He struggled to slog through a still foggy brain to make sense out of it all.
Ding-ding-ding.
Oh, good God. More of that ringing. Not the one to have greeted him that morn in his bed, but an altogether new and different chime, louder and more grievous.
Groaning, he closed his eyes. “Stop with that infernal ringing.” What might have otherwise been an impressive order was ruined by his gravelly tones, coarse from pain and lack of sleep.
A shadow fell over him. “Oh, my apologies for disturbing you.”
“You hardly sound apologetic,” he muttered. In fact, that distantly familiar, husky coloratura sounded anything but.
“Oh, that would be because I’m not really sorry,” the woman said dryly.
Who in hell was his latest tormenter? He forced his eyes open.
And found a stern, decidedly angry young woman frowning down at him. He blinked slowly.
Surely his eyes deceived him.
His steward’s eldest child, the once-precocious girl who’d sought out and found more trouble than he or all the Holman brothers combined. But it couldn’t be. She’d been gone now… he searched his mind. Three… mayhap four years. And mayhap he was having the most peculiar dream about the young woman. Her hair was drawn back in a serviceable plait, and a handful of curls danced about her shoulders that had that same nearly coal-black hue as Merry Read had possessed. “Miss Read?”
“The very same,” she said tightly, confirming she was, one, in fact, very real, and two, about as pleased with him as his father had been that morn. Alas, what other reaction should be expected of anyone who’d found a person sprawled upon the floor? His steward’s eldest child folded her arms at her chest. “Though I must say I hardly recognize you, my lord.”
For the first time, he felt a sentiment that had become so foreign, he’d doubted himself even capable of it.
Shame.
It clawed at his gut and made a mockery of the illusion that there was no opinion he cared for any longer. In fact, he cared a good deal more than he would have liked. A product, no doubt, of the longevity of his relationship with the woman before him… or, in this case, over him.
At the awkward lengthening of silence, he cleared his throat. “I was resting,” he said in perfectly crisp tones.
Merry snorted. “In the foyer?” She leaned down, that slight movement sending the bell in her hand to jingling. “Might I suggest your chambers next time, my lord?”
Heat slapped at his cheeks, and with all the aplomb a man could muster while sprawled on his arse, Luke pushed himself up onto his elbows. “I didn’t say I was sleeping,” he reminded her.
“No.” She paused. “Your snoring, however, did say as much.”
His mouth moved, but he couldn’t get a single word out. Nor did that struggle have anything to do with his night of excess. Never in the whole of his life had any man or woman dared to challenge him.
“Be that as it may,” she went on with a mastery of conversation that even his expert hostess of a mother would be hard-pressed to emulate, “as you’re well aware, I am here at your mother’s behest.”
Luke struggled to his feet. “Aren’t we all,” he muttered.
The lady drifted so close, her skirts stirred against his legs. “What was that, my lord?”
“Nothing at all.” Despite her belief, Merry Read couldn’t be further from the mark. He’d not been aware of either her presence in his household or any plans his mother had for him… or them? Or any of it. It was an admission, however, he’d not make. As it was, it was hard enough saving face from down on the cold, hard floor. “The countess may have mentioned something of it,” he lied.
Merry opened her mouth to say something, but her gaze lingered on his gaping jacket.
“I trust you are somehow displeased with your assignment?” With as much as a gentleman in dishabille could manage, he buttoned his jacket, or he tried to see to the damned eyeholes. Alas, his senses and motions were dulled by a night of excess, and the task was not made any easier with Merry Read’s eyes on his every movement.
She snorted. “Whatever gave you that opinion, my lord? You see, it is not that I’m…”
Only half listening, Luke struggled with a button. “Bloody hell,” he mumbled through the young woman’s ramblings. “Bloody buttons.”
“Oh, just stop,” Merry clipped out. “Here now. Let me see to that.” Knocking his hands out of the way, she undid his previous work… his previous uneven work. “And furthermore, it’s hardly the buttons’ fault,” she said coolly. “Now, as I was saying…”
Luke knew he should be wholly attending her, but he remained fixed upon the top of her bent head, entranced by the sheer intimacy of her movements. Any other lady would have averted her eyes. Nay, any other woman would have rushed off in the opposite direction. Merry Read, however, had never been like any other woman of his acquaintance. She’d been bold, unapologetic, and spirited, and growing up all the way unto adulthood, he’d not known whether to be horrified or captivated by her.
“…I am unable to see how you might…”
As she buttoned his jacket, her callused fingers brushed the flat planes of his stomach, and the muscles there rippled under the inadvertent caress as his white lawn shirt proved little barrier to her touch. Heat. Pure, unadulterated heat washed through him.
Merry made quick work of what had been an otherwise impossible-for-him task and proved remarkably unaffected through it. “There,” she said with a little nod before taking a step away from him. She stared expectantly at him.
And he, who’d never lost track of any discourse or discussion, found his mind blank, and because of it, a proper response was absent. “Uh…”
Merry narrowed her eyes, and thick black lashes swept down like a blanket upon her cream-white skin. “You weren’t listening.”
“I was.” How easy it had become for the lies to simply roll from his tongue.
“Then what did I say?” she shot back.
However, he was rubbish at the skillful ability to prevaricate. By the sparkle in Merry’s chocolate-brown eyes, she knew it, too.
“You were expressing displeasure with your current assignment,” he ventured.
The young woman’s crimson rosebud lips formed a perfect moue of surprise. So, he was on the mark, then. “Though I did not say as much, I appreciate that you detected those undertones.”
Feeling pleased with himself for the first time since he’d chosen honor over happiness, Luke smoothed his lapels. “You’re welcome.”
“I wasn’t, at any point, thanking you,” Merry said, her expression deadpan. Sticking a foot out, she drummed that serviceable boot on the floor. “I would, however, like to ask what you intend to do about my concerns.”
Oh, blast and damn. This was where he really would benefit from those skills of prevarication. “Why don’t you tell me how you would like me to handle your situation, Merry?” The use of her name slipped out easily, a product of the lifetime they’d known each other.
Nearly five inches shorter than his own six-foot frame, the young woman went up on tiptoes to peer at his face.
Luke resisted the uncomfortable urge to shift under that scrutiny. Being the recipient of disapproval and insolence was as foreign to him as the Latin language had been when his tutor had first set out those books.