The Marquess Who Loved Me

Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT


If he had asked her eight years ago, she would have said yes — would have done anything to atone, to please him, to show him that she loved him.

If he had asked her five years ago, she would have said yes, because she was lonely and had already disrobed.

If he had asked her a week ago, she would have said yes, because she had missed him for so long and would take whatever pleasure he offered.

She had said yes the previous night.

“No,” she said. “If this is really a choice, I choose no.”

“What?”

His voice was harsh, but his eyes were more confused than angry. She suppressed the urge to stroke his cheek and instead crossed her arms over her bare chest. “I said I can’t, Nick. Or rather, I could, and it would be wonderful, and I would never want to stop. That’s why I cannot.”

He clasped his fingers behind his head. His eyes flickered over her face, trying to read her emotions instead of shamelessly scanning her naked body. She didn’t know whether she would have painted him in that pose as a prisoner awaiting punishment or a devil inviting her to take the last step toward her own destruction.

“I could take you anyway,” he said, almost to himself. “I should have when you broke our engagement. I should have dragged you to Gretna Green and married you, not let you go.”

“Why didn’t you?”

The question slipped out before she thought about it. He dropped his hands and the shutters fell over his eyes. He picked up his shirt and thrust it at her. “Put this on before I forget that I gave you a choice.”

She pulled the shirt over her head. It reached the middle of her thighs and the neck gaped open over her bosom, but it was better than nothing.

“You should go to your chamber,” he said.

Ellie took a deep breath. Then she took another. And another. There were so many words she wanted to give him — so many feelings she hadn’t let herself give names to, and now they overwhelmed her. Everything turned hot, until even the tips of her ears burned from the friction between the identity she’d chosen and the feelings she’d buried.

Nick had been deadly serious, but as she started to gasp like a flopping fish, his voice softened. “Ellie…it will come out all right in the end. We’ve survived this long — we will survive tonight as well.”

“What if I don’t want to survive?”

“Don’t say that,” he said, suddenly grim. “I won’t allow you to not survive.”

“I don’t mean I want to die — but were the last ten years living? Was it living when my whole life was an endless masquerade? Was it living when I cannot remember feeling anything other than remorse? Was it living to spend ten years running from a ghost?”

Tears pricked against her eyes, as hot and furious as the sound roaring in her ears. Nick wrapped his arms around her, pulling her toward his chest without saying a word in either agreement or dispute. He simply tucked her into his embrace. He stroked her back, then kissed the top of her head.

“Feel, Ellie,” he whispered. “You are not a ghost if you can feel.”

She felt. God, she felt — all the sharp pain of fresh love, not the weak throb of memory. She couldn’t bear to have it sharp again, couldn’t bear how Nick’s return and his revenge were the whetstone that had given a new, knife-sharp edge to the love buried in her heart.

She also couldn’t bear how her memories had become a crypt. The past ten years had been an exercise in burying everything beneath a hundred protective layers of cynicism and solitude. But her crypt was safe. All her pain had faded and chilled there, until it had turned to stone instead of fire.

She inhaled. Her perfume mingled with his scent. The faded bergamot of his soap was overlaid with his sweat. His chest was still bare, and she felt both more hair and more muscle than he’d had when she first knew him.

Nick had changed. Aged. The changes were slow, like flowers growing over a grave — and yet fast, like snow melting in spring. He was a mass of contradictions, but only two mattered to her: he was the boy who hated her enough to spend a decade plotting her ruin. And he was the man who loved who she really was, not the image she portrayed.

Even though there was nothing she could offer him that he didn’t already have. He didn’t need her dowry like Charles had. He didn’t need her to maintain her reputation and bloodlines like her father had. He either needed her love, or he needed his revenge — but those were for her, not for her bloody pedigree.

She escaped his embrace. “I should go to my chamber.”

“Running from ghosts again?”

“Better than going to bed with them, isn’t it?”

Nick sighed. “Perhaps. Can’t say I am happy with your choice, though.”

Her choice. She didn’t know many men who wouldn’t try to force her when she was in their chamber, late at night, wearing only their shirt. He’d always let her have her choice, when no one else had.

“Why didn’t you elope with me?” she asked again.

His eyes narrowed. “No wonder you’re plagued with ghosts if you won’t let them rest.”

“Very well. Goodnight, Nick.”

Her hand was on the doorknob before he responded. His voice made her turn around even though she wasn’t sure she wanted his answer. “I thought you didn’t want me,” he said, his back still to her. “You never should have wanted me in the first place. I thought you had finally come to your senses.”

“I didn’t want to elope,” she said. “But if you don’t deserve me, it’s in the opposite sense of your meaning. You don’t deserve someone who would forsake you for her father’s approval. If I had defied my father and eloped with you…I am still sure he would have harmed you. The only way he could have made good on such a mesalliance was by making me a widow so I could marry someone else.”

