Her Missing Marquess (Wicked Husbands #5) - Scarlett Scott Page 0,2

time, I shan’t give a bloody damn.”

Her words were coarse. Unbecoming of a lady. As were her actions and this very party itself, one of dozens she had held over the last three years. She did not care.

He caught her arm in an unrelenting grip before she could skirt him, staying her egress. “Who the hell have you become, Nell?”

She tipped her head back, meeting his gaze and doing everything in her power to keep the tears threatening to rise from her eyes. “I am what you have made me.”

“I am what you have made me,” said the perfect, pink lips of his wife.

A wife who scarcely resembled the woman he had parted from three years ago.

Oh, she was still Nell—petite but beautifully curved, like a Renaissance Madonna come to life. Wavy, golden hair, flashing blue eyes that were neither purely blue nor gray, a retroussé nose, and a succulent mouth that was made for kissing.

A mouth that had undoubtedly been known by countless men in his absence.

He tucked away that distressing thought, because he knew why. Indeed, of all the accusations she had hurled at him since he had first rescued her from landing upon her fool head during her dining room table dance, this last hit him like a blade to the gut.

Because there was truth in it.

He had created all this mess.

One moment of drunken stupidity.

His gut clenched, and he felt as seasick as if he were aboard a storm-tossed vessel. “I am sorry.”

Three words. He had spoken them more times than he could count. He had written them in virtually every letter he had sent her. None of those letters had been answered until the last one.

The one demanding a divorce so she could marry her lover.

She stiffened and attempted to wrest herself from his grasp. “Your apology changes nothing.”

He did not let her go. Could not do so. Not yet. His heart was pounding, an eerie prickle traveling over his flesh, and beneath his touch, she was so warm and vital and smooth. God, he had missed her skin.

He had missed her scent, her voice, her laughter, her gaze. He missed waking up with her tangled around him. He missed the way she had left her gowns and undergarments strewn all over his private apartments. He missed staying up until dawn with her in his arms, reading poetry and drinking too much wine.

He stifled a wince. Actually, he did not miss the wine. Just the memories. The time when Nell had been his, and his alone. When she had looked at him with reckless love in her sparkling gaze instead of wretched distrust, cold rage.

“We need to speak, Nell,” he told her.

“No, we do not.” Her lip curled. “Unhand me, Needham.”

She had not called him by his given name since her first, startled gasp when he had saved her from calamity. He noted the largeness of her pupils, the glassiness of her eyes. The scent of spirits, mingling with her signature lily of the valley, was undeniable.

Nell was in her cups.

“You are bosky.” He wondered where in the hell her lover was, why the bastard had allowed her to go dancing about on polished tables in her silken, heeled boots.

“And you disapprove?” She bit out a laugh that held no mirth. “How rich.”

He was not the man he had been three years ago, either. But her hatred was stronger than he had supposed. He had known she would be angry. Her silence had been damning. Three years of unanswered letters. Three years of distance.

But still, she seethed with fury, the likes of which he had never seen from her before. This anger was different from that long-ago night and then the hideous morning after. The Nell he had known, the wife he loved, was an embittered stranger now.

“I no longer drink the poison,” he told her.

Indeed, he had not touched a drop of spirits of any sort in three years. Not following the raging, self-destructive day-long stupor into which he had worked himself following their massive row. The one which had ended in her demanding he leave her alone.

Forever.

Forever was a long, bloody time. Especially when his wife wanted to divorce him so she could marry another man.

“Shall I applaud you?” The acid in her voice was virulent. She tugged at her elbow again. “Bravo to my lord teetotaler. I am certain you have not been bedding half the Continent either.”

She was the last woman he had bedded. The only woman whom he wished to