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 triumphantly.
Madeleine and Prudence both looked up at her with identical expressions of inquisitive delight. She knew they cared about her. They wanted her to be happy. They wanted to share in her emotion. Their friendship was still new to her, but it was what Ellie had dreamed of as a child, all alone on the country estate where her father had abandoned her. She had been exiled, raised by a series of nursemaids and governesses, for the crime of looking too much like the wife he’d adored and lost. With Ferguson similarly exiled at Eton and her other half-siblings in London, she had dreamed of having friends to play with, to laugh with, to share secrets with…
But she hadn’t realized then that secrets held a dark, dangerous kind of power. What danger had her secrets posed when no one cared about them but her? It was a lesson she’d learned, and learned hard, during her first season in London, when she had finally found other women her own age to talk to.
Suddenly, it wasn’t Madeleine and Prudence in front of her. Annabel and Clarabel Claiborne had been eighteen and seventeen during Ellie’s debut, while Ellie was already nineteen, but they were kind and cheerful — easygoing, charming girls whom Ellie’s father approved of her knowing. She wanted her father’s approval badly enough that she would have been friends with