Page 19 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match

How did one refuse a proposal of marriage that had not, in actuality, been tendered? The thought had plagued her all through the carriage ride back home, which had been mercifully brief, and it lingered still at the forefront of Mercy’s mind as she bent over the billiard table, struggling to turn her mind to the task of sinking the red ball into a pocket.

She had given Thomas certain expectations, no doubt, with the intimacies they had shared. Above all, he was an honorable man, upstanding and rigidly moral. There was little room in his regimented life drawn of such stark blacks and whites for the shades of grey that colored her own.

Impossible to tell, at this juncture, if he truly wished to marry her or only imagined that he did. Whether he had convinced himself that marriage was the most reasonable, logical outcome, whether he had assumed that the liberties he had taken and which she had granted had made marriage a foregone conclusion, at least to his mind. She had a week, perhaps, before that proposal was given in earnest.

One day, he would be grateful for her refusal. As she was grateful that his present financial state and his rigid sense of honor kept him from tendering that proposal immediately. Because the moment she refused, she knew it would all come to an end. The camaraderie, the closeness they had somehow fallen into which had grown to feel more natural than breathing. The intimacy they shared.

Only a week, and she would have to fit a full lifetime into it. One week to hold within her heart for the rest of her days. It wouldn’t be a lie, exactly. More like a dream, which would break upon waking—no promises made which he would feel obligated to honor. Once she had honored hers, told him the truth she had concealed these last weeks, he would be glad of it.

And it would end. It would all end.

She missed the shot; a rare blunder.

Thomas chuckled, adjusting his spectacles upon the bridge of his nose as he nudged her away from the table to make his own shot. “Something on your mind?”

he asked as he lined up his cue.

More than he could possibly know. More that she was of a mind to tell him at present. “A fair few things,”

she admitted. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I’m about to beat you,”

he said, and with a smooth stroke of his arm he sank her ball, clinching the game for himself. “I can’t imagine you would have let me, had you been giving the game your full concentration.”

In fact, her concentration had been split across half a dozen things, each vying for attention, clamoring in her head. But nothing quite so much as him. She busied herself with collecting the ivory balls, replacing them in their silk-lined case as he retreated to the sideboard to pour two glasses of brandy.

“Tell me,”

he said as he offered her a glass, and his voice held such a depth of warmth—as if she could tell him anything. And he meant it, she knew. Or thought he did, at least.

“Tomorrow,”

she said, in a burst of nervous energy. “I’m going tomorrow. To Cheapside.”

She had promised him this much.

He stilled, glass half-raised to his lips. “To a tavern?”

Mercy gave a short nod.

“Which?”

“The…The Black Swan,”

she said. “I’ve never been there before. I will not be recognized.”

At least, she didn’t think so. Though her experience with taverns was limited, she had gotten the impression that the people who frequented them tended to choose one to patronize, and rarely altered their habits unless out of necessity. “You’re not happy,” she said.

“Not happy, no,”

he acknowledged, setting his glass aside. One hand circled around her, flattening against the small of her back to draw her closer. “I am trying my best,”

he said, “to be rational about this. To ask you only for reasonable accommodations for the sake of your safety.”

The fingers of his free hand slid into her hair, knocking a few pins loose as he dragged her closer to press her head against his shoulder. “But you cannot expect me to be happy about it.”

“I promised I would tell you,”

she said, breathing in the oddly comforting scent of his shaving soap, which clung to his throat. “I don’t want to be at odds with you.”

Not with only a week left between them.

“We’re not at odds,”

he soothed, and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “When will you leave?”

“After the theatre,”

she said, her fingers curling into the soft fabric of his coat. “It will be late enough that no one will make note of it should I retire for the evening. Your mother and the girls will be changing and taking down their hair; they will not notice if I should slip out of the house.”

They never had before. “By the time I return, they’ll be fast asleep.”

“What time do you expect that to be?”

“One,”

she said. “Perhaps two, at the very latest.”

“You will take the carriage,”

he said, his fingers sliding down the nape of her neck to massage the muscles there which had grown tight with strain.

Perhaps half of the tension she had been carrying came loose with her sigh, and Mercy relaxed against the expanse of his chest. “I don’t know that the coachman will agree to take me,”

she said. To Cheapside, after dark? It seemed unlikely.

“He will if I ask it of him,”

Thomas said. “He’ll remain nearby, of course. I don’t want you taking a hack home again.”

He truly wasn’t going to stop her, despite his disapproval. “Thank you,”

she said. “I promise I’ll come straight home again.”

