The Queen's Librarian by Carole Cummings Read Free Book Online

couldn’t decide if he was annoyed that it was Mister Scontun, or outraged that this relative stranger was in his house . Had he been in here the whole time? No, Laurie would’ve run into him, surely. And Bramble wasn’t exactly a vicious watchdog, but he was pretty good at pretending to be one.
    Lucas supposed he ought to be a little bit frightened—what with the whole relative-stranger- in-his-house thing—but the man didn’t seem to be dangerous, and he wasn’t armed. Unless one counted Cat. Which Alex certainly did. But the way Cat was snuggling and purring wasn’t exactly inspiring dread at the moment. It was kind of inspiring nausea, though.
    “What the bloody —” Lucas stopped himself. There was no reason to be completely crude. Well, there was, but Lucas could be the better man. Sometimes. When he tried. “Mister Scontun,” he said, as calmly as he could, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but one generally waits until one has been invited into a man’s home before accosting him in his bedroom.”
    Um. Right. That hadn’t come out quite the way it had sounded in Lucas’s head. Which was right this second reminding some of Lucas’s more inconvenient bits of all the pleasant accosting that had gone on in this particular bedroom. As it were.
    “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” Lucas said sternly. “If you have a matter you would like to see me about, I shall be pleased to make an appoint—” He stopped, the little bit of his brain that lived in the account books and not his trousers abruptly awake and slightly less hungover than he was. “ Did you have some sort of business you wanted to discuss, Mister Scontun?” Alex had said the Henleys over to Bambridge had been asking Ennis about their wine and brandy supplier, and this man had been at the Duck last night. Maybe—
    Oh. Wait.
    Lucas winced.
    “You’re not some kind of collector, are you?”
    All the books were up to date, and Lucas was very careful to pay all of the debts on time, but sometimes Mother or one of the girls would have a little charging seizure and “forget” to tell Lucas about it. Only once or twice, but the experiences had been embarrassing enough to sear themselves in Lucas’s memory. Except this man didn’t look like he’d be employed by any of the shops Mother or the girls would patronize. Once again, Lucas was struck by the odd style of the man’s coat, and now that it was daylight and Lucas wasn’t trying to see through a fog of beer and a screen of thorny bushes, he was struck further by the apparent wealth. The coat was silk, had to be, with intricate embroidery all along the seams, and cut in a style Lucas had never seen before.
    And Cat was shedding all over it.
    “Red Libe-aar-in,” the man repeated, skritching Cat under the chin with his long fingers as she stretched shamelessly into it. And then he went on, very matter-of-factly, to vent a string of babble that Lucas supposed made sense to Mister Scontun, but was no more decodable to Lucas now than it had been last night. Lucas was vaguely pleased that at least his failure to communicate successfully while having been strung up by a bush had not, in fact, been entirely due to his own not-sober-ness.
    “Mister… Whatever-your-name-is,” Lucas cut in, as politely as he could, considering the man had just walked into his home, commandeered his cat, and started blathering at him like he was supposed to understand, “I’m sure you know exactly what it is you’re trying to say, but I’m afraid I don’t, and I’m not going to be able to give you whatever it is you apparently want from me until you can say something that makes more sense to me than ‘Red Libe-aar-in’.” Lucas paused, then added a bit tetchily, “Which, by the way, I must say isn’t the most polite way I’ve ever been addressed.” Not the least polite, either, but still. “While I am, in fact a librarian, and my hair is, indeed, what one