Page 57 of The Marquess Wins a Wife
How perfectly, wonderfully convenient.
Luke shoved himself to his feet, bounding across the vacant space between them to arrive beside the table in less time than it had taken to draw breath.
“Fancy meeting you here, Wycombe,” he said pleasantly.
And drew back his arm to smash his fist into the man’s face.
∞∞∞
A splintering crash woke Lizzie in the depths of the night. Disoriented, she sat up, clutching the bedclothes to her chest as her heart raced through several frantic beats.
A groan of pain rent the air. “Bloody damned chair. Should’ve stayed in its place.” Though there was a strange slur to the words, the voice that had tendered them was not unfamiliar.
Luke.Luke?She could see nothing through the thick curtains that encircled the bed; the darkness within nearly complete. At the fringes of her vision, a faint trickle of light glinted through the part in the curtains, and she wriggled across the vast expanse of the bed toward the edge, poking her fingers through to widen the gap.
She hadn’t left her candle burning, but it seemed that hadn’t mattered, for he’d brought one with him, and it sat upon the escritoire placed against the far wall, casting a dim golden glow across the room. Haloed by the light, Luke stood near an overturned chair, naked as the day he’d been born, massaging his shin. “Have youanyidea of what time it is?” Lizzie hissed.
Luke jumped in surprise, rocking back on his heels, his arms pin-wheeling as he struggled to right himself. “Not the faintest,” he said, when he’d regained his equilibrium, covering his mouth with one hand to muffle the hiccough that escaped. “I suppose it must’ve been somewhere around two when I left the club.”
She gave an inelegant snort. “And what are you doing in my room?”
“Presently? Being attacked by furniture.” He cast a sulky, contemptuous glare at the overturned chair, as if he had been personally offended by it.
“Youoverturnedit.”
“I didnot,” he snapped, with all the indignity of one unfairly accused. “It leapt out in front of me.”
“It’s achair. It does notleap.”
“It’s a damned menace, is what it is.” Somehow, despite his tendency toward swaying unsteadily, he managed to toss his head in a suitably supercilious manner. “Besides, a husband needs no reason to visit his wife’s bedchamber.”
How he had managed to prowl to her bedside without falling, she would never know. Practice, she supposed. “He does when he reeks of a brewery.”
With a grunt, he landed upon the edge of the bed, nearly pulling the curtain down from its hooks as he grabbed desperately for something to steady himself. “Distillery,” he said, reaching for her.
Neatly evading the fingers that swiped for her—an easy feat, given that she suspected his vision had been compromised by too much drink—Lizzie asked, “What?”
“Distillery,” he repeated. “Brewerywould imply I’ve been drinking ale. In fact, I have been drinkingbrandy.”
And a great deal of it, too, given the fact that the fumes from his breath could have knocked a man over at twenty paces. “A distillery, then, if you like,” she said, sliding across the bed toward the opposite edge, ignoring his indignant huff.
A raw sound of aggravation climbed up his throat. “Where the devil are you going?”
“To ring for a bath,” she said. “You’re in dire need of one.”
“Well, there’s two of you presently. One can ring for the bath, and the other can come back here.” His hand flopped about; a dictatorial decree rendered ridiculous.
Lizzie yanked the bell pull. “There’s only one of me. You’re just foxed.” Probably she should have been embarrassed by his nakedness, but there was something vaguely pitiful about him just now.
“Good.” With a groan he collapsed backward, half-concealed by the curtains. “Two of you would be rather too much to manage, I suspect.” Another pathetic groan, and then he muttered, “You Talbots will be the death of me.”
If he did not pickle himself in spirits first, Lizzie supposed he might have had a point. The sound of footsteps in the hall had her sprinting back toward the bed to cast the mass of bedclothes she’d abandoned over his groin, lest whichever maid had come running be subjected to more of Luke that was necessary.
Apparently she’d gathered more than just the bedclothes, because Luke gave a rather dramatic grunt. “Careful with the damned pillows, if you please. I’d not care to be unmanned by something so preposterous as an excess of fringe.”
Lizzie managed to plaster a smile to her face just as a maid—Becky, she thought—slipped into the room. “His lordship requires a bath,” she said, striving to inflect a tone of patience rather than exasperation into her voice.
“I don’t, really,” Luke called. “My wife simply finds the odor of spirits offensive.”
