woman you are preferable to the girl you were.”
It wasn’t forgiveness. And yet the sentiment moved her, far more dramatically than any meaningless words of rapprochement.
The carriage pulled to a stop in front of Folkestone. The spell broke before she could sift through her thoughts and find whatever truth she wanted to share with him. But as he started toward the door, she reached for his hand. “I am glad you are home, Nick. No matter what happens between us.”
He squeezed her fingers but didn’t respond. A groom opened the door and Nick jumped out to help her down. He didn’t say anything more — just looked at her with an unfathomable expression, then offered his arm to escort her into the house.
So she went. Her hosting duties awaited; he no doubt wished to further harass her guests. But that look she couldn’t read would haunt her — just as her own unreadable heart did. Could they reconcile, truly? Or would all his anger and all her regret conspire to keep them apart?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Two hours later, Ellie was outside again. Her body might freeze to match the temperature Nick had accused her of being, but after being cooped up inside, her guests were eager for an outdoor diversion. One of her sisters had proposed ice skating — no doubt because Sebastian Staunton had mentioned how much he missed ice when he was in Bermuda. Ellie had raised an eyebrow at that, but once the idea was out, it had spread through the company like a contagion.
And so, they were skating. Her gardeners had cleared the snow off the pond nearest the house, and the ice was thick and wonderfully flat. She had plenty of skates to go around for anyone who had boots sturdy enough to attach the blades to. At one of her wilder bacchanals, there had been skating in the moonlight beneath a ring of torches around the pond, and the blades had stayed in some disused corner of the stables until today.
She knew her sisters’ intentions weren’t entirely innocent. She should try to provide a sobering influence for them — but Ellie had never been a sobering influence before, and she was grateful for the suggestion. Skating was far more fun than yet another conversation in her drawing room.
Especially when every conversation seemed to turn, inevitably, to Nick.
He was doing nothing at the moment, and yet even his idleness drew interest. He leaned against a tree near the edge of the pond and watched as she skated fast loops around the ice. She chose to indulge in her love for speed rather than playing the lady for her older guests. She had skated for hours and hours as a girl, when there was nothing better to do, and so she didn’t have the halting, tentative strokes of some of her inexperienced friends.
But even with her speed, she saw how people looked at him. And she saw how he looked at no one but her. It was a conundrum, that — she knew some of her guests would befriend him, and genuinely, if he gave them the chance. But he was too closed for them to approach. And he saw their hesitation as a judgment on his origins.
She skated to the very edge of the pond, as close to his tree as she could get without taking off her skates. Picking her toe into the ice to maintain her balance, she held out her hand. “Won’t you skate with us, Lord Folkestone?” she asked, staying formal for anyone who might hear her. “I know you had no ice in India, but surely you learned as a child.”
She knew he had. They had skated together once, on thinning late-February ice on the Serpentine in Hyde Park. It had been her first week in the capital, and it was the only public place they could think to meet where her chaperone wouldn’t overly care that she was talking to a man. Their skating was brief — only twenty minutes — but long enough for her to assure him that she hadn’t forgotten him despite her father’s attempts to dazzle her.
Perhaps it was that memory that made his mouth twist. He swept his eyes blatantly over her curves. She wore thick skirts and a beaver hat, but her military-inspired spencer nipped in provocatively at her waist. “I thank you, Lady Folkestone, but the view is better from here.”
“I would have worn sackcloth if I’d known what you were after, but I