“You had better, for the coachman will be instructed of the same,”

he said, and she could hear the threat of a frown in his voice.

Mercy choked on an unwise flutter of laughter. “And I will remember my key.”

“It will make no difference whether or not you do. I will be up to see you off, and so I will remain until you return.”

He sounded a bit cross, as if he had conceded this much against his better judgment. But still he had conceded.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said.

“Yes,”

he said. “I do.”

Though he softened the grim tones of the words with the stroke of his hand along her spine. “I have known you’ve been sneaking out for weeks. I’ve had more than one sleepless night over it. At least I know, approximately, when this one will end.”

He heaved a sigh, his arms tightening around her. “Is that all that troubles you at present?”

No. What troubled her most now was the thought of surrendering this in potentially as little as a week’s time. What troubled her was the prospect of never again feeling his arms around her, of nevermore laying her head upon his shoulder. Never to feel so safe, so protected, so cossetted and cared for. She could do without the balls and the dinner parties and the social events at which she had never truly expected to be welcome.

But her life would be so much emptier for his loss. So much colder. One warm memory, she told herself as she lifted her head from its place upon his shoulder. Just one. It wasn’t so very much to ask. Only one warm night to heat the cold ones which lay ahead of her.

“No,”

she said, turning her face into the curve of his throat. “Thomas, if I ask something of you—something significantly less than proper—will you think less of me for it?”

“Hmm.”

His soft huff of amusement skittered past her ear. “Less proper than sharing a carriage without a chaperone? Or playing billiards alone?”

She supposed he had, in fact, already made a few concessions in regard to propriety. The sort of things that no one would have noticed. They might be sharing the same house, but so were his mother and sisters. No one would have assumed her to be unchaperoned—even if she had. “Less proper even than—than our evening in Cheapside,” she said.

Beneath her fingers, she felt the escalation of his heartbeat, the steady pulse rising to a pound. “Mercy, what are you asking?”

Too late to retract it now. And she would never forgive herself for letting the chance pass her by, otherwise. “I am asking,”

she said, clearly, concisely, “for you to come to bed with me.”

∞∞∞

Thomas had never been so tempted to indiscretion in his life. For a long moment it felt as though he had imagined those words, invented them, wished them into being. Because she couldn’t possibly have suggested—

But this was Mercy. Of course she could have done.

He’d stood in his stunned silence too long. “You do think less of me,”

she accused, an odd fragility trembling in her voice as she bestirred herself from her prior comfortable drape across his chest to draw away from him.

“God, no.”

His arms banded around her, and that tension that had risen in her at his apparent rejection faded in seconds. “No, of course I don’t think any less of you.”

He never could. She was always going to be bold, to be adventurous and brave and forthright. A leader, charging headfirst into the unknown with enthusiasm rather than dread. How could he possibly stand firm against the wishes of a woman like her? Still a general, if presently vague, sense of honor compelled him to say, “It would be best”—proper; correct; moral—“to wait.”

“I don’t want to wait,”

she said, and the sulky petulance within her voice provoked a short, strained, laugh from him.

“We are in your father’s house. You are being chaperoned by my mother. Anyone would assume I’d pressed some advantage,”

he said into her haphazardly-pinned curls. “For God’s sake, Mercy, I am doing my damnedest to be honorable about this.”

“I don’t want you to be honorable about it, either. No one will know. Please, Thomas,”

she said, and lifted herself onto her toes to brush her lips to his. “Won’t you be just a bit wicked with me? Just this once?”

Good God, it could never be just this once. Advancing their vows would be a bell that could not be unrung. He had found it a trying task to keep his hands off of her after only that short interlude in the carriage—just ten minutes had changed him.

If he took her to bed, he would be forever altered. And it would be magnificent.

“Christ,”

he said. “You are going to be the death of me.”

There was nothing in the world he wanted more than her. Beyond the point of pride or shame, beyond those principles to which he had clung with such ferocity all his life. Beyond any semblance of honor.

“That means yes,”

she said, with a tiny tilt of her head. “Doesn’t it?”

It meant more than yes. It meant he’d be writing to her father in the morning to announce his intentions. It meant instructing mother to arrange a ceremony in as few weeks as she could possibly manage. It meant a short engagement and a scandalously swift wedding.

It meant the very first thing he’d be purchasing once he had run Fordham to ground would be a wedding ring. It meant that the scandal, the gossip he had hoped to avoid would find them anyway, albeit for different reasons. There would be talk, and he—he wouldn’t care.

He wouldn’t care. For the first time in his life, he wouldn’t bloody care. Because he’d have Mercy as his wife, and that was all that mattered.

