He knew that it wasn’t his brother returning, intent on convincing him to join their mother for the holiday season.

Knew it wasn’t a beggar child or person, desperately knocking on doors.

Or anyone else . . . for one simple reason: people didn’t knock on his door.

It was one of the reasons he’d been so very comfortable relieving Jenkins of that responsibility during this interlude when the servants were gone.

Val slid his fingertips into his temple and jabbed himself several times.

Oh, how he wished he’d not granted that reprieve.

For he didn’t want to see her again.

He didn’t want to see the pitying look that had been there in her revealing eyes after his telling.

He wanted peace and quiet and for her damned family to come and collect her and—

RapRapRapRapRapRap . . . RapRap.

“Christ,” he hissed, his words a prayer and not a mere exclamation.

She wasn’t leaving because she was a stubborn minx.

Stomping his way from the library to the foyer, Val steeled his heart as he went, determined to keep those walls around himself firmly in place.

He wrenched the door open, and by the way Myrtle stood with her fist poised, raised as if to strike, he’d interrupted a fourth of those grating knocks.

“Val,” she greeted, her deep hood and enormous cloak giving her the look of a child playing at dress-up in her mother’s wardrobe.

“I am busy,” he said crisply, and made to shut the door.

The minx slipped under his arm and stepped inside. She paused only long enough to favor Horace with a long stroke of his enormous head. “I won’t take up much of your time,” she announced, pushing the fur-lined hood back and revealing that riot of curls, which at every new day since he’d met her had grown increasingly wild, as the lady herself.

He’d always had a preference for blonde, and yet, those midnight-black strands gleaming at the ends, hopeless to be constrained or tamed, perfectly suited her. She was a fey fairy always up to mischief. A mermaid who’d found her way to shore and retained an ability to cast her net out to unsuspecting captains and land men and—

“I know what you are thinking,” Myrtle piped in, freeing him of that maddening path his thoughts had been waltzing down.

Giving his head a slight but hard shake, he pushed the door shut. “I rather doubt you do,” he muttered.

Around her feet, Horace danced, his limp making his movements uneasy and awkward. Unlike Val, the dog made no attempt to conceal his excitement at their morning visitor.

Egad, what madness had that been, those pathetic, poetic thoughts about this woman—any woman, no less. But especially this garrulous one with a tendency of making a nuisance of herself.