The Marquess Who Loved Me Read Online Free Page B

flared again as he watched her dance through all her admiring, worshipful guests. He hadn’t been this angry in years. On the ship, he had even thought he might be able to see her again without betraying any feeling at all. But knowing that she had been here, in his house, holding court while he had rotted in India alone…
    He turned back to Marcus. “Tell me you still kept to our plan.”
    It wasn’t a question. Marcus sighed. “Yes. But Nick…”
    He trailed off. Ten years, and the responsibilities for their grandfather’s shipping empire and Nick’s Claiborne estates, had stripped away the boy his brother used to be. If Marcus still laughed as much as he had as a boy, there was no sign of it. He was somber now, and slightly wary, as though Nick’s homecoming was something he had looked forward to until he had realized what it might mean.
    Nick sighed. “I didn’t come seeking revenge tonight. Let’s talk of something else. I’d rather hear about you than her after all this time.”
    It was partly true. He’d returned from India to determine whether someone wanted him dead, not to take his long overdue revenge on Ellie. He’d even told himself he wouldn’t follow through with the plan he’d hatched with Marcus, in a fit of madness, on the way to the docks a decade earlier.
    But seeing Ellie now — a jaded, rich, indolent aristocrat, with the title she’d left him for and a cold, fickle heart that refused to give him satisfaction — made him itch to break her.
    Marcus’s eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t rather hear about me. Don’t pretend you’re not here for revenge. I think everyone in the ballroom sensed your intentions.”
    “I haven’t decided what I will do yet,” Nick hedged.
    “You have. If you hadn’t, you would have warned her you were coming. Warned me that you were coming. You couldn’t risk that I’d tell her and she would flee, could you?”
    Nick hadn’t warned him because there was no time to warn him — he’d taken the first ship out of Madras after realizing that the attacks on him and his interests were not coincidences. But Marcus’s tone sounded uncomfortably like censure.
    Nick leaned in, speaking low, but forceful enough to make himself understood. “She brought this upon herself. I can’t take away the title she spurned me for, but I can take everything else that marriage gave her.”
    Marcus held his gaze for a long time, longer than anyone did. Whatever he saw there made his forehead crease.
    “At least talk to her first. She’s changed, Nick. We all have. Perhaps not for the better…”
    “I vow she hasn’t changed for the better,” Nick interjected. “The Ellie I knew never cared for spectacles such as these.”
    “The Ellie you knew is dead,” Marcus shot back. “If you need proof of it, look at yourself. You aren’t the same man who waved goodbye to me on the docks.”
    He wasn’t the same man. He still remembered the docks — a mercilessly cheerful June sky, when all he wanted was rain. And Marcus, who didn’t beg him to stay even though he seemed inclined to. Marcus had been the one who was supposed to go to India at the tender age of twenty, while Nick should have stayed to manage the London office. But Nick couldn’t stay, not when Ellie had married Charles — and especially not when she had been widowed three days later, since he might have begged her to take him back.
    So he’d gone to India, leaving Marcus to set in motion the revenge that Nick one day intended to finish. The revenge Ellie deserved, even if Marcus now thought otherwise.
    Nick shook his head. “When did you become so forgiving, little brother?”
    Marcus smiled thinly. “I’m not forgiving. But being present makes me more qualified to play the judge.”
    Nick couldn’t recall a single time that Marcus had sneered at him in quite that way. He’d boasted, teased, bedeviled — but never sneered.
    “What would you have me do?” Nick asked. “Beg