“It means we had better hurry, because my family absolutely cannot catch us sneaking off to your bed chamber together,”

he said, and she gave a giddy little laugh. With that same exuberance of which he had grown so fond, she seized his hand in hers and began to drag him along behind her.

Perhaps he had not tried very hard to maintain a hold upon his honor, his sense of decency. But to pit his will against Mercy’s in this? An impossibility on its face.

And he found himself glad of it.

∞∞∞

“You look surprised,”

Mercy said, as Thomas closed the door behind him.

“It’s tidier than I had expected,”

he said. “Given the state it was in when last I was here.”

That morning he’d snooped within her dressing room, she supposed he meant. And it was true that her room had become somewhat less chaotic than it had been. She had taken the note he had left for her upon the stairs and extrapolated it to other areas of her life, leaving little reminders to herself where she would be most likely to see them.

The corner of his mouth hitched up as he caught sight of one pinned to the back of her door. “Shoes?”

he inquired, with an arch of his brow.

“So I don’t run about the house without them,”

she said with a shrug. “The maids think I’ve gone a bit mad.”

The chaos of her habits had not been exorcised, per se—but it had become more of an organized sort. A manageable sort, because of Thomas. Because he had cared enough to help her wrest some semblance of order from it all. One that suited her. As he did. As they would have suited each other.

Would have.

The thought tore a tiny hole in her heart—the first prick of that knife which she had placed upon her breast herself. “I’m afraid you’ll be playing lady’s maid tonight,”

she said, with a gesture to the space on the bed beside her as she removed her shoes and her stockings. “As I plainly cannot summon one to my room at present. Will you come take down my hairpins?”

The width of that smile grew. Pleased, she thought. “You are not in the least bit shy, are you?” he asked.

“No,”

she said. “Not really.”

There had never seemed much sense in shyness, and there seemed even less in pretending otherwise.

“I knew you would be like this,”

he said, and his fingers hooked in his cravat, dragging it away from his neck in a long pull of fabric, which he crammed into his pocket. “I knew you would be like this from the moment I saw you riding horseback at midnight in your nightclothes. Like Lady Godiva.”

He had seen that? She’d never known, never suspected. “I had no idea you were at home. Your family was meant to be in London,”

she said. “If I had known, I wouldn’t have done it.”

He had ordered her, after all, to stay off of his property unless and until she had been specifically invited. It was only that she had let her horse lead himself, and she hadn’t noticed precisely where they had been headed until he’d wandered across the rolling green lawns of the Armitage manor house.

“Oh, yes, you damned well would have, you sweet little liar.”

A chuckle rasped in his throat as he tore at the buttons of his coat. “You have always delighted in menacing me. Don’t deny it.”

She would not. She could not. She had delighted in menacing him, in prodding stern, serious Thomas into some manner of untoward reaction. “If it consoles you at all, my bum was sore for days thereafter,” she said.

“Do you know, I think it does? I might have heated your arse for it myself, had I been able to draw my gaze away from you long enough run outside and catch you.”

At last he shed his coat, discarding it carelessly, as if it mattered not where it fell provided he had gotten it off.

“You were watching me?”

Oddly, she was charmed. “Not just in a—a glance out the window?”

“Oh, no. I watched you,”

he said, and he dropped down onto the bed beside her. “I watched you in that damned nothing of a nightgown, and I wondered whether it was only my imagination that supplied the curves of your breasts beneath it. I watched you and wondered whether your skin was as soft as it appeared. I watched you until you were just a speck in the distance, and then I closed my eyes for at least a quarter of an hour in a vain attempt to preserve you in my memory just as you had been.”

Mercy might not be shy, but she could still be moved to blush. “I spied on you once,”

she admitted. “I didn’t mean to do it. I was trespassing.”

“Of course you were,”

he said dryly, though the curl of his lips had lent a fond inflection to his voice. With one hand, he fished through her hair, drawing out pins one at a time. “When was this?”

“A year ago or so,”

she said. “You were swimming in your pond. Naked.”

Her shoulders rose and fell. “I didn’t know you were there until you’d surfaced. I suppose it was lucky for me that you weren’t wearing your spectacles—”

“I don’t, when I swim. I’ve lost more than one pair to the murky depths. Enough to have taken the lesson, at least.”

“If you had been, you’d surely have seen me,”

she said. “You looked straight in my direction for a moment, and I was certain I’d been caught.”

But he would surely have said something if he had caught her there, trespassing once more upon his land. “I was at most twenty feet away.”

