Marrying His Cinderella Countess

He had the sense not to deny it.

‘I was very happy with you, Eleanor. I was beginning to hope that you were happy with me. And then we went home to Hampshire, where there was so much to remind me of her and what had happened. I hadn’t examined that statue on its pedestal, hadn’t looked at my own feelings for so long. I just assumed that somehow I would always love the memory of her, and that I would never feel that way about anyone again.’

Ellie looked down and found that her hands were crossed over her stomach, cradling the baby that had not even begun to swell her belly yet. ‘Go on,’ she whispered.

‘I felt so strange. Guilt for the way I had acted was still there, but that feeling that I had always thought was love had become unwelcome, bitter. I couldn’t recall her face any longer, but that didn’t bring me any peace. And I was hurting you, and I hated it that I was. I wanted you—only you—but I didn’t realise just what it was that I felt. All I knew was that when her parents put up that memorial it felt as though a blindfold had been ripped from my eyes. I did not know whether I had ever truly loved her.’

‘Ever?’ Ellie shook her head, trying to clear it.

‘Eleanor—’

He ran his hands through his hair again and she almost smiled. It was so characteristic of Blake to do that when he was frustrated or impatient.

‘I had been telling myself a story all this time since I had proposed to Felicity. I was in love with her—an impossible love—and she was my beautiful ideal, my lost destiny. But that was all it was—a story. I married you telling myself that I had to marry, and that I liked you, I could be happy with you and I hoped make you happy too. Everything I was beginning to feel for you—it was like smoke blowing across a puzzle that I had almost solved. I couldn’t read it any longer.’

He came out of the chair, down on his knees on the faded hearthrug at her feet.

‘I had no time to think. You were there—and real. And yet I was hurting you because I could not let go of the guilt and the memories.’

Blake held out both his hands and Ellie took them in hers.

‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘it hurt that you still had the portrait. It hurt that you seemed to need to go to her memorial.’

‘I had that miniature all this time. I cannot recall the last time I looked at it, but it had become part of the things that Duncombe always moved from house to house. I remembered it and knew I must get rid of it, because she was no longer part of my life and I did not want you to see it and misunderstand. I could not give it back to her parents because that would have been like an admission that I had never loved their daughter, so putting it into the memorial seemed the best thing to do with it. When I did it—when the stone lid grated back on to that urn—it felt like a door closing on the past, Eleanor. All I could see was how futile it was to feel guilt over it when it was blighting what you and I had, what we could have.’

She had been so wrong about what she had seen. ‘You were coming home to me?’

‘Eventually.’

That smile was the old Blake. Still rueful, but with a healthy self-mockery there now.

‘I rode hard. I gave Tuscan his head and galloped and I felt free for the first time in a very long time. I needed to think, to feel, to listen to what my heart was telling me about you.’

Her fingers tightened involuntarily on his but he kept talking.

‘Tuscan shied at a deer, unseated me because I was hardly thinking about what I was doing. I hit my head, knocked myself out. By the time I came round and got home you were gone.’

‘Knocked yourself out? Blake, you should not have been travelling.’ She released his hands, ran her fingers into his hair, found the lump on the back of his head and the healing wound. ‘Did you see a doctor?’ she demanded.

‘I was concussed, that was all. Duncombe dressed it, I rested, then saw the doctor in London.’

‘You went careering about the countryside with concussion?’

‘Trying to find you,’ Blake said flatly. ‘What the hell were you thinking of, Eleanor?’

‘Me?’ she demanded, jerking her hands from his head with more speed than caution.

Blake winced, but she found that with relief so many other emotions were bubbling up—and amongst them anger.

‘I was thinking of how to make this marriage work—how to make something meaningful out of a ménage à trois with a ghost.’

Blake made the fatal mistake of laughing. ‘Will you come home and we’ll carry on as we did before?’

For a moment she’d thought he was going to tell her that he loved her, that that was what he had meant about understanding his feelings for her.

‘As we did before?’

She should be happy. So happy. Blake did not love Felicity’s memory, and had finally worked out just how his past had haunted him. He had come for her, searched for her, wanted her home again. But it was no longer enough.