Her skin tingled in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. She glanced over and found Luke’s hooded gaze upon her. She cleared her throat. “I trust you find it silly.”
“Quite the opposite,” he said swiftly, and with his spare hand, he claimed one of hers. “I find myself…” His eyes moved over her face. “Riveted,” he murmured.
At that slightest of pauses, her breath quickened and her chest rose and fell quickly, for in that moment, she could almost believe he spoke of her.
Cold as she was, she didn’t want this moment with him to end. For in this very instant, she wasn’t working or serving in the role of future housekeeper charged with the task of organizing the family’s festivities. She was simply a woman conversing with a man about knowledge she’d gained in her travels and had shared with no one… because lords and ladies didn’t speak to maids.
Wind whipped through the trees, stirring their branches. The frigid winter air sent snowflakes battering her cheeks, stinging her with their cold, and yet, his eyes upon her face, a heated look that bespoke desire, sent warmth radiating from her belly and fanning out, touching everyplace inside her.
It couldn’t be desire… and yet, if it was not that which held them frozen here within the abandoned grounds of Green Park, what was it?
She wet her lips, and his eyes slipped a fraction lower as he took in that distracted movement. “Luke,” she whispered, capable of nothing more than his name.
He lowered his mouth toward hers, and closing her eyes, Merry tilted her head back to receive his kiss—a kiss that did not come.
She struggled to force her lashes up.
His heavy features were strained. “I’m a gentleman,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll not do anything that you do not—”
Merry leaned up on tiptoe, erasing the space between them, and claimed his mouth for her own.
He froze and then, with a groan, devoured her lips, slanting his over hers. Again and again.
Thump.
She dimly registered the fall of the saw, and then his hat tumbled to the ground at their feet.
Clutching the fur-lined collar of Luke’s cloak, Merry pressed herself against him and returned his kiss with unfrenzied abandon.
It was her first kiss. The first in the whole of her nearly thirty years. Not a young footman or village boy or bold son of any employer had ever even so much as attempted to steal an embrace. As such, she’d wondered what it would be like… and had believed herself incapable of inspiring desire so that any man would want to kiss her.
Only to see that belief proved to be a lie, here and now in Luke’s arms.
His arms came around her, and she melted into him.
She moaned against his mouth, and he slid his tongue inside, stroking that bold flesh against hers, a brand that scorched and marked her as his. Her legs weakened under her, and he caught her hard to him and guided her back. Her back knocked against the wide trunk of a tree, and with his body as an anchor, he pressed her lightly against that tree and continued making love to her mouth.
“Luke,” she moaned against his lips, and his name, breathless and weak, seemed to drive him into a frenzy.
He deepened their embrace. The moment proved fleeting, however, as he continued his exploration, placing kisses on her cold cheeks, his breath warming her, his touch setting her afire.
Merry panted, and her hips took on a rhythm of their own as she undulated and moved against him in a bid to get closer.
The branches swayed noisily overhead, dancing in time to nature’s fury and Merry and Luke’s own passionate waltz.
Craaaaack.
Luke wrenched his mouth from hers, and with a curse, he hurled them out of the way. A small limb tumbled down a mere fraction of an inch from where they’d stood.
With that, reality came crashing in, an unwelcome, despised visitor in what had been the singularly most erotic, magical moments of her life.
Merry stood, her breathing coming hard and fast, as she fought for some semblance of a normal cadence.
The thing with having never been kissed was that a woman didn’t know what to say after her first one.
In the end, she didn’t have to say anything.
Clearing his throat, Luke swept up his forgotten hat and the saw. “Shall we?”
Shall we what? Continue their embrace? Find another place that was warmer and—
He was already scouring the grounds. “I think I have one,” he said triumphantly.
Dumbly, Merry followed his gaze to a ten-foot evergreen that was perfectly rounded and had a perfect point at the top.
He had… simply moved on? To Christmas trees? While she was here, her heart threatening to pound out of her chest and her body still burning?
“Merry?”
“Of course. It’s perfect,” she blurted.
That morn, when they’d set out to Green Park, she’d been determined to be free of his company because she’d not wanted him around while she saw to her work. Now, everything had shifted… and yet, it had also remained the same. The last thing she wanted or could afford was having Luke Holman, the Viscount Grimslee, about. Not because she didn’t want him near, but because she did. And that desire could only be dangerous.
As they settled on the evergreen tree, Merry committed to not taking any more help from Luke after this day.
No matter how much she wished to.
Chapter Six
Luke had always been one to rise early.
Little rest for those of rank was the mantra his father had ingrained into him as a boy of four, when he’d been mastering his letters before the sun had even started its climb into the sky.
Since then, by three every morn, he was awake and groomed to face the day of business dealings and responsibilities.
It was an hour that most members of Polite Society would call ungodly.
Of course, as one who’d lived a life that wasn’t licentious, he’d had no long nights of drinking or revelry, and so rising so early had never been a chore, not even as a young man just out of university. No, aside from the past four-month deviation from those norms, after the end of his betrothal to Josephine Pratt—now Josephine Everleigh—he’d risen before the roosters.
He’d never known a single soul to rise and face the day so early…
Until yesterday.
Until Merry.
Merry Read, who kissed without restraint and tasted of gingerbread and orange and mint, a confectionary treat more intoxicating than any of the spirits Luke had drowned himself in these past months.
She was the reason he now waited in the same corridor he’d run into her when she was on her way to organize the holiday festivities.
Today also marked the first day he’d not awakened seized by the sting of regret and misery over the decisions he’d made in the name of honor.
Now, as he stood with a shoulder resting against the silk wallpaper, he felt only an eager anticipation to see her. Collecting his gold watch fob, Luke consulted the timepiece.
She’d be punctual.
If after her day of travels, she’d been awake and moving about yesterday at four o’clock in the morn, she’d be here now.
Restlessness filled him as he craned his head, searching for a hint of her.
And then he heard it.
“Bring a torch, Jeanette, Isabella!
Bring a torch, to the stable call