dangerous reading can be,” Garrick said. “Why were you in the chest in the first place?”
“I was playing hide-and-seek with Joanna and Tess,” Merryn said. He could hear her voice warm into amusement. The memory was distracting her. “I wanted to hide somewhere they would never find me,” she said, “just to prove that I was cleverer than they were.” Her amusement died. “Unfortunately I chose too well.”
“Presumably they were cleverer than you had anticipated,” Garrick pointed out, “or you would not be here.” He paused. “Why did you feel you had something to prove?”
Merryn did not reply for a moment. Garrick waited. It was odd not being able to see her. He had nothing on which to judge her responses other than hearing and intuition. But the darkness seemed to have sharpened his senses other than sight. He could read all the little nuances in Merryn’s voice. Her emotions were reflected in her breathing: her fear, her unhappiness and her determination not to crack and give in to weakness. He could smell her, too, the faint scent of flowers mixed with dust and beer in her hair and on her skin. He ached to touch her.
After a moment Merryn answered his question. He could hear reluctance in her voice, as though she were confiding a secret almost against her will.
“Jo and Tess were both so pretty,” she said ruefully, “and I was not. All I had was my book learning.”
Garrick remembered her telling him that he should address his gallantries to her sisters because she had no interest or experience in the art of flirtation.
“You look just like they do,” he said. “No one could doubt that you are related.”
He could feel her amazement. “No, I do not! I don’t look like them at all! I am short where they are statuesque.”
“You are smaller than your sisters, perhaps, but more of a perfect miniature.”
She did not appear to have heard him. “And I am fair whereas Jo is dark and Tess has dark red hair.”
“Blond hair is just as pretty,” Garrick pointed out. “Prettier.”
“And my eyes are not violet-blue.”
“No, they are more like sapphires.”
“And my nose is snub.” Merryn sounded defiant, as though this were the clinching argument.
“True,” Garrick agreed.
“Which ruins everything.” Now she sounded fierce.
“What a good job,” Garrick said, “that you do not value appearance in the least.”
There was a silence. “I was jealous,” Merryn said in a very small voice. “They had each other. They were friends. I was younger and I had no charm. Not a scrap of it.”
Garrick found that he wanted to pull her into his arms. The impulse grabbed him fast and violently. He forced his hands to his sides. To touch Merryn now just as they were starting to build a tentative alliance to see them through this ordeal would be madness. He had to keep his distance.
“It is true that you are not in the common style,” he said carefully, “but that does not mean that you are not …”
He stopped. What, Farne? he thought. He could scarcely tell her that she was exquisite, desirable, ravishing, even if he believed all those things to be true.
“Interesting in your own way,” he finished. It sounded lame. It was lame. His address had clearly deserted him. He wanted to kick himself.
But Merryn was laughing. “No one could accuse you of flattery, your grace,” she said dryly.
“I can see that having two sisters who are incomparables must be somewhat trying,” Garrick said.
“I felt like a cuckoo in the nest,” Merryn said. “You have brothers and sisters,” she added, taking him aback. “Why are you estranged from them?”
Garrick laughed ruefully. “You are unfailingly direct, are you not, Lady Merryn?”
She sounded surprised. “I ask things because I want to know.”
That, Garrick thought, summed Merryn up precisely. She had never learned the art of compromise, never seen why she should adopt all the little accommodations, lies and deceits that made life run so much more easily. When Merryn wanted to know something she asked a straight question.
“I am not estranged from Ethan,” he said, taking her question very literally to avoid addressing the more painful truths about his family and their appalling lack of sibling spirit.
“Ethan is your half brother, is he not?” Merryn said. “The one who married Lottie Palliser?”
The word brother seemed to dance on the air between them for a moment and the atmosphere thickened with emotion. Garrick could sense the fragile pact between them slipping away when it was barely begun. How could it not, with Stephen Fenner’s death always lying between them? And yet suddenly, fiercely, he was not prepared to accept that. He and Merryn had to survive this disaster together and he would fight for that against all the odds.
“Unfortunately Ethan is the only one who does not hate me,” he said conversationally, trying to distract her. “The others refuse to speak to me.”
“Oh …” Merryn almost laughed. Garrick could feel the huge effort she was making not to allow Stephen Fenner’s memory to come between them. It was the only thing that she could do, trapped alone with him in the dark. She needed comfort and reassurance, someone to talk to, and he was the only one there with her.
“Why should they hate you?” Her voice was almost normal. “You are the eldest. Did they not look up to you?”
“They took their cue from my father,” Garrick said.
She digested that. “I never met him,” she said. “But I heard about him. He sounded …” there was a shiver in her voice “… rather unpleasant.”
“That was one word for him,” Garrick agreed. His father had been the most malevolent man he had known, eaten up by raging ambition and eventually by disappointed hopes. “I am afraid that I was a great source of discontent to him,” he said.
“Because you were a rake?” Merryn said. “I have heard something of your reputation.” She sounded like a disapproving maiden aunt and the censure in her tone made Garrick grin. It also made him want to kiss her. That, he knew, would be as dangerous as allowing Stephen Fenner to divide them. In a moment, though, he would be sitting on his hands to prevent himself from touching her.
“That was a part of the problem,” he said. “My father disapproved of my rakish ways, which was somewhat hypocritical of him since he was the greatest rake in the kingdom himself.” He sighed. “More than that he disapproved of my scholarly ambitions. Those, he said, were quite beneath the dignity of a gentleman.”
This time Merryn did laugh. “Yet he sent you to Oxford.”
“Only because it was the done thing,” Garrick said. “He did not expect me to study. That, he felt, was quite wrong and inappropriate to the station of a Duke.”
