The Marquess Who Loved Me Read Online Free PDF

could find a way to forget her.

C H A P T E R F O U R

    Nick didn’t dance. He didn’t go in to supper. Beyond the one conversation she saw him have with Marcus, he didn’t speak to anyone at all.
    The man was unnerving her. Ellie knew that was his intention. His actions were laughably transparent, but she couldn’t fight the effect he had on her. When she thought of being alone with him — for the first time since that awful conversation she’d wished, endlessly, to take back — her breath turned shallow and her hands went slick with sweat.
    So she didn’t think of it, even though his dark presence on the edge of her vision wouldn’t let her forget.
    She had painted him as Hades once. His pose now, with his arms crossed and his jaw set, matched the painting. The doors between the ballroom and the rest of the house replaced the gates of hell, separating the life she knew from the afterlife that awaited her.
    He stood ready, waiting to take her there. Once the party ended, once she crossed that threshold, he’d have her.
    Your hysterics are unbecoming, Elinor . She heard her father’s voice in her head, as clear and inescapable as the great bells of St. Paul’s on her wedding day. Her father — now there was a man she could hate and love safely, without worrying he’d one day reappear in her ballroom. Perhaps he should have encouraged hysterics in his children — if her brother Richard could have belly-ached over their father’s demands like a normal man, rather than snapping and shooting him, her father would still be alive.
    Still, she didn’t like hysterics any more than he had. She straightened her shoulders. She couldn’t avoid Nick — but Ellie didn’t avoid anyone.
    She’d made a critical error. She should have attacked, not retreated.
    Most of the local gentry had left, taking advantage of the last of the moon to drive home. Some guests would leave in the morning; the rest would stay another week. It was the tamest affair she’d given since she had stopped mourning her husband — if mourning was the right word for cloistered celebration. But even among these guests, they wouldn’t miss her as long as the wine flowed.
    So when her next dancing partner, Alex Staunton, the Earl of Salford, came to claim her, she demurred. “Lord Folkestone has returned. I should see him settled,” she said.
    Salford cast a sidelong glance at the door. “Do you think he’d bed down there if you gave him a pallet? He seems to like the spot.”
    She stifled a laugh. She had known Salford for years, but their acquaintance had deepened after his cousin Madeleine had married her brother. Salford was stuffy to some, but their mutual interests in art and antiquities had brought them close enough that she saw beneath his honor-bound façade. Tonight, his sly humor was a bit of balm that soothed her rupturing scars.
    “Folkestone isn’t easily led,” she said. “But I’ll find a room for him.”
    The servants wouldn’t have to air his room, if she gave him the master suite despite the door that connected it to hers. On her orders, they had aired it every day for a decade. But Salford didn’t know of her past, or how well she knew the man who had been her husband’s cousin and heir.
    He eyed Nick, who watched them darkly. “I don’t believe he likes me, Lady Folkestone,” he mused. “Any idea why that would be?”
    “None,” Ellie lied. “But he’s a strange man, to have stayed in India so long when Folkestone was his. Who knows what he’s thinking?”
    “Shall we experiment?” Salford asked. He brought Ellie’s hand to his lips. It was an empty gesture — there was about as much romantic feeling between them as between a pair of coffee spoons. But Ellie saw Nick’s arms tighten, saw him draw a breath — saw the laughter in Salford’s eyes as he dropped her hand.
    “The marquess seems taken with you, my lady. Your effect remains undimmed.”
    “I’ve no idea why,” she said with a