Marrying His Cinderella Countess Read online

  He put his elbows on his knees and ran his hands through his hair. Then he looked up, his face bleak.

  ‘So I gave her time—and she reacted by running off with that damn poet.’

  He was just out of arm’s reach. Ellie lifted a hand, shifted on her seat, then let her hand drop. She wanted to touch him, wanted to be in his arms, holding and being held. But that was too easy for both of them. Blake had to finish.

  ‘She left a note, you know. She said I had been a brute, a ravening beast without sensitivity or sensibility. She could not bear to be married to me. I could well believe that she had been frightened and shocked because I had kissed her—probably with far more passion, far more demand than I should have. Her father picked up their trail, but it was a week later. They had taken a ship for Italy and it was far too late to do anything about it.’

  ‘So your heart was broken,’ Ellie said.

  ‘My heart was broken, my pride was in tatters and I knew damn well that I had completely mishandled the whole thing—I should have come home sooner… I should have wooed her properly. I reacted by behaving as though it hadn’t happened. I should have followed them—found her, made certain she was all right, told her I was sorry and asked her to forgive me for my crassness. And then, if she had been content with her poet, I would have learned to live without her, to be happy for her. Instead I made a shrine in my heart for my lost love and carried on. And somehow the news that she had died, unhappy and alone, only made it worse. I managed to nurse my broken heart and found it armoured me very effectively against Cupid’s arrows and the inconvenience and uncertainty of a new courtship.’

  He looked at her and his smile was wry and self-mocking. It did not touch the darkness in his eyes.

  ‘And then you met me.’

  ‘Yes.’ Blake’s voice warmed. ‘I met you. And you baffled me, infuriated me, provoked me and challenged me—and I found I liked you. Liked you a lot.’

  ‘So you married me. A safe, plain bride who was not going to run off with anyone else.’

  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.

  ‘I… I do not know. We can never be as we were before.’

  She loved him, and courtesy and kindness and his remorse at having hurt her would simply be coals of fire because now—selfishly—she wanted so much more. She wanted it all, and anything less would break her heart. But she would have to endure for the child’s sake.

  Ellie got to her feet and the solid flagstone floor felt unstable beneath her. ‘I do not think I can—not yet.’

  How could she be a good wife, having to hide how she felt because she was too much of a coward to tell him? Suffer his kindness and his pity and probably, because he was a kind man, his lies about how he felt for her?

  She walked past him, out through the door before he could stop her, out through the kitchen where Jon and Polly and Finch scrambled to their feet as she passed. Out across the yard past the chicken coop and the privy and out onto the hillside.

  She did not know where she was going or what good it would do. She knew only that she could not be in the same room as Blake, seeing his face, seeing his expres
sion change when he realised his plain, lame wife was foolishly in love with him and wanted more than a fresh start or for things to be as they had before.

  *

  ‘Eleanor!’ Blake stood unable to comprehend it as the door banged closed behind her.

  Hell, had he failed to apologise enough? Had he not managed to communicate how deeply sorry he was that he had hurt her, how wrong he had been, how much he loved her?

  The dark green of her gown moved across the back window of the parlour and he strode across to see her weave her way, limping rapidly, through the outbuildings and out of the gate into the hillside meadow beyond.

  And then he realised just what he had not done.

  The catch on the window was old and stiff, and he had to thump it hard with the flat of his hand before it opened, but he was in no mood now to find his way out of the house. He wanted the fastest route to Eleanor.

  A coat seam split as he climbed through the casement and dropped to the ground, and a strong smell of mint wafted up. He had landed in the middle of the herb patch.

  Kicking the crushed leaves and earth off his boots Blake ran, scattering chickens as he went. He lost sight of her for a moment, and then he was through the gate and running up the hill.

  ‘Eleanor!’

  She stopped on the crest of the ridge, where a clump of windswept trees made a small spinney, and stood waiting for him, her back turned. She looked…weary.

  Blake slowed, getting his breath as he walked round to face her. ‘You are unhappy because you love me and you think I do not love you. But you are wrong. I do love you,’ he said.

  No time now for elaborate explanations that might be misunderstood.

  ‘You love me? Why didn’t you say so?’ she demanded, staring at him.

  ‘I meant to and then I got too tied up in explaining. Concussion, male stupidity, guilt… I don’t know, Eleanor. I have never told anyone I loved them before.’

  ‘You love me,’ she repeated, and this time it was not a question.

  Blake nodded, instinct telling him that this was not the time to protest too much.

  Then the rest of what he had said seemed to reach her. ‘You believe that I love you?’

  He pulled a folded paper from his inside breast pocket. ‘I found all of these in your room when I was searching for clues to where you had gone and I read them. You are writing a novel, aren’t you?’

  She shrugged, the colour high in her face. ‘I was trying to. It is no good—I realise that. I couldn’t send it to a publisher.’

  ‘Because it reveals too much about your own thoughts and feelings. And the hero looks just like me. I was jealous until I recognised him.’

  ‘You are very good-looking,’ she said tightly, still blushing. ‘I saw you with Francis once and you seemed so right for the hero.’

  ‘I sorted them into order,’ he said. ‘You start off with what I flatter myself is sensual desire and as the story progresses something else happens. You were writing about your feelings for me, weren’t you, Eleanor? Why didn’t you tell me that you loved me?’

  ‘When you married me because I would do as a wife and you liked me? How could I have borne it if I’d told you and you were kind to me?’

  She could not meet his eyes now, and that was probably a good thing—because otherwise she would see the look of triumph on his face. He hadn’t been certain, was not such a coxcomb as to have fully believed what he was reading, but she had fallen for his bluff and admitted it.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she demanded, but her voice shook with something more than anger.

