Free The Marquess Who Loved Me by Sara Ramsey

triumphantly.
    Madeleine and Prudence both looked up at her with identical expressions of inquisitive delight. She knew they cared about her. They wanted her to be happy. They wanted to share in her emotion. Their friendship was still new to her, but it was what Ellie had dreamed of as a child, all alone on the country estate where her father had abandoned her. She had been exiled, raised by a series of nursemaids and governesses, for the crime of looking too much like the wife he’d adored and lost. With Ferguson similarly exiled at Eton and her other half-siblings in London, she had dreamed of having friends to play with, to laugh with, to share secrets with…
    But she hadn’t realized then that secrets held a dark, dangerous kind of power. What danger had her secrets posed when no one cared about them but her? It was a lesson she’d learned, and learned hard, during her first season in London, when she had finally found other women her own age to talk to.
    Suddenly, it wasn’t Madeleine and Prudence in front of her. Annabel and Clarabel Claiborne had been eighteen and seventeen during Ellie’s debut, while Ellie was already nineteen, but they were kind and cheerful — easygoing, charming girls whom Ellie’s father approved of her knowing. She wanted her father’s approval badly enough that she would have been friends with a lamppost if it had possessed the right pedigree and fortune. If the girls’ charm was a bit shallow, it was made up for by how nicely they tittered at her conversational gambits.
    And so when they had asked her one night, when they’d all had too much champagne, whether she had found a man to pin her hopes on, Ellie had told the truth. She’d been giddy with the truth, sure of her own heart, confident that once the season was over, her father would let her marry Nick. He’d promised to let them marry, after all; Ellie just had to finish the season without marrying someone else.
    So she had shown Annabel and Clarabel her heart. Wasn’t that what friends were supposed to do?
    Friends in the ton knew better. Annabel and Clarabel hadn’t intended to hurt her — perhaps they never even knew that a word was enough to change the course of Ellie’s life. But they went off and whispered to their brother that his despised cousin had tricked a duke’s daughter into falling in love with him. And when Charles Claiborne, a marquess rather than a merchant, came asking the duke for Ellie’s hand…
    Ellie shook her head. Madeleine and Prudence weren’t Charles’s sisters. She wanted to tell them what Nick had done. She wanted to show them how he’d hurt her, how confused she was, how much she still wanted him.
    But when she opened her mouth, the words wouldn’t come out.
    “Are you feeling well?” Madeleine asked, suddenly concerned. “Perhaps you should rest rather than going to London today.”
    “I shall be fine in London. As for the rest of it…”
    Ellie paused again. Prudence finally took pity on her. She stood and linked arms with Madeleine, pulling the duchess out of her chair when Madeleine looked ready to stay and pursue her questioning. “There’s no need to know your feelings today,” Prudence said. “But we are here should you need our help.”
    It was a nice gesture. If Ellie were nineteen, perhaps she even would have accepted it — perhaps she would have been grateful for it, rather than immediately dismissing it. But she was thirty now, on a birthday no one other than Nick would acknowledge since she hadn’t told them the date. She knew the limits of her friendships.
    And she knew the truth — no one could help her with Nick.
    As soon as they left, she let Lucia pin her hat to her hair and took up her swansdown-trimmed grey pelisse before descending to the front hall. A drive to London was hardly relaxing, given the state of the roads and traffic, but at least she would have a few hours to herself. She needed to explore all the options that would buy her freedom, repair