Marrying His Cinderella Countess

‘My feelings are more of guilt and regret than anything,’ Blake said, pruning the truth as rigorously as Wilkins had been pruning that shrub. ‘I was so arrogantly certain of what was right for both of us that I tried to push Felicity into a decision she was not ready to make, and that sent her into flight, into doing something that if I had been more careful, more patient, she would never have contemplated. Until she had gone I did not realise how I felt about her.’

‘And you did not go after her? This woman you loved?’

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘I was hurt… I was angry. She had made her bed and I simply assumed she was happy lying on it. By the time I knew what had happened—that her poet had abandoned her in Rome when Trenton refused to let them have any money—it was too late.’

‘Oh, poor thing. To be betrayed like that…’

One tear welled up and ran down Ellie’s cheek. Her eyes were red, and he saw that she would never be a woman who could weep prettily. Her eyes would become bloodshot, her nose would go pink and she would blow it energetically on a large, practical handkerchief. She had no pretty little wiles as Felicity had had.

‘Oh, Ellie.’

She looked up, seemingly startled by his use of her shortened name, and he kissed her on a wave of affection and guilt and pity. Betrayed. Was his failure to find out what had happened to Felicity a betrayal too?

She tasted of salt, and Eleanor, and somehow of anger, and she was stiff in his arms.

Still too thin, he thought, feeling her shoulders under his palms, as fragile of the bones of the sparrow he had likened her to.

For a moment he thought she was yielding, that her lips had softened under his, but then she pushed him away and stood, head down, still in his arms.

‘Don’t, Ellie.’ He couldn’t tell if she was still crying, but he thought he would rather she stabbed him.

‘Don’t push you away? No, I will not—and of course I will be a conformable wife,’ she said, still addressing his middle waistcoat button. ‘You will just have to give me a little time to… I was not so naïve as to believe that you as

ked me to marry you because you loved me, but I did not realise that you…that you still loved someone else.’

She put back her shoulders, effectively dislodging his hands, and raised her gaze as far as his chin.

‘Just because I do not much want to kiss you right at this moment, it does not mean that I am going to close my bedchamber door to you. It is very foolish of me to behave as though a dead woman is as much a threat as a living one.’

Relief swept through him. She was upset—of course she was. And naturally she wanted time to get over the upset. He would stop thinking about Felicity, difficult though it seemed at the moment. But he had received a shock too, Blake told himself, wrestling with the turbulence of his emotions. He had thought Felicity safely in the past—a matter for sadness and regret. Now he could almost see her standing there amidst the roses, could almost hear her voice on the soft breeze, although the words he heard she had never spoken.

Love is pain…

‘You need not worry that I do not know my duty as your wife,’ Eleanor continued, her voice firmer now. ‘I know you want an heir.’

Relief was replaced by a flood of something that was not precisely anger, nor hurt pride, but an unpleasant mixture of emotions that contained, at its churning centre, something horribly like fear.

‘Damn it, Eleanor, I don’t want you sleeping with me out of duty. Children are not the point.’

Her lips moved soundlessly.

Not the point…

‘Out of what, then?’ she demanded.

Now she was looking him in the eye, and he wished she was not. He was not the only one who was hurt and angry, and he had made her feel like that. ‘You did not marry me for love, that is clear, and you surely do not think I love you.’

‘I had rather hoped that you might enjoy making love,’ he said through stiff lips, almost unable to believe he was actually asking a woman to approve his bedchamber skills.

‘I did,’ she said. ‘I do. You are very good at it. At least I assume you are. I cannot compare it to anything. It is very…’

‘If you say nice I will not be responsible for my actions,’ Blake said grimly.

Eleanor’s eyes widened. ‘You would hit me?’

Blake slammed his clenched fist against a sagging pergola support. ‘Under no circumstances would I strike a woman, Eleanor. If you don’t know that about me by now—’

‘Oh, what have you done?’