  ‘I didn’t realise until I rode away from the church and saw things so clearly.’ He risked moving close—so close that her skirts brushed his boots—and reached out gently to turn her face to him. ‘I love you, Eleanor. My Ellie. I love you with all the incoherent clumsiness of first love—because that is what this is. You will have to forgive me while I get it right. I have never loved before and I will never love again.’

  ‘Blake…’

  She reached out and rested her hands on his shoulders, looked up into his face, and he wondered how he had ever thought her plain.

  ‘You have got it right and I do love you—so very much.’

  He bent and kissed her, and for the second time went down to his knees in a field with a woman in his arms—but this time he knew she was his woman.

  ‘Blake? Blake! We are in a field.’

  But somehow she was not struggling very hard as he freed his arms and shrugged out of his greatcoat.

  ‘It hasn’t rained for days, by the look of it. There don’t appear to be any bulls, and I can’t see anyone. Besides, this spinney makes a nice screen, don’t you think?’

  ‘Screen for what?’ she asked, but she was smiling and her eyes were sparkling. ‘Are you going to kiss me in a field again?’

  ‘Kiss you and make love to you—which is what I very much wanted to do that first time, even with the bull watching. Come here and lie down.’

  He got her settled on his coat, fully dressed, then unfastened his falls with one hand and threw up her skirts with the other, coming down over her to stop her laughing protests with his mouth.

  *

  Blake’s mouth was hot and demanding and exactly what she wanted. That and him inside her.

  Ellie wrapped her legs around his narrow hips, opening herself to him, and he slid home and then went still except for his mouth, silently telling her how he felt, how he had missed her, how he had worried about her. How he loved her.

  She tried to answer the same way, her tongue slipping languidly over his, and the taste and the smell of him, even with confusing overtones of mint, was so familiar, so precious.

  He began to move within her, very slowly, and she used all the muscles that she had discovered in their few weeks of marriage to answer him, rocking to the rhythm he set, feeling the long muscles of his back flex under the silk of his waistcoat and the linen of his shirt. His buckskins were rough and arousing on the tender insides of her thighs and Ellie began to move more urgently, needing him, needing to feel his passion as she tried to show him hers.

  Blake answered her with his body, stroking into her with hard, demanding thrusts, challenging her to respond, taking her higher as she followed him.

  He freed her mouth to gasp her name and then, ‘Come for me, Ellie. Come with me, my love.’

  And she did, breaking apart to become something different with him. His love, her love, one person…and then she lost the power to think, only to feel.

  *

  Distantly someone was shouting, calling Blake’s name. Ellie blinked and opened her eyes and found she was in Blake’s arms, held against his chest, and that somewhere above them a lark was singing in a blue, blue sky.

  ‘Awake, my love?’ He sat up, bringing her with him, and then stood. ‘I think we had better take ourselves down the hill before the search party comes near to us.’ He reached down and helped her to her feet. ‘All right?’

  ‘My legs are shaky,’ she admitted. ‘And I am worried that this has all been a dream.’

  ‘What a very vivid imagination you have, Ellie,’ Blake said, his grin wicked. ‘I wish I could dream like this every night.’

  ‘You can. We can,’ she said as he picked up his coat, shook off the grass and grimaced at the torn seam. ‘Every night.’

  Then she remembered.

  ‘Well, perhaps we had better make the most of it, because in a while I think that running around in fields making love like this might become a little difficult.’

  ‘You mean with the weather closing in for autumn?’

  ‘No…’

  She stopped and tugged him round to face her, laid his hands on her midriff.

  ‘Blake, your feelings for Felicity are not the only reason I left. What you said about the way your father expected to direct your marriage, your future, and how you would expect to do the same for your eldest son. That chilled me to the bone, my love. Children deserve to be l
oved for themselves, not as dynastic pawns. Your heir will be a child who deserves to find his own way, his own love. And the others will be just as valuable, will deserve to be valued as much as your heir. My emotions might be all over the place at the moment, and I know I was upset—but, Blake, I had to find some way to make you realise that. Because otherwise how can we make a loving family together?’

  He looked down at her, and then at her hands. ‘You weren’t feeling well… Ellie?’

  ‘There’s nothing to see—nothing to feel yet. But the doctor says that there is the beginning of our family snug in there.’

  ‘Oh, Ellie. My Ellie.’ He swung her up into his arms and kissed her. ‘My clever girl. I don’t deserve any more than to get you back safely, to know that you love me. But this—’

  He set her down gently on her feet but kept his arms around her.

  ‘All my adult life I have told myself that my father had the right to direct my choice of wife and that it was part of my duty as the Earl to think like that too. But what if our son found a woman to love who was simply Miss Brown of nowhere in particular? Would I say to him that I found true love but he must forgo it? And as for his brothers and sisters—they will be ours, and they will be loved, because you have taught me how.’

  Eventually he took her hand and they walked up to the crest and then down the slope to the farm, where Jon was standing with Polly in the yard, looking around. Blake raised a hand and waved to his brother. He waved back, then, reassured, went into the house.

  ‘Don’t sell this place,’ Ellie said as Blake bent and picked a buttercup and tucked it in her hair. ‘Please.’

  ‘No, we will keep it as our place of escape for when we do not want to be the Earl and the Countess—just Blake and Ellie. All our children will like the animals—’

  ‘All our children?’

  ‘We have made a start,’ he said, holding the gate for her. ‘And now we have the knack of it we ought to keep on, don’t you think? Imagine all those little boys and girls, chasing the chickens and getting covered in mud.’

  ‘Idiot.’ She elbowed him gently in the ribs. ‘I missed you so much,’ Ellie added, suddenly shy. ‘I told myself that if I could only have the space to think I would be able work out how to have a happy marriage.’