“I’m blind as a mole without my spectacles. And you—you often wear earth-toned gowns. Probably you blended with the rest of the landscape, to my sight. Did you watch me?”

“For longer than it would be prudent to admit,”

she said, and the last coil of her hair came tumbling down her back as he removed the final few pins. “But you climbed out, and I knew you would be seeking your spectacles. I left before you could spot me there.”

“And how much did you see?”

“Everything.”

She nudged him with her shoulder in censure when he cast back his head and laughed. “I was curious! You can hardly blame me—”

His fingers tangled in her hair, and he pressed his lips to hers to quiet her protests. “Then it seems you have the advantage of me,”

he said. “But not for long. Turn.”

Mercy gave him her back, felt his hands slide down to her shoulders and meet just above the neckline of her gown, lingering over that first button closure. The haste that he had exhibited in shedding his outerwear had faded to nothing, and instead he had acquired a steady patience, as if this act of divesting her of her gown were a pleasure of its own. One to be savored.

“Do you know what is meant to happen?”

he asked idly, conversationally, his hands warm even through the fabric of her gown.

“Yes.”

Mostly. “I’m not ignorant.”

“I didn’t intend to imply you were,”

he said. “I’ll confess I don’t really know what women are told, or when. But I do know you were quite young when you lost your mother—”

Mercy winced.

“—And to the best of my knowledge, it would have been she who was meant to tell you.”

A few more buttons undone, and the cool air in the room whisked over her skin. “My mother probably would have taken up that mantle, had you ever shown any inclination to be married. She might still do. Of course, you shall have to let her, and to pretend you don’t know any better.”

“At the rate you are going with my buttons, I’m not certain I will.”

“Don’t fuss. I’m enjoying myself immensely.”

He made an approving sound deep in his throat as he kissed her shoulder. “How do you always smell like cinnamon?”

“It’s in my soap,”

she said, shivering at the mild abrasion of his cheek against her skin, the rasp of stubble tingling upon her sensitive flesh.

“Is it? It’s delightful.”

He helped her to wiggle out of her gown, and the material slid off of her legs and pooled on the floor beside the bed. “Of course, now I run the risk of an inconvenient erection at the slightest whiff of a Chelsea bun.”

A giddy laugh rose in her throat, and she found it—lovely. She had not thought to find humor in this, but it was a welcome surprise. His fingers tangled in the laces of her stays, and hers found the tapes of her petticoats, and then there was only her chemise left. Light, gauzy linen which left little to the imagination. But then, it had not been meant to be seen.

“Do I get to undress you?”

she asked.

“If I can bear to let you,”

he said wryly, and she lifted her arms so that he might draw her chemise off over her head. And then he sat for a moment in mute silence, hands still clutching the rumpled fabric of her chemise, as if her nakedness had stunned the words straight out of him.

He looked at her as if she were a revelation, like a long-awaited dream come to life. “I’ve had an epiphany,”

he said, his voice thick with desire.

“What, just now?”

From only the sight of her bare breasts?

“Yes. Just now,”

he said, and still he sounded astonished, amazed. “All my life I have striven to do the right thing, the proper thing. To be responsible and serious and steady. I have eschewed all manner of pleasures, all manner of wickedness, in the service of being who I thought I had to be, what I thought it was necessary for me to be.”

“Thomas, that’s really not much of an epiphany.”

A hoarse laugh rattled in his chest. “That’s not the epiphany,”

he said, and his fingers attacked the buttons of his waistcoat, wrenching the material from his body with a renewed sense of urgency. “The epiphany is that I can be both. Wicked and responsible. The one does not deny the other. I only needed you,”

he said, “to show me that. Always, I have only needed you.”

The confession produced an ache in her chest, along with a titillated skirl of excitement. “And do you intend to be wicked with me, then?”

she asked, and stretched out her fingers to toy with the buttons running along the front of his shirt.

“Oh, yes,”

he said. “I was so wrong. It’s not giving up, Mercy. It’s giving in. Accepting all those things I have long denied. Becoming the truest version of myself.”

He seized her hand in his, drawing her wrist to his mouth to press his lips there, where her pulse beat wild and strong. “Will you be wicked with me?” he asked.

“Yes,”

she breathed, and relished the hitch of his breath in his chest as she crawled into his lap, into his arms. “Oh, yes.”

For as long as he was hers, she would be his in return. To indulge the both of them, for too short a time, in whatever wickedness she might wrest from him. In whichever ways he pleased, for she thought she might have stumbled across an epiphany of her own.

That whatever wickedness he had held tightly leashed inside of him would undoubtedly please her as well.