Page 12 of Indebted (Hidden Gems #2)

“ I think this one is the best. Oh, yes, look at him. See how he rubs against my back? He likes attention. He’s a big dog, isn’t he? What’s his name?”

Marcus watched Amy cradle the head of a dark bay gelding. “I believe his name is Pepper. Yes, he’s the one. See all those black dots at the top of his socks?” Marcus pointed down to the sprinkling of dark fur on the tall black socks that went from the horse’s knees to his hooves.

“You’ve made an effort to get to know their names and markings. Good.” Amy smiled and rested her cheek to the horse’s nose.

“That’s the first time I’ve seen you smile all night—and the first time I’ve ever been jealous of a horse. If I sprinkle pepper down my socks, will you caress my nose like that?” Marcus leaned against the stall door.

To his surprise, Amy walked forward, eyes moving from side to side while her head remained straight. “I thought Thomas was going to meet us out here?”

“I may have sent him toward Uncle Horace’s new greenhouse instead of the stable. I’m still a little muddled about directions. I daresay I’ll get the hang of it after a month or two.”

“You wicked man.”

“How can it be wicked to want to make you smile? You look as though you have horrible news to tell me.” Marcus’ insides instantly felt cold and stiff. “Your father?”

The words had the most uncanny effect. Amy’s smile vanished and she froze, just shy of arm’s length. “Oh, Marcus,” she choked out and let herself fall forward into his embrace. “Everything is so difficult with Father right now. He wants me to marry you, but particularly because he thinks we’ll never do more than tolerate one another. All he cares about is that you have the right connections, you’re younger, and you won’t likely leave me a widow. He said he wants to protect me and doesn’t know what to do with me now that Mother’s gone. This feels awful, almost worse than having him angry and ignoring me.” She gave up trying to be brave and dropped her head, tears starting to stream down her cheeks. Her shoulders shook as all the anger and confusion of that afternoon’s talk was finally allowed to flow from her.

“Shh, shh. It’s all right. Well, no, it isn’t, but we’ll make it all right.” Marcus gathered her up in his arms and kissed her forehead.

“I shouldn’t cry. What will you think? And what would Thomas imagine if he arrived to find me sobbing and you with your arms around me?”

“That you have a beastly father and that I care about you. At least he might be doing it out of a misplaced sort of concern. He’s lost his great love and never recovered. He worries about you enduring that, too.”

“Yet I know that if I asked him if he would rather have lived without my mother or lived with and lost her, I know he’d pick the second option.”

Marcus nodded. “I know. I know, my dear. Well... Do you know what?”

Amy looked up, surprised by the sudden brightness in his tone. Part of her was angry that he should be so cheery when her world had felt splintered for days, and the most open conversation she’d had with her father in years had ended in his storming off and locking himself in his rooms. “What?” Perhaps Marcus is not as bright as I had come to believe. Only a fool could find any cheer in this moment.

“You haven’t done what he expects of you, which is to sit quietly embroidering until a man comes along to make you a meek little wife and mother.”

“No, I should say not. As you could plainly see today in town, the women of the district avoid me, and society shuns me—because I shunned it first.” Amy managed a wan smile.

“Oh, come now, did you truly shun it, or just evade its expectations? Did you kick and scream and refuse to play your party piece?”

Amy tried to recall her tentative reentry into society, several years after her mother’s death. Her family had remained locked in mourning and necessary operations of their business for two years. It had only been out of a need to ensure the mill was looked upon favorably that pushed her father to start attending local functions again.

“I... When Mother died, there was a long period where we refused any demands society put upon us. When Father began to fear that the local council would look unfavorably upon the mill and us as owners for being standoffish, we began to attend parties here and there, but it wasn’t with the goal of matchmaking. Father talked business with the older men. My brothers talked to their cronies, danced, and flirted. When I tried to stand with the other young women, I found that I couldn’t grasp what they were saying.” She frowned, a hand to her temple.

“You? Not grasp something, Amy? Were they writing out recipes in broad Roman?”

