The Marquess Who Loved Me - By Sara Ramsey Page 0,32
of business to attend to yet, but I shall return for dinner.”
“Good. My chef would be displeased if he killed the fatted lamb for nothing. He is very French, and very angry when a plan changes. If you don’t come tonight, we will all be eating porridge for a week.”
She grinned at him. For just a moment he saw her at eighteen again, vowing to do anything to charm a laugh from him.
He did reach for her then, but she’d already slid away. His hand dropped as she stepped toward the door.
Then she turned back. “I meant it, Nick, when I said I missed you. Despite everything.”
She was gone before he could reply. He listened to her steps, slow at first, then gaining intensity as she retreated down the hall. She would have every feature firmly in control before any servant saw her, he was sure of it.
Just as sure as he was that he never should have come back from India. He should have stayed there until the sun burned out every emotion, until the monsoon drowned every memory.
Because even though he couldn’t keep her, he wasn’t sure he had the strength to leave her again.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“He is insufferable,” Ellie declared. The carriage hit a rut in the frozen road. She reached for a strap to steady herself. “Not a word for ten years, and now he wants to know everything about everyone?”
She’d held her tongue for nearly two hours, but as they neared Folkestone, she finally broke her silence. Lucia didn’t open her eyes. Enclosed carriages always made the maid queasy, but it was too damp for her to ride in the open air with the driver.
At least the maid was more comfortable in the larger Folkestone traveling coach. Ellie had used that as an excuse to steal it from Nick and Marcus, even though she knew she was merely being petty. But if Ellie were to spend two hours stewing over Nick’s return, she would rather do it in luxury than in the smaller coach she’d been forced to take to London that morning.
“I am sure his lordship knows something of the estate,” Lucia said, leaning back into the cushions. “Mr. Claiborne corresponded with him regularly.”
“Marcus can go to the devil and take his brother with him. Every man in every generation of this family has been an oaf — or worse. I suppose I should be grateful that Charles didn’t give me a child. Can you imagine raising a Claiborne male?”
“Your sparkling personality wouldn’t be utterly absent in your offspring, I trust.”
Ellie looked at her maid suspiciously. “Do you count that as a blessing or a curse?”
Lucia's mouth curved the tiniest bit. “I’ll allow that you are preferable to any Claiborne I’ve met.”
Ellie sniffed. “If you weren’t utterly unemployable, I would turn you off and be done with you.”
Her maid’s smile widened, an odd contrast to the sickly green of her face. “You are too kind, my lady.”
“Tell me the truth, Lucia. What should I do about Nick?”
Lucia paused, so long that it seemed she might be sick in earnest. Ellie reached up to pound on the ceiling, but Lucia spoke before she could order a halt.
“Do you want what I think, or what you want to hear?”
Ellie dropped her fist into her lap. “What you think.”
“I think you want me to say you should leave.”
“That’s not what I asked for.”
Lucia shrugged. “Then if I say I think you should stay — do you want to hear that?”
“Staying is an awful idea.”
“My point precisely, my lady.”
“You know what happened between us,” Ellie said. She’d shared the details one night, when she’d had far too much claret and was in a maudlin mood as she prepared for bed. Lucia had been good enough not to reference it again, but her mind was a steel trap — she wouldn’t have forgotten. “Why wouldn’t I run at the first sight of him?”
“For the same reason you’ve lived in his house all these years, I suspect. And the same reason you haven’t married again.”
“I’m not in love with him, if that’s what you mean.”
Lucia opened an eye.
“I’m not,” Ellie insisted.
Lucia opened her other eye. In the dim interior of the coach, she suddenly looked deadly serious. “Believe what you will, my lady. But for all the advice you’ve given me, let me return the favor. You either stayed because you love him, or stayed because you want revenge. I don’t know which desire drives you — but either way, the