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herself for it. If he heard her desperation, though, it spurred him on. He released her wrist — but only long enough to sweep the table away with his foot, sending it crashing to the floor.  
    Ellie stumbled backward, the sudden violence surprising her. Her whisky tumbler missed the soft landing of the thick Axminster carpet and shattered against the nearby hearth, covering the stones with glistening shards of glass. She saw the damage in an instant, then turned back to Nick. His eyes matched the wreckage, with the warmth of a fire and the cruel edge of a razor.
    She should have been frightened as he uncoiled from the chair, a cobra about to strike. And maybe she was frightened — but it wasn’t the intensity in his eyes that scared her. She feared the hot swirl of emotion rising up within her. She’d learned how to control it all, locked it away where it could never hurt her again. But it only took a few minutes with Nick to sweep the first of those barriers away.
    She wouldn’t survive if her barriers disappeared entirely.
    So when he touched her cheek again, she jerked away like his hand was a brand. “I cannot do this, Nick,” she said, forcing the words out through clenched teeth.
    “Marcus said you’d given up on me coming home. Are you looking for another Charles amongst our guests?”
    Ellie frowned. “Did you come back because you thought I might marry again?”
    He laughed, dark and dangerous. “Marry as many men as you like. I’m not here to leg-shackle myself to you.”
    She pretended, even to herself, that his statement didn’t disappoint her. “Then why are you here?”
    “Business, of course. I’m still the merchant you threw over for a marquess, even if I have the title now.”
    He brushed a kiss across her forehead. It was leagues away from the chill in his words. She leaned in, letting herself be seduced by what she knew lurked beneath all their feints and insults…
    Then he whispered in her ear. “I am in the market for a mistress, though. And I’d take you whether you are married or not.”
    She snapped her head back. How did she keep fooling herself into thinking that he wasn’t utterly ruthless?  
    “If you’ve come to find a mistress, you’re in the wrong room.”
    He clucked his tongue, as though correcting a headstrong pupil. “I’m in the only room I want to be in. And I will have you, Ellie — depend upon it.”
    And then, as his lips descended on hers, she realized he intended to prove it.
    *     *     *
    When he had first kissed Ellie, twelve years earlier, she had tasted of berries. They had been picking blackberries together in the hot August sun, far from the lax guardianship of Ellie’s governess and the nearby country cottage where Nick’s mother was in the final throes of her last illness. Ellie had taken her gloves off, heedless of freckles and thorns, and her fingers were stained purple with juice. She laughed at one of his jests, and her lips were purple, too. She freed her glorious red hair from her hat, and strands of it whipped around her face.
    He had reached out to smooth the hair away from her mouth. Something in her blue eyes, the hopeful tilt to her smile, urged him forward before his better self could dissuade him. He was gentle, so gentle, not wanting to hurt her, feeling like he’d somehow stumbled across a princess who had been waiting for him to rescue her. She’d grown up alone, left in the countryside by her uncaring father, and Nick wanted to be the one who showed her happiness. She tasted of berries, of innocence, and as her hands clasped hesitantly around his neck, he had lost himself.
    Tonight, in the house he owned but she inhabited, she had the fierceness of a queen, not the hesitating dreaminess of a cloistered princess. He had thought he could do this coldly, emotionlessly, cruelly — as cruelly as she had destroyed him. But there never should have been cruelty between them.
    He claimed her mouth. This time, her lips were pale