Mistress by Midnight Read Free Page A

that Garrick heard the sneeze.

    U NDER THE LARGE tester bed, Lady Merryn Fenner lay with her face pressed against the dusty floorboards. She had been trapped for a half hour. In a short but varied career working for the private investigator Tom Bradshaw she had never been in a situation quite like this one. She had never been caught before.
    Merryn had been reading when the Duke of Farne had entered the bedroom and had had a bare few seconds to take cover. She had hoped to escape when he fell asleep. Then the woman had come in. Merryn had heard the husky seductive tones, seen the robe fall to the floor, felt the bedsprings give and had known she was in for a thorough education in a matter in which she had previously been in almost total ignorance.
    She had rolled over, pressing her face against the floor, eyes screwed tightly closed. She had shoved her fingers in her ears and prayed that Garrick Farne’s ardor would be both quick and exhausting, that the lovers would wear themselves out swiftly and fall into a sex-induced stupor. The sounds and the movements she could not quite block out had made her feel very hot and bothered. She could feel her body radiating a warmth that was part embarrassment but also something else infinitely more disconcerting. Her clothes felt tight and restraining and she wanted to squirm. It was most odd.
    Then she had inhaled a cobweb and the harder she tried to hold back a sneeze the more it tickled her before it burst out with explosive force.
    Oh, dear. There was no escape now. That would have disturbed even the most ardent lovers.
    Sure enough, a second later, someone reached down, grabbed her arm and dragged her from under the bed. She was hauled roughly to her feet. Eyes watering, another sneeze threatening, she drew herself up to her full five-foot height.
    How to explain? No, forget the explanations, how to escape?
    “My bedroom seems an unconscionably popular venue tonight,” the man before her drawled.
    Garrick Farne, best friend to her brother Stephen. Her brother’s murderer…
    Merryn shivered. Once—pitiful to remember now—she had had a schoolgirl crush on Garrick Farne. He had been like a god to her, a creature who inhabited a different world. While Merryn and her sisters had lived a circumscribed life, educated at home, their existence bounded by the village of Fenridge and their parents’ immediate acquaintances, Stephen and his friends, including Garrick, had studied at Oxford, gambled their patrimony away in London, lived, according to the gossip, for women and drink and vice. Oh, how she had lapped up that scandal. It had all sounded frightfully exciting to a thirteen-year-old girl who had never traveled farther than Bath in her life.
    Garrick had never noticed her, of course. Why should he? Merryn had two beautiful elder sisters who drew all the eyes, all the attention and all the compliments. Besides, Garrick had been betrothed from the cradle to Kitty Scott, the daughter of his father’s political friend and ally; it was simply a matter of when Kitty and Garrick wed, not if they wed. Kitty was a beauty, too, the toast of the town. Which was no doubt why Stephen had fallen in love with her, too…
    A shock ran through Merryn now, like lightning, like recognition, setting her shaking as though she had an ague. Garrick Farne. His name had become a byword for evil in her family, a murderer, a man who had ruined her life and those of her father and her sisters. While he had been abroad, in exile, it had been just about possible for her to put him from her mind, to ignore, if not forget, the events of that hot summer so many years ago. Then, fifteen months ago, Garrick had come back, back to a society that instead of trying him for murder had welcomed him like a hero; back to be lauded as the most handsome, wealthy and eligible nobleman in the ton.
    In contrast it seemed to Merryn that no one remembered her brother Stephen at all. He was gone, irrelevant, forgotten. They