“No, they were gossiping about who would match with whom, what dress was cut too simply, which hairstyle was too ostentatious, who had an unbecoming laugh, or shade, or freckles.” Amy’s chest felt tight at the memory. “I stormed off and stood next to Father. Talk of shipping, the price of coal, and what the war in America was doing to the cotton trade—that made sense. All the rest? It was just unkindness and pettiness. It meant nothing at all to me. How could these girls think that I should care who had an ugly nose or a dress the wrong shade when my mother had died and my father was becoming a stranger?”

Marcus, for all his love of talk (and his talent at it), nodded and said nothing.

She went on, “It wasn’t until I was perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five that Father seemed to suddenly become alarmed that I hadn’t received much interest from suitors and insisted on trying to thrust the family into society at every opportunity. I found that the men wanted to tell me their positions and prospects, but when I would comment on them, they were offended. It was as if I should only nod and compliment.”

“Yes. Frankly, that is what we like,” Marcus admitted with a wry smile.

“When they would ask me about my accomplishments and I began to talk of plans for introducing dyed cotton or expanding gabardine, they told me to my face I shouldn’t speak of such things. And then I usually called them pompous fatheads who wouldn’t know a spinning mule from a rotating teapot and took my leave.”

“Oh, dear, dear, Amy. You did cause such a stir. And soon all the men in the district cowered, hiding their fragile egos and their delicate ears lest the talk of an intelligent woman should get in?” Marcus pretended to hide in fear, nimbly hopping behind a hay bale before reaching out and snagging her arm, pulling her into the dark shadows of the summery-smelling hay with him.

“You’ll get hay all over my dress, and Thomas will think terrible things.” Amy moved deeper into Marcus’ arms to avoid getting the prickly brown and yellow straw all over her pale pink dress.

Marcus pressed his forehead against hers. “You have never cared for what others think. What you’ve said only confirms it in my mind. Let your father bluster about who you should marry and why, and whether or not love should enter into it. You will defy him if you need to and be the better for it.” His hands moved from her arms to settle on either side of her throat, thumbs pressing against her jaw as he tipped her face upward. “He may think that he runs you like he runs his business, but he doesn't. Never will. No one in the world could stop me from falling in love with you, Amy Winthrop—or you with me.”

Not in love, but falling there.

Yes, perhaps that’s what this was, Amy thought as her lips reached for his and met their mark. Explosions set off inside of her, dizzying bursts of emotion as he kept kissing her and didn’t stop. When his mouth lifted from hers for a moment to breathe, she had to ask. “But why? It isn’t only the money?”

“I am a gambler at heart, Amy. You have the one with the longest odds, but you—” Marcus paused, shaking his head in an appreciative wonder that was foreign to her and only sent another wave of flames flying through her middle, “you are the one longshot in my life that I know will pay off.”

“Only you could speak of gambling and make love to a woman at the same time,” Amy laughed and let him claim her lips again.

“Amy! Mr. Holcomb? You know the stable is quite the opposite direction from where you sent me!”

Thomas’ voice was calling, heading in their direction.

“Here, Thomas!” Amy called back, putting her brother out of his misery and prying herself from Marcus’ embrace.

“Oh, hang it all,” Marcus grumbled. “But I expect to continue that conversation, Miss Winthrop. Will you and Jericho assist me tomorrow?”

Amy nodded, then put her hands on her hips. “Only if you will do your best to slip into conversation with my father and tell him how sensible it is not to overtax the production at the mill in anticipation of the Corliss engine being installed.”

“That would mean I have to arrive very early or very late in order to catch him at home,” Marcus pointed out. “Or that I must spend the entire day with you.”

“You would be most frightfully bored.”

“Oh... I’m sure we could think of something to do.”

“Amy? Where in the world are you?”

With a sigh and a smile, Amy ventured out of the stable, the sensation of Marcus’ hands on her face still warming her through and through. “Coming, Thomas!”

“YOU’RE HARDLY EVER free, Miss Amy,” Agnes spoke around a mouth full of pins as she knelt in front of her mistress. “Not like you to leave things to the last minute.”

Amy smiled uncertainly at the reflection in her bedroom mirror, staring at the dress Steven had brought home from Manchester and thrown at her with a careless shrug. “This dress will catch every eye and turn every head. I don’t know if I should wear it tonight, even though it was kind of Steven to procure it for me while he went into the city on business.”

