“I assure you,” he drawled, “I’m aware of my title.” From the moment he’d taken his first breath, he’d had ground into him the undisputable truth: He was first and foremost a future duke, and because of that, every expectation had been laid out for him. Life was nothing more than a mold that he’d been hopelessly stuffed into. Why, they’d even pick his wife. Nay, not they. In this case, his damned mother. His mouth tightened. “I’m very aware of my title, indeed.”
“Then you know that it’s expected I should refer to you so.” She gave a snap of her skirts, and a memory traipsed in.
“Why in God’s name are you snapping your skirts, Mare?”
“Because that is what ladies do to convey their displeasure. It is a most useful skill. For instance…” Meredith snapped her skirts at her ankles.
A smile pulled at his lips. “Pfft.” Barry perched his hip along the back of his mother’s sofa. “That will never do,” he chided, reaching for a strand of her hair to tug as he’d done as a boy determined to bother her… and finding all those strands perfectly in place. In the end, he settled for cuffing her under the chin. “I daresay first names shall still suffice. I mean…” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Given that you were gracious enough to serve as my ‘mare’ for the first four years of my—”
Meredith dissolved into a paroxysm, her previously pale cheeks going red, adding an endearing color to her slightly long face. “M-my lord…” she choked out, whipping her gaze about as if she feared she’d be discovered committing some great scandal.
“Barry,” he corrected. “Or were you praying?”
She choked once more. “The p-proper form of a-address. I was referring t-to your title.”
For the passage of time that had elapsed, one constant remained: It was enjoyable as hell teasing the minx. “Ah, pity that.” He lifted his mother’s hidden bottle and took another drink. “I see you received the summons.” Given that Meredith had been born at Berkshire and given her connection to the Aberdeens, it had been a summons long overdue. Though one he’d never envy a person for. “My apologies.”
“My lord?”
There it was again, hesitant… and formal.
He lifted a brow.
Meredith wetted her lips, darting her tongue out, trailing their narrow seam. And it was only because a rogue’s blood flowed in his veins that he was riveted by that subtle movement. “Barry,” she conceded. Her voice, a shade lower, added a husky depth that only further fired his awareness.
“Generally, my mother’s summer house party is my least-loathed event.” He gave her a look. “You do remember, I trust? The fair where my father allows the gypsies…”
Her features grew stricken. “I remember,” she said quietly.
The flash of sadness was gone as soon as it came, so that it might have merely been a trick of the light.
There were several beats of silence, and to fill the void, Barry lifted the bottle to his mouth for another drink. “My mother has plans for me.” He held out his mother’s brandy.
Meredith ignored the offering. “Oh?” she asked, seating herself.
“Matchmaking.” He strangled on the syllables, waving his spare hand about. “Finding me a bride. A suitable one. An illustrious one.”
Something glinted in her eyes. “I… see.” Something he could not make sense of… and yet, it intrigued him all the further.
“Goodness, you’re a good deal quieter than… ever.”
“I’m a good deal many more things than I was,” she murmured, and were she any other woman who refused to be flirted with, he’d have taken her response as a deliberate attempt at being coy.
Yes, she was more restrained. Reserved. And… completely unlike her once-boisterous self. The Meredith of old would have had some commiserative—mayhap even choice words—and only after she’d grabbed the bottle of brandy and downed a swallow.
She’d changed… in so many ways. Even this version of Meredith Durant was a more somber version than the woman he’d run into at the Royal Horticultural Society—a woman whose eyes had been on him while he’d read.
And he quite despised it. Because propriety rotted a nobleman’s soul and dulled his excitement, but now time had proven it had the same effects on young women… like Meredith.
Restless, he quit his place on the back of the sofa and moved around, finding the place beside her.
Meredith stiffened, her spine going ramrod straight, and then she inched closer to the arm of the sofa.
Now, this was interesting, indeed. At what point did a girl who’d set out to tease and torment him become so very skittish? Regardless, none would dare confuse Barry as one who set about to make ladies uncomfortable. He stopped his approach. “I thought you of all people would have something to say on it,” he admonished, dropping his legs atop the rose-inlaid table alongside his mother’s tabletop desk.
“On what?”
He gave her a look.
Meredith yanked her gaze from his legs, and a bright blush stained her cheeks. Well, this was even more interesting. “Oh,” she blurted. “You referred to your upcoming marriage.”
Upcoming marriage. “That is certainly the way my mother would refer to it,” he muttered. Never Meredith Durant.
She scooted closer, and he felt a lightness that they could simply be around each other as they’d been. “And… why do you expect I should have something to say about your marital affairs?”
Barry tossed an arm out, looping it around the place on the back of the sofa where Meredith’s shoulders would have been—had she not been sitting painfully erect. “Because it is you of all people.”
A small frown turned her already tense mouth down at the corners. She fought with herself. Old Meredith would have spit out the question and ten others behind it. This new, more measured version of herself tried to hold on to propriety above all else. In the end, the Meredith of old won out. “And what is that supposed to mean?”
“You remember, do you not?” Barry leaned in all the more and placed his lips against her ear. “You ladies and your desire for a duke. What of the love and laughter of an honorable man?”
