Midsummer Moon Read Free

she could picture him in exquisite detail as she had just seen him, when first she had opened the door. She could see his thick brown hair beneath his hat, ruthlessly trained into neatness, and the dark eyebrows just as fiercely tamed. His eyes had looked yellow-green in the dappled shade outside, and his nose and mouth as elegant and wild as a gyrfalcon's fine-drawn markings. Perhaps that was why they had picked him as the Duke of Falconer. He looked uncannily like a smiling hawk.
    She stumbled on something that fell with a dull thump and heard him utter a muffled oath behind her as his hands steadied her shoulders. “Sorry,” she said miserably. He kept his hand beneath her elbow as she negotiated the last of the dim-lit passage and turned aside into the central hall.
    One look at the jumble that filled the large room made her realize it was no place to entertain a visitor. Merlin knew she was no housekeeper, but when had she let things come to this? A rested steam boiler, the fraying basket of a hot-air balloon, a discarded vacuum pump, and a damaged paddle—in the pale sunlight through grimy windows the place looked like a battlefield. She picked her way through the silent confusion, bending to slip beneath the massive sweep of a broken wing that cast a shadow across the narrow path like a great, weary bat.
    The duke came behind her. He made no comment on the chaos, but she sensed his opinion in the way he inspected the caked grease that had smeared across his glove from the falling axle-rod.
    The short flight of stairs to the solar was clear, at least, if only because it provided the single passage from her laboratory to this ... storage. “Put it in storage,” she'd said a thousand times to Theodore or Thaddeus, and never looked to see where the item had gone. Well, now she knew. It had gone to the great-hall and been dumped, and if she'd always been too preoccupied before to notice the accumulating mass, she certainly saw it now.
    The solar was a slight improvement. Only half the size of the great-hall, it contained crowded laboratory tables and smaller pieces of equipment, roils of wire and cases of glass beakers, and hundreds of leather-bound books strewn about in a mild degree of organization. At least she knew where a chair was. Under two feet of journals, which required several moments of exertion to remove.
    She stood back from her labors, panting slightly, and offered him a seat.
    "Thank you,” he said. “I prefer to stand."
    Merlin blinked at him. “Oh. Forgive me. I suppose you must have rheumatism?"
    A fine curve appeared at the corner of his mouth and quivered there as he said solemnly, “I enjoy the best of health, thank you. But I was taught by a formidable nanny that a gentleman does not sit in the presence of a lady."
    Merlin, lost in rapt contemplation of that intriguing masculine dimple, took a moment to realize that by “a lady,” he meant her. “Oh,” she said, and sat down.
    He tilted his head, surveying the cluttered room. His gaze lingered on a large wooden crate from which a tangle of wires led to a set of wheels and pulleys. He stared at the object a moment and then looked down at her with that odd half-smile. In the sidelight from the window his hair danced with gold and red. “It is Miss Lambourne, then, whom I have the pleasure of addressing?"
    Merlin nodded and hoped he wouldn't begin calling her “ Miss Lambourne” in that soft and dignified way. She had a feeling that in one of her frequent reveries she would not answer to anything but a sharply enunciated “Miss Merlin, hey!,” which was what Theodore and Thaddeus had found to be moderately successful.
    "You seem to be quite an inventress,” the duke said. “What is that object, if I may inquire?"
    Merlin frowned at the wooden crate and wires. “It was to help me string the framework for my full-sized aviation machine. It didn't work."
    "I see.” He looked around again, as if seeking something, and then at Merlin. His