Read Online The Marquess Who Loved Me by Sara Ramsey - Free Book Online Page B

Salford’s maid helped me to dress, and she heard that Lord Folkestone had already left for London. Not that I gossiped with the servants, of course — but they can be useful.”
    Madeleine grinned. “Planning a rendezvous in the capital? How shocking of you, Lady Folkestone.”
    Ellie sucked in a breath that had nothing to do with Lucia's sharp tug on the back of her dress. She hadn’t known that Nick was going to London, but she couldn’t delay her trip just to avoid him. “What that scoundrel does is no concern of mine,” she said sharply.
    She knew her mistake immediately — both of her friends went from interested to very interested. “So he’s a scoundrel now?” Madeleine asked. “Was he a scoundrel before or after he moved into the room next to yours?”
    “I didn’t put him in the room next to mine,” Ellie said smugly. “The only room left, other than the master’s chamber, was a small bachelor’s room in the old wing of the house. He may freeze to death there, but it would save me the trouble of finding a new residence.”
    Prudence and Madeleine both looked into their cups at the same time.
    “What are you not telling me?” she asked.
    “I must have made a mistake,” Madeleine said, in a voice that didn’t allow for mistakes. “But I saw him leaving this hallway when your maid requested that I join you for tea. Since I knew all the other rooms on this floor were occupied, I assumed he was in the master’s chamber. Unless he was in here with you?”
    She sounded so guileless that her innocence somehow wrapped around itself and became an insinuation. “Yes, you made a mistake,” Ellie said firmly. “I’m sure he stayed where I put him. But that is neither here nor there. All I need is for you to keep my guests entertained until dinner so that I may deal with an urgent matter in the City. I’m sorry if you came to my room expecting a grand story of reunited lovers, but there’s no world in which that story is going to happen.”
    “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