Meredith gasped and whipped her head around so quick her forehead slammed into his nose.
With a curse, he pressed a palm against the wounded appendage. “Bloody hell. I think you broke it,” he muttered, checking his fingers for blood.
“You heard us?” she whispered. “And it’s not broken. You’re not even bleeding. Though I should break it.”
Even through the pain, he grinned. This was the Meredith he recalled. “Oh, I not only heard you ladies that day, but I remembered it and committed it to memory.”
Meredith gasped. “How dare you?”
“Oh, I dared quite regularly.” Alas, if he’d been a more polite gent, he’d have taken mercy. Fire, however, lit her eyes, spurring him shamelessly on. “What was it that you and my sister and her friends were plotting? Hmm?” He made a show of tapping a contemplative finger against his chin. “I have it! You were plotting ways to win the heart of a duke.”
A bright blush flooded her cheeks again, rather transforming her into someone quite… pretty. When was the last time he’d so enjoyed himself? “You are a scoundrel still, Barry Aberdeen.”
He pressed a palm to his chest. “Unapologetically so. I will say, however, it was rather shortsighted of you to have failed to consider there was at least one future duke in your mid—oomph.” He grunted as Meredith let a sharp elbow slide into his ribs.
Good God, by the time they were through here, she was going to have broken or bloodied some part of him. Nonetheless… “That is better.”
She puzzled her brow. “What is?”
“You’re showing hints of your former”—more spirited—“self. I could really benefit from having an ally through… through… this,” he settled for, unable to make himself utter anything about the demise of his bachelorhood.
“Generally, if one is in the market for an ally, they don’t go a
bout needling and making a pest of oneself to the ally in question,” Meredith said dryly.
“Fair point,” he conceded. “Perhaps we can begin again?” He dropped his stained boots to the floor, splattering mud upon the Aubusson carpet. Meredith winced, eyeing the mess. Oh, bloody hell. Need of an ally or not, it was just too irresistible. She was just too irresistible. Barry leaned close, placing his lips near the shell of her ear. Only… the hint of jasmine that clung to her proved distracting. Heady. A fragrant intoxication, sweet and alluring. All earlier teasing fled as Barry drew in a deep breath, inhaling the summery scent of her.
The long column of Meredith’s throat worked, the muscles moving in a rhythmic display as she angled her neck the slightest amount, and yet, close as they were, he saw her body’s reflexive opening, an invitation. Odd that he knew so very much about Meredith Durant, and yet, the feel of her skin, the taste of it escaped him. A moth to the flame, Barry angled his mouth closer to at last have an answer to the question he’d not known he needed an answer to—until now. “Mayhap, we might even return to that day at the Royal Horticultural Society when you were admiring my recitation of poetry,” he suggested on a whisper.
*
Meredith was awash with an inexplicable and dangerous awareness of the most unlikely of men, so it took a moment for Barry’s words to penetrate.
When they did, they pulled another gasp from her lips. “You are incorrigible, and we are done here, my lord,” she said tightly, reverting back to the use of his proper title. A lifetime of knowing each other be damned.
She made to jump up.
And she would have.
If the muscles in her legs were not already fatigued from her twelve-hour journey from London. If she hadn’t already been more than slightly weak-kneed from the sough of his breath upon her skin.
But she was both of those things.
Meredith lost her balance and came down hard, landing squarely on Barry’s lap.
“Whoa, love.” His hands caught her by the waist, righting her so she didn’t tumble backward onto the floor.
The earth stilled in the most peculiar way.
“You were admiring me,” he pointed out, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to cradle her on his lap and converse about that past moment in the public garden she’d not allowed herself to think on.
“I most certainly was not admiring you.”
Alas, such as a rebuttal could never be convincing when it emerged on a whispery exhalation that was more sigh than speech. And no convincing rebuttal could ever be given when perched atop Barry’s lap.
A perch that admirably displayed the muscle he’d added to his form in their time apart. Meredith swallowed hard.
She really needed to storm off. Such was the suitable, ladylike response.
And she would have, if he’d teased her further. Only he didn’t. He angled her body closer, bringing their chests in perfect alignment, and she remained there, her chest pressed to his, keenly aware of every ripple of muscle when he moved. “Do you know what I believe, Meredith?”
Meredith.
Not Mare.
Not Miss Durant.
Husked on a whisper laced with a promise.
The dampness of his trousers penetrating her skirts did little to stifle the warmth fluttering low in her belly.
Stop, you’re no virginal miss. And she was certainly not so… so… imprudent to be enraptured by little Barry Aberdeen.
Liar. Aside from the half grin he’d always perfectly affected, she couldn’t even find a hint of the boy of her past. She made her head move in a semblance of a shake. “I… don’t…” Even recall the last question he’d asked. Had it even been a question?
His mouth moved close to hers, and her breath hitched in her lungs. “I believe you were admiring me that day.” He winked.
It was that slight flutter of his impossibly long golden lashes that managed to break whatever momentary madness had held her under its snare.
With a gasp, she scrambled from his lap. Her skirts—her now-damp skirts—tangled about her legs.
