She sensed it in the way he watched her, hope battling avoidance. She’d learned that pleasure didn’t last — but he tempted her as she hadn’t been tempted in years.

“Do you know why I painted you?” she asked, coming around the work table.

He stayed still, his hands behind his back, denying himself as she came to stand in front of him. “Trouble finding models better than me?”

She laughed. The low seduction in his voice thrilled her — told her she could have this. They could have this.

“Perhaps.” She stroked his arm, felt his muscles jump for her. “You were my first, after all.”

“Shall I thank you for the honor?”

Ellie shook her head. “I should thank you. Without you, I might never have known what was…possible from a perfect match.”

“You’re not talking of painting, are you.”

It wasn’t a question. She felt the moment start to slip, to veer into territory she wasn’t ready to explore.

She sighed. “Are you willing to let me seduce you or not?”

His breath hitched. With his shadow of stubble and his missing cravat, he looked like a man startled out of — or into — a delicious dream.

She almost wanted to hang the seduction and paint him instead. But when he reached for her, life became preferable to art.

Their kiss was something they had been born for. If there was anything inevitable, it was how well they fit together — how even after all this time and anyone else who’d come between them, they still knew exactly how to match each other. There was no awkward misalignment, no accidental scraping of teeth. It was like a ballet arranged just for them. They knew their parts by heart. She was hungry for him, desperately so — hungry for that feeling of perfect symmetry, of two halves brought together in a way that never failed to thrill her artist’s soul.

If she was hungry, he was ravenous. His fingers dug into her hair, changed the angle of their kiss. She skimmed hers down his torso, resting them on his slim hips, her thumbs seeking the indentations in his pelvis.

“This isn’t a good idea,” he murmured against her lips when they came up for air.

She untied his shirt and pushed it up, until he was forced to pull it over his head. “Then why did you come here?”

He brushed his hands across her shoulders and pushed her sleeves down her arms. Her peignoir fell around the sash at her waist. “Don’t remember. Doesn’t matter.”

“Then forget that this is ill-advised. I already have.”

He picked her up suddenly. She laughed into his chest, her sleeves trailing behind them. “The only bit I regret is that we aren’t near a bed,” he said.

“You know we don’t need a bed. But I do wish it were warmer.”

He kissed the top of her hair. “Care to risk a dash to my chamber?”

She paused. The moment started to slip again, threatened like a bubble that would be destroyed by the merest brush with reality. She wanted to stay inside it, where everything was perfectly iridescent. There was no way this could end well.

Forget, she told herself.

“There’s a cushioned bench near the far fireplace,” she said. “I’ll trust you to keep me warm.”

The room was long enough for two fireplaces, but the other half, where she hadn’t lit any lamps, was full of shadows. He carried her there easily, as though for all her height she weighed nothing.

But when he set her down, she heard the same hesitation in his voice that threatened to break her. “Are you sure you want this?” he asked. “I won’t be offended if your head hurts or you’re too…cold to continue.”

It sounded like part hope, part dare. She pulled him toward the backless couch. “I want this. And so do you.”