Page 43 of As the Devil Dares

Robert supposed she was, despite the untamed hellcat that lurked within.

“Papa!” Clara ran into the library.

“Walk inside the house,” Chesney ordered patiently.

She slowed to a walk, yet her feet still somehow managed to propel her across the room as fast as one of Jackson Shaw’s racehorses. “Papa, it’s Daisy,” she choked out. She beseechingly wrapped her arms around Chesney’s legs, with a trembling bottom lip and large eyes round with worry. “She’s climbed up a tree again and gotten stuck. You have to get her down!”

“That cat will find its own way down in an hour or so. It always does,” he answered firmly.

Robert slid a sideways glance at Mariah, who wisely kept staring straight ahead, and mumbled, “Always, huh?”

Chesney placed a loving kiss on his daughter’s forehead. “Now stop worrying about that cat and go find Nanny. Tell her I said you could have an extra sweet roll this afternoon.”

Clara beamed, then turned to run from the library without a worry in the world.

“Walk.”

She walked slowly until she reached the hallway where, thinking that she couldn’t be seen, she launched into a bouncing, high-stepping skip as she hurried away.

Robert rolled his eyes. Women would be the death of him yet.

“Robert, join me upstairs in my study. The women won’t come looking for us for at least another hour.” Chesney nodded his head politely at Mariah. “Miss Winslow, it was a pleasure to see you again.”

“And you, my lord.”

Chesney took both his glass and the bottle, then headed toward the door. Clara burst into happy song from somewhere down the hallway, and he paused to shake his head with fatherly pride.

He glanced back at Robert and Mariah. “Clara worries about that cat, but it’s been stuck in a tree every day for the past fortnight, yet it always manages to get itself down.” He grinned as he stepped from the room. “I’d have to be a nodcock to climb up after it!”

Robert pinned a narrowed glare on Mariah, her lips twitching with suppressed laughter.

“You will pay for that,” he warned.

“Undoubtedly.” She nodded with mock gravity, her bottom lip trembling as she forced out, “Uncle Robert.”

Damned minx.

“I do hope your arm isn’t too painful,” she offered, an apologetic tone lacing her voice. “If I had known…”

He lifted a brow. “You still would have sent me up that tree?”

“Oh, most certainly,” she heaved out in a sigh, as if she simply couldn’t have helped herself.

“Mariah—”

She touched his bicep, silencing him. The teasing glint in her eyes dulled into quiet sincerity, and she admitted quietly, “But I am glad that you shared your memories of your father with me.”

The genuineness behind that comment surprised the hell out of him. So did the demure way she folded her hands in front of her as she dropped her gaze to the rug.

“And thank you for listening in kind about my mother,” she added. “I find that it helps sometimes to talk about her.”

“I suppose it does.” Although he hadn’t yet gotten to that point himself. Oh, sharing with her how wonderful Richard Carlisle’s life had been was far easier than he’d suspected, but he wasn’t prepared yet to reveal the truth about his death. If he ever could.

“I can’t do that with Evie or Papa, you see, because they have their own pain over losing her. I assume it’s the same for you, with your family.”

“Certainly.” Except that he’d never tried to talk about his father with them. And never planned to.

She gave a slow nod, turning her head slightly toward him but not yet raising her gaze to look fully at him. “We might never be anything more than adversaries,” she confided softly, “but you can trust me with this.” Then she lifted her gaze, and the compassion for him on her face struck him like a blow. “If you ever need to talk about your father and what—”