Meredith came down hard on the floor. She groaned as pain radiated from her buttocks up her back, and she resisted the urge to massage the wounded area.
Barry leaned over, an entirely too amused grin on his lips. “May I…?” He stretched a hand out.
“I-I most certainly do not require any help,” she stammered, rising with as much grace as one could who’d fallen first in his lap and then at his feet and now had mud-spattered skirts for her efforts.
“Oh, come, Mare, I was teasing,” he called as she grabbed her bag. The floorboards groaned as he rushed over and placed himself in her path, blocking her slow retreat. “I came looking for support.”
“You want my support.” Meredith switched her increasingly heavy bag to her other hand.
“Emilia is otherwise occupied by her newish husband. My mother and father only have one plan for me.”
“And you’ve identified me as your only friend in this place?” she drawled.
“Among a houseful of marriage-minded ladies? Indeed, I have.” His smile widened, dimpling his left cheek and doing odd things to her heart’s natural rhythm.
She’d used to pinch that dimple when he’d been a boy with pudgy cheeks. How very different that mark was in his chiseled features.
Disgusted with herself, she struggled with her bag. “We haven’t seen each other in years, Barry.”
He relieved her of her bag, holding on to it with an infuriating ease. “Two months.”
“That isn’t the same,” she insisted. Furthermore, she’d been alone these past years, looking after herself and her belongings, and that wouldn’t change now that she’d returned to the Aberdeen residence. She rescued her valise, her shoulders slumping slightly under the added weight, and then she made herself straighten them.
“I was merely teasing before, Meredith,” he said quietly, with the first seriousness she’d heard in his voice since he’d stormed the room, searching for the duchess and her bottle of brandy.
Of course he’d only been teasing. Barry had ever been teasing. His accidental confiding in her about his efforts to subvert his mother’s matchmaking—or, more accurately, Meredith’s matchmaking—had proved both distracting… and far more useful.
But entirely less pleasurable. Sighing, she set her bag at her feet and faced him. “I’m listening.”
His lips twitched, and he perched himself on the back of the sofa once more. “Though slightly better, that’s hardly a vast improvement in the renewal of our childhood friendship.”
Meredith gave him a look. “You’re incapable of being serious.” She turned to go.
“My mother and father are trying to marry me off,” he called after her, freezing her in her tracks. “There you have it. You’ve been invited to attend the summer house party where they attempt to maneuver me into a match with an estimably suitable young lady.”
He didn’t know why she’d been invited here. As she turned slowly back, she thrust back the niggling part of her that said that remaining here under the guise of not knowing was shamefully underhanded. “And you don’t wish to marry?”
“Egad. Me?” He grimaced. “No.”
“Why?” she asked quietly, and by the way he opened and closed his mouth several times, her question had taken him by surprise.
“Why?”
Meredith drifted over to him. “What are you in search of, Barry?”
“I… I…” He gave his head a bemused shake, dislodging several droplets of water. A lone bit of moisture hit her cheek.
Meredith brushed it away and stopped so the tips of her travel-worn boots brushed his mud-splattered ones. “What is it you enjoy?” she asked quietly. Meredith merely asked to gather information to help her in her work here. Except, as the next question left her, why did it feel as though she wished to know more about this very tall, very muscular version of the Barry she’d once known?
“I…” His gaze
grew distant, and he glanced down at the bottle in his hand. Instead of slogging another swallow, however, he studied the decanter before setting it on the console table behind the sofa. “What would you say, Meredith Durant,” he began on a quiet murmur, “if I told you it doesn’t matter because my purpose is singular: I’m an heir to a dukedom and not much more.”
This was a more serious and solemn side of Barry. Her chest tightened at the deviation from his usual carefree self. “I would say,” she ventured slowly, “I don’t believe you. And that you should let more than your title and future title define you and your future, Barry.”
He smiled, this one a small sad expression that briefly ghosted his lips. “Alas, one cannot truly be separated from the other.”
She’d never envied Emilia or Barry their birthrights… until she’d gone off on her own to make a future and living for herself, without the benefits and protections enjoyed by those of the peerage. Reflexively, she touched a hand to his chest. “I’m not suggesting that you separate yourself from it, Barry, but rather, recognize that you are first and foremost a man.”
Tension crackled in the air. And his gaze dipped slowly to her hand.
She quickly dropped her arm. Meredith cleared her throat. “Let us say you were being forced into a match—”
“Which I won’t be.”
“But if you were, what interests do you have that you’d hope your future bride would also enjoy?”
Barry eyed her suspiciously for a moment, and in his eyes, she saw the battle he fought with himself. And she knew he didn’t know whether he wished to carry on this real conversation between them in which he would share parts of himself. Or whether he wanted to give some flippant reply.
“I’d want a woman who can understand plants.”
She let out a sound of frustration. How utterly foolish to believe him capable of delivering a serious answer. “Good day, Barry,” she said, infusing that with an air of finality as she grabbed her bag.
Except… he called after her, his next five words bringing her up short.
“You believe I’m funning you? That I was at the Royal Horticultural Society for what purpose? Mayhap to seduce some widow among the rhododendron dell? Hmm.”
A Matchmaker for a Marquess Page 6