The Marquess Who Loved Me - By Sara Ramsey Page 0,54

in Bermuda, but had been in England since November — the longest time he’d spent on this side of the Atlantic in years.

“Be careful, my dears,” Ellie said in a low voice. “If you catch a man like that, you won’t know what to do with him.”

“I have some ideas,” Maria whispered.

Kate giggled as Ellie sighed. “Why the concern, Ellie?” Kate asked. “We are merely flirting. By the time you were our age, you were already married, widowed, and well on your way to bedding half the ton.”

“It wasn’t half the ton,” Ellie protested with a laugh. “Whoever told you that was mistaken.”

“Father did tend to exaggerate when he was angry,” Kate said, pausing to clap too enthusiastically when Madeleine hit the wainscoting behind the target. “But still, you can’t begrudge us a bit of excitement after all the years he kept us locked away.”

Ellie didn’t begrudge them. She’d only taken four lovers since her marriage — not the regiment her father had assumed, although she’d worked hard to cultivate her dissolute reputation to keep him from setting her up with another husband. And she hadn’t regretted them — they were all rakes with secret sweet sides who kept their own counsel and expected nothing from her. None of them had equaled Nick — but then, she hadn’t been looking for love.

She wanted her sisters to find love, though. They’d had little enough of it, raised by their tyrannical father; at one-and-twenty, it was past time for them to have some happiness. “Don’t sell yourselves too cheaply,” she warned. “There are good men in the ton if you are patient enough to find them.”

The twins gave noncommittal nods, then wandered toward Sebastian as though they shared a single mind. Ellie sighed again. They were smart enough — and Sebastian elusive enough — that none of them were in any danger.

But she would rather see them make safe, happy matches than play the game she’d entered with Nick.

Madeleine gave up her bow with a laugh after hitting the wainscoting a second time and joined Ellie by the wall. “If Ferguson ever upsets me, remind me not to shoot him,” Madeleine said. “I’m more likely to injure myself than him.”

“You should take lessons,” Ellie said. “Your cousin seems eager to give them.”

Madeleine wrinkled her nose in Sebastian’s direction. “He’s even more of a rogue than he was the last time he came home. I hope your sisters know he’s not the marrying kind.”

Ellie’s reply was interrupted when Lucia slipped into the gallery. She held a small slip of paper and wore a grim expression. Ellie raised an eyebrow at her in silent question.

Lucia shook her head.

Damn. Ellie had tasked Lucia with adding up the original value of Ellie’s collection from all the ledgers of her acquisitions. She took the paper and read the note like it was a prison sentence.

Nineteen thousand, two hundred and twenty three pounds, six shillings, and four pence.

Her stomach twisted. She might be able to sell most of it. But she couldn’t sell everything. Some pieces would bring more than she had paid, but some were already out of fashion. Her Chinese collection, for example, was not entirely en vogue. If she sold every painting, every sculpture, every scrap of wall hanging, she couldn’t possibly pay Nick in full. All she could do was shorten the length of their arrangement.

And unless she wanted to auction it all publicly — and humiliate herself in the process — it might take months to sell everything.

Ellie didn’t have months. She wasn’t even sure she had minutes. She had always thought she knew her own heart, but last night’s passion and this morning’s regret had surprised her.

Somehow, while she had worked so hard to reforge herself into a woman with no weaknesses, she had made a critical error. Her heart, guarded and locked and left unexamined in the dark, hadn’t healed during its decade of solitude.

It had festered.

The face she showed the world was a dressing expertly applied over her wounds. Her heart, though, couldn’t bear to be touched. Stripping away even a bit of the covering, as Nick had done the previous night — as he would likely do again that night, and every night after that until she repaid him or killed him — caused her unbearable pain.

She recognized the pain. She had sometimes let herself feel it on those rare occasions when her painting drew from the deep well of her heart. She could let the blood flow into