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