The Marquess Who Loved Me

Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN


She wanted to run. He saw it in the way she came up on the balls of her feet — in the way her eyes widened, then narrowed, shock followed by the need to act.

He was the worst sort of cad. But he had dreamed of her like this for so long, spent so many nights wishing for her. Now that he had her…

He wasn’t a hero. And he wouldn’t let her go.

But he didn’t want a pliant, thoughtless thing in his arms. He wanted her alive — as awakened by the possibilities between them as he was. He held out his hand. “Come to me, Ellie.” His voice was softer than it had been. He couldn’t seem to keep an edge to it when her kohl-rimmed eyes were so stark. “I vow I won’t hurt you.”

“No one can keep such a promise.”

But she reached out her hand and let him pull her into his lap. Her veil fell away, revealing her hair — the same red waves he’d dreamed of any number of times.

He couldn’t resist her — couldn’t help himself when her lips were so close to his and the blood rushing from his head to his cock made it so damned hard to remember what he had planned for her. He kissed her. He swore she kissed him back. Her hands roved over his shoulders. Her lips opened for him, and he heard her approving moan as he claimed her.

Suddenly he didn’t want what he had planned for her. He didn’t want a slow, devastating seduction; didn’t want to play the patient lover until she finally admitted that she wanted him as much as he wanted her. He still wanted to hear her need for him, but at this point, he would take what he could get.

He knew, somehow, in a dim corner of his mind that hadn’t quite flickered out, that these were the ravings of an addict. One more card, one more glass, one more pipe — one more time sinking into her, and surely he could save them both. It was madness — but it was no madness he wanted rescued from.

He stopped kissing her long enough to stand up. She didn’t say a word as he pulled her up with him. He pushed her hair back on both sides of her face, brushing her temples with his thumbs. He kissed the top of her head and breathed in her scent. It fired his pulse — gave him the final spur to overwhelm his control and give in to his fantasies.

He kissed her again, hard, using her hair to tilt her up toward his mouth. She moaned as their lips met — moaned again as he bit her, lightly, tugging at her lower lip before plunging into her with his tongue. But a kiss wasn’t enough anymore. He needed to see her, now.

He broke away and dropped his hands to her bodice. He’d planned to make her strip for him. But now he wanted to strip her himself — not reverently, as he always had before, but forcefully, irrevocably.

The bodice opened down the front, with hooks made of stiffened thread catching into fragile loops on the other side. He wrenched it open, fraying threads and scattering beads as he shoved the bodice down her arms — letting her breasts out of their cage to fit perfectly in his hands.

For Nick, seeing her breasts for the first time in a decade was its own reward. For Ellie, his gaze was a new kind of torture. He looked so hungry for her, so damned reverent even though he shouldn’t be — so in love with her, even though she knew he’d never admit it.

Just as in love as she was — and just as unable to forget the past.

She couldn’t bear the way his blue eyes lit up, the way he concentrated on her as though he had to memorize every color, every smooth contour and every pebbled surface between the ridge of her collarbones and the stiffened peaks of her nipples. But she kept her eyes open. It was torture to watch him — but not as bad as the torture of letting him go.

His hands grazed across her breasts — then turned rougher, as though he remembered, at great personal cost, that her breasts weren’t an altar. He squeezed her nipples between his thumbs and forefingers, with just enough force that it almost felt like a bite.

“You don’t know how I’ve dreamed of this,” he murmured.

She knew. She’d dreamed of it too — dreamed of him loving her again, touching her again, taking her again. But he kissed her again before she could confess, and his mouth swallowed whatever she might have said while one hand still caressed her and the other skimmed lower, down the curve of her bare torso to the waistband of her skirt.

A quick tug on the drawstring was enough to make the skirt collapse around her legs. It was so stiff with embroidery and beading that it was almost a shell — almost like she was Venus coming out of the waves for him.

He stopped kissing her and stepped back. She regretted the candles then — every inch of her was illuminated. But it wasn’t her nudity that made her self-conscious. With her painting, she’d stopped being precious about the human body long ago. It was that he was still clothed where she was not — and she wanted to see him, all of him, the way he currently devoured her.

“Won’t you undress?” she asked.

“I undressed you. You can return the favor.”

She stepped forward and pushed off his coat. His waistcoat came next, then his braces, and then his shirt, which he had to pull over his head himself. He bent to take off his shoes as well, but she stopped him. “Allow me, my lord,” she murmured.

She knelt. Her hair fell around her as she pulled his shoes off his feet. As she rolled his stockings down, she caressed the arch of each foot. Then she kissed the bridges, right on the top where the shoe buckles would have been. She heard him inhale — heard pain in the sound, as though it rasped over broken glass.

She came to her feet and met his gaze. There was a world of feeling there she’d never seen before — a world of feeling she could experience herself, if she could only find the key to unlock her own heart.

She stroked her hand against his chest, resting her palm over his heart. “I dreamed you would come home for this — even though I can’t feel what you want me to feel.”

She didn’t know why she had confessed that. His hand closed over hers, trapping it against his heart. “You aren’t the woman I loved, are you?”

She jerked her hand away from him, but he held it trapped against his chest. “You know it’s true. You aren’t the girl I loved when I was a boy. You don’t see the world as a parade of beauty. You don’t trust, you don’t confide, you don’t laugh, you don’t let yourself hope…”

His hand tightened over hers. She was too shocked by his litany of bitterness to respond. “But I’m not the boy you loved, either,” he continued. “I don’t give a damn what you’ve done these past ten years, or how many lovers you’ve taken, or why none of your friends can tell me anything of substance about you. All I know is that I want the woman you are, not the girl you were.”

He was wrong. She did hope — a hope he awakened again, sharp and painful, as he looked at her with a gaze that held dreams of the future rather than nightmares of the past.

She pulled her hand away. This time he let her go. “I can’t, Nick. Don’t make me hope again. Ravish me, ruin me, do whatever it is you came here to do. But don’t raise my hopes.”

He put both hands on her cheeks, holding her so she couldn’t look away. “Stay with me, Ellie. Here, in this moment, where nothing else matters. The past doesn’t have to consume us forever.”

She wrenched her face out of his hands. “You can’t forgive me. I can’t forgive myself. We’re lying to ourselves when we say we can do this without the past coming between us — it’s all there is. Don’t you see that? All we are, all we’ve been for the past ten years, is obsession and hatred and regret. I don’t know a single fact about your life beyond that — not what you traded, or where you lived, or who you spent your time with, or even whether you enjoyed it. And you don’t know any facts about me. So don’t you dare think to make me love you again. You’re in love with an illusion — just as you always were.”

She’d fought to stay calm even though she couldn't keep her voice from rising. But she could only sound rational by sounding cold — and by sounding cold, she had taken them back to her father's drawing room, where she had lied to Nick and told him she couldn't love him. His jaw tightened and his teeth ground together. His effort to control himself was etched in the lines around his eyes as they narrowed. All the love she’d seen there turned to ice.

“I’m not the boy you spurned, but I’m no illusion. Tell me now you don’t want me to take you to bed — or stop talking altogether.”