How To Tempt a Viscount by Margaret McPhee Read Free Book Online Page B

raised one eyebrow as he walked towards her.
    She gave a gasp of incredulity. ‘How dare you?’
    ‘Oh, I dare,’ he said. ‘I may have been fool enough to let you go before, but I will not do so again.’
    ‘You think you can keep me here against my will?’
    ‘Against your will? You want me as much as I want you.’
    ‘You are mistaken.’ She held her head up, faced him like a combatant.
    He walked right up to her and stared down into her stormy grey eyes.
    ‘Are you denying what is between us, Ellen? Denying the passion and desire and love.’
    She glanced to the side. ‘There is nothing between us, Marcus. There never was.’ Her voice sounded hard but behind it he heard her pain. He touched his fingers to her chin, moved her face around that he could look in her eyes; touched his lips very gently against hers and felt her momentary yield before she pulled away.
    ‘Your words may lie but your lips and your eyes cannot.’
    He saw the truth in her eyes before she looked away again trying to hide all of her hurt from him.
    ‘Why will you not let me talk to you, Ellen? Why will you not give me a chance to explain?’
    She was silent for so long that he thought she would not answer him. And then she looked up at him, her eyes so stark and honest that it seemed he could see into her very soul.
    ‘Because I already know, Marcus.’
    There was a silence in which there was only the fast thud of his heart and a cold prickling down his spine.
    ‘I know that you married me only for my money. I know that you were forced to it against your will. And I know that your heart lay with another. You should have had the courage to stand up to your father. It would have saved us both much anguish.’
    Every muscle tightened. She knew, and he was going to have to tell her all of it in its full glaring ugliness. ‘Ellen, you do not understand—‘
    ‘But I do, Marcus. I understand too well. That is the problem.’
    ‘It was infatuation, not love, although I believed it such at the time.’
    ‘You would have married her!’
    ‘Yes, fool that I was! It was why my father took such drastic action.’
    There was a pause.
    ‘Then she was right,’ he heard her whisper and a shiver of foreboding stole down his spine.
    ‘Ellen, who was right?’
    ‘Amanda,’ she said quietly.
    His heart sank into his stomach. He felt a terrible sense of dread. ‘You have spoken to Amanda?’
    ‘At Lady Carruthers’s ball. Two months after we were married.’

    ‘Just before you left for your parents.’
    ‘She was eager to tell me how it was her that you wanted to marry all along, that you had been betrothed and forced into breaking it off by your father, purely because of my money.’
    His blood was pounding. He knew how dangerous Amanda could be. How malicious and conniving and manipulative.
    “‘Poor Marcus,’” she said, “so desperately in love with me when he walked down the aisle with you.” I did not want to believe her. I thought you too honourable a man to have married one woman when you were in love with another. But I was wrong.’
    ‘It was not like that! Hell’s teeth, Ellen!’
    ‘She was right about that. Was she then right about the rest of it?’
    ‘What did she tell you?’ He dreaded to think of the lies Amanda had spun in her bitter determination to wreck his marriage. He knew she wanted to hurt him, he just had not thought she would go after Ellen.
    ‘That when you were making love to me it was her you were thinking of. She asked me if you cried out her name when you found your pleasure in me. I did not tell her that after those first few times you could not even bring yourself to share my bed! But at least I then understood why.’
    ‘Amanda would say anything to hurt you. Because it is the only way that she can hurt me.’
    ‘You are lying.’
    ‘No, Ellen. My father deemed you a good match for me. Yes, your fortune was a consideration, but there was much more to it than that. He thought we would suit.