Page 22 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match

Tomorrow, Mercy thought as she watched the couples swirl about the ballroom floor in a dizzying blur of color. Tomorrow would be the beginning of the end. Tomorrow Thomas would have to resume his search for Fordham, his time and attention snatched away from her once more in the service of reclaiming that which rightfully belonged to him.

And their affair would come to an end. It would have to, before he could be brought to propose. She would have to tell him all—tonight.

“Mercy,”

Juliet said as her latest dance partner returned her to Thomas’ side in lieu of the baroness, who had gone off toward the refreshment table, “you’ve not danced at all this evening. Are you quite well?”

“I am, thank you.”

Happily, no one had asked. No one but Thomas, who had scrawled his name upon the dance card that dangled from a ribbon on her wrist, for a waltz that had yet to come up. Those gentlemen who had seen fit to call upon her only when they had learned of her dowry had, it seemed, at last received the message that their suits, such as they were, would not be entertained. “But you’ve danced a great deal, I see.”

“Oh, yes.”

Juliet smiled. “It’s been just lovely.”

“You’ll have callers aplenty tomorrow, no doubt,”

Mercy said. “I counted at least three I would not hesitate to describe as utterly smitten.”

One gentleman in particular had all but stumbled over his own feet in order to reach her side for the dance he had claimed. But then, Juliet was a lovely girl, bright and bubbly and with an effortless manner of making a body feel comfortable.

“Oh,”

Juliet said, with a tiny frown. “I hope not.”

Beside Mercy, Thomas shifted. “You hope not?”

Juliet let loose a light, trilling laugh. “Thomas,”

she said. “It’s my first Season. Besides, I have no particular plans to marry until I am twenty at the very earliest.”

Mercy choked on a laugh at the brief consternation that flickered across Thomas’ face. “You are aware that the purpose of the Season is to find a husband,” he said.

“And I will,”

Juliet said lightly. “When I count myself ready for one. But I shouldn’t like to break any hearts in the meantime, you understand.”

She smoothed at her skirts and glanced down at the card upon her wrist to see with whom she was next to dance. “I’ve had quite a pleasant Season thus far. I shouldn’t like to muddle it all up with an engagement.”

With a flutter of her fingers, she was gone again, on the arm of her next dance partner.

“Hell,”

Thomas muttered beneath his breath. “Just how many suitors do you expect I shall have to refuse on her behalf?”

“Truly? None,”

Mercy said. “Unless they are particularly persistent. Juliet will let them down gently herself.”

With such grace and tact that she suspected there would be few, if any, hurt feelings or pride to be salvaged. “She’s quite diplomatic, you know, when she wishes to be. Confident enough to state her wishes plainly, but charming enough to make even a refusal not quite so painful as it might otherwise be.”

“Do you know,”

Thomas said reflectively, with the hint of a smile in his voice, “I think that must be your influence upon her.”

“You’re not upset?”

“Because she doesn’t wish to marry her first Season out? No,”

he said with a chuckle. “I don’t care if she’s out five Seasons—ten, even. I don’t care if she chooses to never marry. The choice of a spouse is the most important decision a person can make. It should not be undertaken lightly, without due consideration.”

By the grace of God alone, