Under the fuddling influence of a potential duke sighting and countless sips of this miraculous water, she decided that Brandon needed one of these and handed over a fistful of groschen to the agreeable man. As she did, she risked another sly peek over her shoulder.
This time, there was no mistaking it. He was here! And he was glowering at the vendor for some unknown reason, but that was neither here nor there. All that mattered was that her plans to have a grand flirtation with Lucien were still possible.
She bit into the cushion of her bottom lip to keep from smiling too broadly. For the moment, she played coy and pretended that she hadn’t noticed him.
After collecting her brother’s horn, she stopped to consider the porcelain dolls dressed in lederhosen as a gift for her nephew. It wasn’t long before she felt the prickling of gooseflesh over her skin and caught a familiar masculine scent on the breeze as she heard the scuff of a boot sole on the pavement behind her.
“Are you following me, Herr Merleton?” she asked without turning around.
A second passed before she heard an impatient exhale. Then he stepped beside her.
“That would be Herzog Merleton. But addressing me by my surname would be Herr Ambrose.”
“Very well, Herzog.” She giggled and turned on her heel to walk away. But that made her muzzy-headed and she faltered . . . just before she felt his hand at the small of her back.
“What have you been drinking?” he asked in that severe tone of his, and she just knew his mouth was turned in that delightfully disapproving frown.
“Just a little water. Cherry water. They make it here, you know.”
“Do you mean Kirschwasser?”
“That’s it. Cherry water.” She pointed at him. “You, mein Freund, are exceedingly clever to have guessed it. And according to that nice bearded man in the feathered Tyrolean hat, it fills one with vitality. What do you think, Herzog?” She grinned up at him. “Am I full of vitality?”
He continued to frown, and she was ever so tempted to put her fingertips to either side of his mouth and nudge a smile into place.
“You are certainly full of something. Where are your chaperones?”
“Shh . . . I cannot tell you. It’s a secret,” she said and wondered why her whisper sounded vaguely slurred. Perhaps there was something on her tongue. Perhaps she needed more water to wash it down.
Just as she was about to turn around and walk back to the hut with the drinking horns, Lucien liberated her basket and took her hand, tucking it into the crook of his arm.
“They should be here, watching over you.”
Pfft. “I do a better job watching over them. They are terrible flirts.”
“And you are not?”
“I’m only a terrible flirt with you, though little good it has done me. I haven’t seen you for over a senny . . . a sennai”—she shook her head, wondering why her tongue couldn’t say sennight—“for over a week.”
“I think you should get out of the sun and beneath the shade,” he said walking toward the vacant stall at the far end of the market row.
“Oh, look! Two butterflies,” Meg said, tottering to the left as she pointed to the buttery yellow wings flitting from flower to flower among the posies piled up on the back of a cart.
“Moths, actually,” he corrected at a glance and secured her to his side.
“Oh, how can you even tell? Your lenses are likely smudged again.” When he looked down at her with another taut sigh of impatience, she saw that they were, for once, perfectly clean. She shrugged. “Besides, it makes no difference whether they are moths or butterflies.”
“I should think it would matter to the moths.”
He stepped beneath the shingled overhang and removed his hat, absently passing a hand through his hair as he turned to face her.
“What matters is that they found each other. In all of this,” she interjected, gesturing with a wide sweep of her parasol, “they found each other. And just look at how happy they are.”
“Their random flying patterns do not indicate any emotion but rather—”
His speech abruptly halted when, in midspin, her parasol suddenly caught on the corner of the roof. Meg lost her grip. She stumbled forward at a tilt, arms windmilling and she fell. Directly against him.
He caught her easily by the shoulders, his stern expression indicating she was in for a lecture. But then, every grim syllable he might have uttered seemed to have dried up, because she saw him wet his lips as he looked at her mouth. And for some reason, she wet hers, too, just enough to dampen the sudden tingling ache that made them feel plump and ripe as the cherries in her basket.
She wasn’t certain what happened next.
All at once, her hands were curled around his lapels, and she was tugging him down as she rose up on her toes. And then her mouth was pressed to his. Right there. In the market. Underneath a clapboard roof with the scent of flowers and cherries in the air.
His eyes widened the instant before she closed her own.
It was little more than a brief meeting of lips. Enough time for her hands to slide to his shoulders, to feel their breadth and strength beneath her palms. For his hands, warm and strong, to meet her waist, then to rise an inch or two higher to frame the bottom of her rib cage.
Then he shifted. A nudge, an ever so slight tilt of the head. And somehow found the perfect angle to send tingles sparking through her body, all the way to her toes.
A hum of pleasure escaped her. A breath left him. It fanned hotly from his nostrils. She felt the responding pressure of his fingertips as he gripped her, drawing her imperceptibly closer. And there was that deep tug again, stronger than before.
She was starting to crave this sensation. In fact, she never wanted it to end—
“Well, hullo there, cousin,” Viscount Holladay said from behind her.
Meg startled, rocking back on her heels. The kiss disconnected with an audible smooch.
Lucien’s head was still bent, his hands lingering on her ribs for the barest moment until he suddenly jolted to awareness. He straightened with a snap, shoulders back. But his lenses were foggy around the edges.
Tearing off his spectacles, he stared down at them as if he couldn’t comprehend how they’d come to be in such a state. Meg understood perfectly. She felt a bit foggy around the edges herself.
“Imagine my dismay when you did not return to the carriage with my food,” Holladay continued with a nudge of his boot against a spill of cherries. “Then imagine my surprise to find you ensnared by our favorite agent provocateur.” He touched the brim of his hat and smiled. “A pleasure to see you again, my lady.”
She nodded distractedly, her lips damp, plump and tingling. Looking down at her fallen basket, she saw that the contents were strewn over the cobblestones. They seemed to represent her wits in this moment: completely and utterly scattered.
She moved to pick them up, but the gentlemen did it for her. As she watched them, the giddiness that she had felt a moment ago evaporated on the sobering realization of what she’d just done.
She had kissed a man in the market! In the full light of day. Barely concealed by the shade provided by the roof. Only a woman who had no care for her reputation would have done such a thing. Only a woman like . . . Lady Avalon.
But wait, she thought as another realization struck her.