years before now. In this moment, with all he’d revealed, she found herself seeing him in a new light. Or, really, seeing him for the first time. Mayhap that was why, despite her earlier resolve to be rid of his company, she found herself relenting.
“Christmas trees,” she said.
Luke cocked his head, sending a lone curl falling over his brow, softening him.
“That is why we’re h-here.” She gestured through the whorl of snowflakes to the rows of evergreen ahead. Merry huddled deeper into the folds of her cloak. “When your brother and I were small, we came upon a story of Martin Luther and how one Christmastide season he decorated the branches with candles.”
Luke looked from her to the trees and then back to her. “Are you saying we are here… to decorate a tree?” He spoke slowly, one trying to puzzle through the peculiarity of that telling.
Her lips twitched reflexively. “No, we aren’t decorating the tree here.” She gestured to the saw in his hand, and he followed her pointed glance. “We’re going to cut one down and decorate it at your family’s household.”
His mouth moved, giving him the look of a trout out of a water. With a soft laugh that stirred a breath of white from the cold, she beckoned him forward. “Come.” She started through the rows of trees, eyeing the options around them. The viscount she recalled would never dare enter Green Park to cut a tree down. He would have seen not only the process, but the intended result, as inane.
The crunch of snow and gravel indicated Luke intended to join her.
Not for the first time, she wondered at just what accounted for the drastic change that had befallen him in her absence. The only certainty was that she enjoyed this newer version of Luke. Around him, she didn’t feel as if she was nothing more than a servant, which was what she was and what she’d been treated like by every lord or lady she’d come across in her travels of the Continent.
“I confess to not understanding it all,” he said as he fell into step beside her. “It’s hardly logical.”
She glanced over, and he launched into a lecture. “Trees have no place in a household. They exist outside and are hardly an article to be decorated.”
“Says who?”
He opened his mouth. “Says… everything the world knows about trees.”
How very much like the sober little boy who’d called out Merry and his brother for one of the many games they’d played outside his schoolroom.
She stopped and put herself in his path. “Ah, but that is the point, Luke.”
“What is the point?” he asked, looking hopelessly perplexed.
She took mercy. “Cutting trees down isn’t logical. It doesn’t serve any purpose but one”—she lifted a single finger—“to bring pleasure.” Merry held his gaze and tried to will him to understand. “That which is fun or enjoyable is not bound by or created in logic. It is simply a matter of finding pleasure without any purpose required.” Merry marched off, and this time, he accompanied her onward in her search without hesitation.
Merry passed her gaze around the copse, eyeing the trees as they went.
“How did you learn of this?” he asked.
“I’ve been traveling these past years. Your family was generous enough to send me abroad to visit households throughout the Continent.” Shivering, Merry rubbed her palms frantically back and forth in a bid to bring some warmth to some part of her body. “I spent time with one noble family, where the lady of the household was from Portugal. The Regiment of the local high-Sacristans of the Cistercian Order wrote of Christmas branches that, upon Christmas Eve, were adorned with the brightest oranges. The other servants secretly derided the lady for that tradition, and I?” She smiled wistfully, remembering the eccentric older woman. “I was just so very fascinated, I wished to know everything about it.”
Her skin tingled in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. She glanced over and found Luke’s hooded gaze upon her. She cleared her throat. “I trust you find it silly.”
“Quite the opposite,” he said swiftly, and with his spare hand, he claimed one of hers. “I find myself…” His eyes moved over her face. “Riveted,” he murmured.
At that slightest of pauses, her breath quickened and her chest rose and fell quickly, for in that moment, she could almost believe he spoke of her.
Cold as she was, she didn’t want this moment with him to end. For in this very instant,