Page 20 of The Marquess Wins a Wife
“I apologized!” she interjected, breaking through the excoriating words he’d slung at her. “I apologized, and I nursed your ungrateful—”
“Lizzie.”
She batted his hand aside. “Thankless, rude—”
“Lizzie.”
“Boorish,churlish—”
“Churlish? Truly?” A laugh rumbled up from somewhere deep in his chest, rough and unpracticed, as if he’d long lost familiarity with the very concept of humor.
“—Arrogantarse back to health!” The words ended in a sort of verbal flourish; a magnificent crescendo of sound that soared into the rafters.
A low huff of sound, followed by a slow shake of his head. “Someone isreallygoing to have to teach you some more appropriate words. You’re rubbish at insults.” He stretched carefully, rolling his shoulders as he reached once more for the bottle of gin. “You’re done, by the way.”
“I’m what?”
“Done.” He pulled the cork from the bottle and cast back a long swallow. “You pulled the last stitch while you were railing at me. Hurt like the very devil, if you must know.” He gave a slow, deliberately flippant gesture. “You’rewelcome.”
“You—you—” Her hands curled into the folds of her skirt. “You provoked me onpurpose?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.” A shrug, without the wince that might have accompanied a pull of the stitches she’d since removed.
Lizzie knew she must bear a striking resemblance to a fish—wide-eyed, mouth agape as if she’d been plucked straight from the water. “Why would you dothat?”
For just a moment,hewas at a loss. That smug, snide expression to which she had become accustomed tore free of his face with such alacrity that she suspected that between the two of them,hewas the more shocked. The candlelight flickered across the taut, tense line of his jaw, and his dark brows furrowed in confusion over eyes that hadn’t quitethe icy gleam to which she had so often been treated. At last he grumbled, “It was better than the alternative. You’d begun to look a bit green again.”
Lizzie swallowed hard. “Of course,” she said, unclenching her hands and shoving herself to her feet. “Of course.” But she didn’tbelieveit.
Somewhere, in the hushed seconds that followed, wherein she snatched up the shears and fled the room, there had certainly been some sort of polite farewell—hers whispered, his grunted. She did not remember what had been said by whom.
But her fingers remembered the feel of his intertwined with her own, like an invisible brand laid beneath the surface of her skin.
Chapter Ten
Luke navigated the stairs with somewhat less grace than he would have preferred. There was a difference, he had found, between walking the stable terrain of the wood floor and the slope of the stairs—his head swam and his knees locked with each jarring step.
Still, he had seen altogether too much of the inside of the master’s chamber, and he did not intend to remain confined within it any longer. No matterhowthat inconvenienced the Talbots. No matter that his clothing was limited to what little had been wearable amongst the moth-eaten remnants of clothing that had belonged to his room’s former occupant.
Perhaps the trousers were too short by half, and the shirt was far too tight in the shoulders, and perhaps he’d been unable to locate stockingsorshoes—he was stilldressed, after a fashion. And he would be better dressed once Lizzie had delivered the letters he’d written for posting, and his staff had sent down some suitable clothing.
ToHatfield, of all places. Surely they would think he’d lost his damned mind—and perhaps he had.
It was the noise that greeted him first upon his arrival downstairs, the likes of which he could not recall having been subjected to in recent memory. The sounds of alivelyhouse—stampeding feet, most likely the children, the overlapping hum of voices, the scrape and clink of dishes set out for breakfast.
All sounds with which Luke was woefully unfamiliar. His meals had been largely silent affairs, the staff being his only company, and rarely did they disturb, either with word or deed, the deferential silence that hung over his table.
What was he meant to make of this—thismadness, when the table was set with mismatched dishes, and the children partook of the meal with the adults? Where a servanthad a place of his own, and snippets of conversation rocketed about the table, disjointed and seemingly unrelated bits of nonsense soaring to and fro.
“Watch your elbows, Georgie—”
“Imogen, pass the butter—”
“I’m to market today, Miss Lizzie, so I’ll need that list—”
Chaos. He’d been thrown intochaos. It was an assault to his senses simply to stand in the doorway, and for a brief moment he wondered if he ought to simply find his way back upstairs and wait for someone to bring his breakfast to him.
Willie was the first to notice him, but the scowl that etched itself into his craggy features was noticed swiftly by Lizzie, who turned at once, her loose, dark hair spinning out in a wave of clustered curls—which smacked the little boy straight in the face.