“Well, you’ll have to wear it now! You’ve been glued to Mr. Holcomb for six days straight and given me no time to alter any other dress—and you’ve only got one new gown.” Agnes pinned the deep, rich purple fabric up by several inches, working her way around the front. “It’s a good thing you’re not a short little sprout like me, Miss Amy. As it is, I’ll have to hem it several inches.”

“I could ask Steven or Philip to go with me into Bolton, and we—”

“Oh, no. No, Miss Amy, don’t go chasing after a new gown with the ball being tonight.” Agnes whined, spitting pins into her hand.

“But this is so eye-catching.”

“And you’ve caught someone’s eye! Someone young and handsome, at that. All the girls will be envying you tonight!”

“I know. That’s what I’m afraid of,” Amy muttered.

Agnes, not usually one for profound statements, nonetheless made one. “Well, that may be all right, miss. They’ve been afraid of you for years.”

“Afraid of me? Me! Why should they—”

“Oh, because you’ve got a sharp tongue and a brain like a man’s.”

“Women have brains equal to men’s, Agnes, it’s just that we use them for different things so often. If we asked a man to nurse an infant and alter a dress, most of them would be failures. It’s what the world deems as difficult or worthy that divides us.”

“Yes, and don’t Mr. Holcomb seem to think like you? I should think he does, for I’ve seen you two riding your horses in the morning and playing cards in the library at night, and him holding your bits of metal and cursing at you when you stabbed him with your tinsnips.”

“My hand slipped.”

“My palms get wet when I look at John Brabbage. I reckon yours will dry up a little after you’ve married Mr. Marcus.”

Amy’s jaw dropped, and at last, she sputtered, “Agnes! You— That’s not— We’ve only just—”

Agnes seemed to take a savage pleasure in jabbing pins the rest of the way around the hem of the new gown. “He’s sweet on you, Miss Amy. He’s going to propose—and a good thing in my mind.”

“Oh, dear. Agnes, don’t tell me you’ve been recruited by Father to lecture me as well? I like Mr. Holcomb very well, but marriage... I doubt I can give any man the satisfaction of ‘winning’ me so quickly.”

“Ha! Miss Amy, men have tried to win you since I was a kitchen maid of nine or ten. There’s nothing quick about this.”

“To you, perhaps. To me, it feels very fast. I only met him a fortnight ago.”

“Ah, isn’t it often the way? Short courtships, long engagements, long marriages, that’s how it is for women in your class, Miss Amy.”

“When did you become such a student of manners and conventions, Agnes?” Amy laughed.

Agnes pouted up at her and moved on her knees, working her way around the heavy, full skirt. “Fine, laugh at me if you will. You may put off that handsome gent, but there will be a dozen ladies at the ball who’ll think nothing of moving faster than that!” Agnes snapped the fingers of her pin-free hand.

Amy gave herself a panicked glance in the mirror. For the first time in her life, she feared competition from other women. Marcus was hers .

We have some strange magic between us.

He teaches me the latest games.

I teach him to ride.

He asks me questions.

I have someone to confide in, and I am someone’s confidant.

He’s my agent with Father.

I’m his guide to the world of mills, cotton, and the hundreds of things that go with them.

“He is my friend, Agnes. I thought him to be my enemy, but oh... He is truly a good friend.”

Agnes jabbed in a final pin and rose, looking her mistress in the eyes with a saucy grin. “Best hope that all your friends don’t kiss you in the garden like that.”

“You saw?” Amy gasped, hopping off the low stool where she had been perched.

“So did Brabbage. And Cook.”

“Oh, no.” Amy sat down heavily on the chair at her dressing table.

“My mother always said I couldn’t let a man kiss me until we were engaged.”

“Yes, that’s what my mother told me, too.” Amy buried her face in her hands. “I suppose that will make its way around the town with silver wings, borne on John Brabbage’s flying tongue.”

Agnes shrugged. “I told him I’d put a rotten egg in his boot if he said a word before you were engaged.”

“Oh, Agnes! You darling.” Amy jumped up and hugged the shorter, rounder little form in front of her.

“Well, I’d still hurry up about it, Miss Amy. I can only use that threat for so long before Brabbage wants to impress a pretty girl and figures a new pair of boots are worth it.”