Nick’s head had been bowed, but he straightened as she spoke. His back rippled with dangerous energy. But he still didn’t turn around. “You thought I would be harmed if we married?”

“It’s not an excuse — or at least not a good one. I really was convinced that the proper choice for a girl in my position was to marry well. And I so wanted Father to be pleased with me. It was something I’d wanted long before I knew you, and it was so hard to say no to him.”

“But you thought I’d be harmed?”

“Do you remember the first day I tried to break our engagement?”

He nodded. He wasn’t still anymore, though — he walked over to one of the chests in the corner and threw it open. His belongings had been delivered from London earlier in the week, but he hadn’t unpacked — did he intend to leave again?

She took a breath. “After that first attempt, I almost changed my mind. I loved you, I was sure of it. And I knew, finally, that Charles had offered for me mostly to stick a knife in your side. I tried to tell Father that I wouldn’t marry Charles, although I would still marry whomever he chose. If I had to be pragmatic and make Father happy, I could still do it in a way that wasn’t quite so awful to you.”

Nick finally emerged from his chest with a cloudy glass bottle. He grabbed a penknife from the top tray of the chest and started digging into the wax seal, but he looked up when her words trailed off. “I’m still listening.”

“There’s not much left to share. Father was proud enough to make jilting Charles unthinkable, and vengeful enough that he thought you’d gotten your just deserts for making the mistake of aspiring so far above your station. And then, almost as though he were offering it as a boon to me, he said he could arrange for you to leave London. Something about his connections in Parliament and the business your company did for the Navy, and how simple it would be to find some malfeasance to pin on you as treason…”

She trailed off again. He’d given up on extracting the cork beneath the seal and pushed it into the bottle. He held the bottle up in mock toast. “All this talk of your father has killed whatever erection I still had, so I thank you for that.”

He drank straight from the bottle. Then he grimaced — whatever he drank was harsh stuff.

“I didn’t mention him to make you sleep better,” she said. “And I’m not using him as an excuse. I regret it now, but I was so young then. I would have been swayed by him or you, whoever was more persuasive. The thought of your life being ruined for being in love with me…well, my father won.”

He took another pull from the bottle. “So I just have to be the most persuasive man around to win you?”

“I’m not a prize anymore. And I like to think I can’t be persuaded by anybody.”

“But that’s another lie, isn’t it?” He walked toward her. Her stomach flipped. With his lowslung trousers and his loose grip on the bottle dangling from his fingers, he looked like a marauder in mid-pillage. “I can persuade you, just like he did, because you’re so bloody scared of feeling anything that you’ll do the first thing that offers you an escape. If I told you to drink this and then let me f*ck you against that door, you’d do it just so I’d shut my mouth and not make you think about what you’re feeling.”

“I’m going to bed,” she said.

“Or that.” He tipped the bottle into his mouth again. From this distance, the fumes alone could intoxicate her. Her wide eyes met his as he pulled the bottle away from his lips. He wiped his mouth with his other hand. “Run, Ellie. Run like you did then. Run like you do every day. Don’t make a choice. Don’t do the hard thing. Don’t try to be anything more than a ghost of what you could have been.”

She was furious, suddenly, and she hit in him the chest, right over his heart. “As though I’m the only one who ran. Where will you go this time? China? Canada? I would hope that cannibals in the South Pacific might eat you, but whatever you are drinking has surely pickled your insides. You may be present, but you’re not here, not if you must drink something every time we argue. So don’t pretend you are better at feeling than I am. I will remember this tomorrow — all you’ll have is a headache.”

His mouth tightened. His eyes were unbearably sad. “I never found you in a bottle of this stuff. But I never forgot you there, either.”

Stop. She took a breath. They’d danced around the same fight ever since he had returned, two players in a game no one else could see and not even they knew the score of.

But she didn’t want a game.

She took the bottle from his hand. “Stop. What I’m about to say — you don’t have to respond tonight. But we can’t keep doing this. Not for another hour, let alone four months. Either we try — really try — to be real for each other, not ghosts. Or we let each other go. But this…this is self-torture, not revenge. For both of us.”

It was disjointed, discombobulated, perhaps not even what she wanted to say at all. There were voices beneath it that she suppressed, like hope scrabbling at the inside of Pandora’s box. But it was the best she could do.

After an age, he nodded. “Go to bed. We will talk tomorrow.”

She left, taking the bottle with her. Neither of them said anything else as she slipped through the door and closed it between them.

She didn’t lock it, though. She leaned her head against it instead. With his scent and shirt enveloping her, she could pretend she still leaned against his chest.

She didn’t want a game. But could she listen to her heart long enough to know what was real?