Elliott audibly choked.
“And the sooner she realizes that, the happier we’ll all be. Not that I’ll see her much. She’ll be with the others out in the garden, and I’ll be focusing on the house,” Alden said over the sound of Elliott coughing and wheezing. “‘Focus on the house’ is my new motto in life. I will focus like the wind. I will be the most focused man who ever lived. I will focus like, as the Americans say—did I tell you that Mercy is American?—as she would say, I will focus like no one’s business.”
A spate of coughing was the answer to his declaration.
“Are you all right?” he asked solicitously.
“No,” Elliott wheezed, his voice hoarse and gritty. “But at least I didn’t run away from Alice when I met her.”
“You’re supposed to be supportive. That sort ofcomment is not supportive. That is judgmental and petty. I will leave you to your judgmental, petty coughing fit that you wholly deserve, and go attend to my house.” A dull grating sound started overhead, growing sharper until he looked up in time to see three tiles and an ancient bird’s nest fall to the ground in front of him. “It is, after all, what’s important.”
“You’re protesting too much,” came the hoarse reply.
“I’m not doing any such thing. I’m simply telling you where my priorities lie, and that I really don’t want a woman munging up my plans. If you could find a way to have Alice call off her protégée, I’d be grateful. There are enough people clogging up the house now without having another one.”
“Too late, I believe,” Elliott wheezed. “Alice said something about the woman being on her way.”
“Dammit.” Alden straightened his shoulders, stepped over the slates and the bird’s nest, and set out again on the gravel path. “Well, I’ll just deal with the woman when she arrives. Perhaps I can leave her a note, and I won’t even have to see her. Oh, hell, I forgot to ask Mercy about the bat. Er... I don’t suppose...”
“No,” Elliot said, his voice still rough around the edges, although he had stopped coughing. “I will not call her up and ask her for you.”
“That’s a fine sort of supportiveness you practice,” Alden said pointedly, and, after a few more remarks of that nature, hung up the phone. He waffled for a minute, trying to rally enough inner strength to hunt down Mercy so he could apologize for his brusqueness, followed by an inquiry into her experience with possibly ill bats, but decided in the end that he’d put off that task until later. Instead, he toured the remainder of theestate, checked the condition of the outbuildings, and took photos of various spots around the exterior of the house about which he’d seek professional opinions.
An hour had passed when his stomach reminded him that he’d had a meager lunch at best, and perhaps a little food might be in order. The thought that Mercy might be in the kitchen was almost enough to send him running (again), but in the end, he persuaded himself that she wasn’t likely to be present.
She had other things to do, no doubt. There was that Vandal character—he sounded like a right bloke with the ladies. He just bet Mercy would fall for that sort of a man. Not that he cared. Not that it mattered whom she fell for, so long as she didn’t expect to stand around chatting with him, and leaning in to the point where he could smell that delicious scent that seemed to wrap around her, or feel the nearness of her body. No, he didn’t need that in his life, and certainly not after his experience of the afternoon.
“I’ve had enough emotional trauma for the day,” he said aloud, letting himself in through a pair of French doors into what he knew was the long, narrow room that used to be a library.
“Really? What’s traumatized you now?”
He froze at the door. Mercy was seated at a card table that had been set up to the right of the doors, a massive mound of books, journals, loose papers, and what looked to be sheet music spilling off the table onto stacks on the floor.
“Or should I say who?”
“Who has done what?” he asked, confused by the fact that she was there in his formerly empty library, that she had set up a desk so quickly with what were clearlyLady Sybilla’s papers and assorted documents, and that he felt a spurt of pleasure at seeing her. He wasn’t happy to see her, he reminded himself. She terrified him, just as every other woman had ever since puberty.
“Caused trauma.” She watched him with interesting hazel eyes that appeared now to be a stormy gray tinged with green.
“You,” his mouth answered without his brain giving the all clear to do so. The second the word left his mouth, he was mortified. Shame heated his cheeks, which in turn made him feel even more uncomfortable. Men didn’t blush—women did.
“Me?” Her brows, straight slashes of chocolate brown, pulled together in consternation. “What have I done to traumatize you?”
“I... you...” His tongue seemed to stumble over the words as he gestured hopelessly. “It’s not really you, per se....”
“You’re blushing,” she said, disbelief rampant in her voice.
He couldn’t be more mortified if he had set out to achieve that goal. With an inarticulate noise of self-loathing, he turned stiffly toward the French doors, intending to retreat to an unoccupied room where he could chastise himself in private, but a warm hand on his arm stopped him.
“Hey, I’m sorry. That was rude of me. You’re obviously upset with me about something, but I don’t know what it is, so I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t suppose you’d like to start over? Pretend we’re meeting for the first time?”
The look in her (now darker gray with more brown than green) eyes kept him from running away again.There was sympathy there, yes, but no pity. Just concern and worry. “No! That would be infinitely worse.”
“Really? Why?”
He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to focus on breathing calmly, as a therapist had once counseled him to do when faced with stressful social situations. “Because then I’d have to meet you all over again.”
“And that’s... unpleasant?”
