A Winter Wish (The Read Family Saga #1) - Christi Caldwell Page 0,29

been the Viscountess Grimslee… and who would have been Merry’s employer.

Perhaps it was fatigue from the long hours she and Luke had kept, or perhaps it was an illogic thought that simply could not be rationalized away, but the idea of him with his Society-born lady left her bereft.

This is where you are to say something…

“I’m… sorry,” she said softly, resting her hand on his. “She is the reason you…”

Luke stared at their almost-joined hands and then lifted his face. And in those perfectly carved features, there wasn’t a hint of pain or regret. Only wry amusement. “She is the reason I was sleeping in the foyer when you arrived?” He wore a faintly sheepish expression. “Yes, she is the reason, and yet…”

And yet?

That question screamed around her mind, and the lessons on patience ingrained into her early on were all that kept her from demanding he say more.

“I regret that I let my family’s concerns drive my decision. I regret the dishonorable way in which I conducted myself. I’ll always regret that I let my worry about Society and what they might say matter more than what I wanted.”

What I wanted. The sharp blade dug all the deeper. She stared down at the obscenely shiny objects littered about them.

“But I won’t regret not marrying her,” he said quietly, bringing her head jerking up. “Not because she wasn’t an honorable or good woman, nor because my life with her would have been content, but because had we married, I would have never realized I wanted more than being content. You, however, Merry Read,” he said, lightly caressing her left hand. “It was you who showed me I wanted more. That I want passion and joy, and I thank you for that.”

“You needn’t thank me, Luke. We are… friends.”

Friends.

Aside from her relationship with her brother and sister, there’d been a dearth of friendship in her life.

And you cannot very well go on being friends with him when he is your employer. Not when he would eventually wed and Merry would answer to that lady of the household.

Luke looked up, and he searched his eyes over her face in a slow, delicate caress, and she held her breath, more than half afraid of what emotion he’d see there. But he gave no indication that he had detected the undercurrents of feelings she had no place feeling for him. Luke set his garland down and spoke with an earnestness she’d never remembered from him. “You’ve challenged me to see the world and live in it in ways that I never have. In ways I suspect will always be foreign, and yet”—he caught one of her hands, tangling their fingers as one—“I’ve never felt more alive or freer than I have this week with you, Merry.”

Merry’s heart lifted and then soared as Luke’s words gave that organ flight. Only to come crashing down in a blaze of reality.

As much as she loved the Luke Holman he was before her, he would, by his very admission, forever remain a man worried about Society’s opinion. Such men didn’t have friendships with maids or other servants. They didn’t tease their housekeepers, and they certainly didn’t marry them.

They wed women such as the honorable and good one he’d been betrothed to. And even with a like social connection, his parents still had not approved of the match.

Her stomach flipped, as it had when she was a girl aboard a packet to France in a violent storm that churned up the waters, leaving her sick.

A light palm came to rest upon her forearm, and she jumped. “Merry?” he asked.

Suddenly, she was besieged by an overwhelming urge to cry at the tenderness of his touch, at something that would never—and could never—be.

“I was… thinking of what you said.” Which wasn’t altogether untrue. For even as she reveled in this new freedom he’d allowed himself and all the ways in which he’d changed, Merry proved selfish. “And how I’ll miss this.” Her voice faded to a whisper that she could not call back. With that, she made to return her seat to its previous spot so she could resume working.

Luke stopped her. “Why does it have to end?”

He didn’t know. He couldn’t know.

Her teeth snapped together with a ferocity that sent pain shooting from her jaw to her temple. “Come, Luke, by your very words here, you’re aware of how Society is driven by its social order. Servants work.”

He frowned. “That’s not what I was saying.”

“But it’s true.” She tied off