Love's Patient Fury (The Deverell Series Book 3) by Susan Ward Page A

why?”
    Panic rounded her eyes. What was the point of this? Why was he doing this to her in front of her family? He was purposely rattling her and rattling her well. After the fiction they’d given her father, why would he intentionally push her to behave in way that would make it obvious it was untrue?
    She arched a brow. “What I would like to do is eat, Your Grace.”
    He was focused on his plate. “I would not attempt the herring. As I recall, it agreed with you not at all yesterday.”
    Merry lowered her gaze to her plate. “Perhaps it was not the herring. Perhaps it was the company.”
    She noticed her hands were trembling as she moved her knife. Damn him. On top of everything, he had been right. The herring was her undoing. She was starting to feel sick again, that unrelenting nausea that had plagued her for nearly two months now. Stubbornly, she took another bite and wished she hadn’t. She’d had to force it down, and her stomach turned.
    She struggled against the nausea, struggled against Varian next to her, and struggled through breakfast beneath the heavy stare of her father until she could leave without making another scene. One by one her family left, until there remained only Varian, her mother, and Uncle Andrew at the table. Merry motioned for a footman, but it was her husband who came and pulled back her chair.
    Softly, Varian said, “I would like to speak with you. You did not give me the opportunity to speak with you last night. Come walk out of doors with me, Merry.”
    “I don’t wish to speak you. I wish I had never set eyes upon you.”
    She left the salon quickly and raced up the stairs, back to her bedroom, back to safety, and unfortunately back to the washbowl where her breakfast would soon be.
    Rhea and Andrew sat in the heavy silence left in the salon. Her brother-in-law came to her then, pausing at Rhea’s chair, picking up a strawberry from the ridiculous mountain Merry had left on her plate.
    “I have never liked that man, Rhea. It is a tragedy that Merry is married to Windmere. Lucien would do well to end this miserable farce and rid your daughter of him quickly,” Andrew said, and then added, “And you Rhea would do well to take count of the serving girls at bedtime while Windmere is here.”
    Elegantly calm, Rhea said, “That was no serving girl you heard last night, Andrew. That was my daughter. If you tell Lucien, I will never speak to you again. He is angry enough. He needs to calm so he can deal with this sensibly. Leave them alone. I don’t understand the purpose of this farce, but they fight like a married couple. Merry is angry with him. It will pass. This marriage will not be annulled, Lucien’s displeasure or not.”
    ~~~
    Merry sat on the grass against a stone wall in a meadow. She was shoeless, stocking-less, surrounded by kittens, her brother and Kate.
    A light fall breeze whispered upward from the channel redolent with the rich scents of Cornwall, brushing feather light against Merry’s cheeks and freeing wisps of dark curls from her combs. She laid her cheek against her knees, fighting her swirling web of hair as she tried to follow Kate’s rambling chatter.
    The rain had come on and off all morning, the faintest of drizzle, and the sky had taken on a grayish ombré behind the low dipping clouds of swan white. The droplets had collected on the tips of the grass and in the pockets in the stone wall, giving it the appearance of silvery glass. A quilt rested beneath them, a protection against the dampness, and Merry fixed her gaze on her icy toes, pink at their tips from the cold and the dampness of Falmouth she was no longer accustom to.
    She tried to work her feet into the warmth of a fold in the quilt. Beside her lay a forgotten bouquet of wild flowers, lily-of-the-valley, star grass and day flowers that Kate was enthusiastically weaving into a crown.
    Across the farm the news of Merry’s marriage had spread like a wild fire. The reaction was one of curiosity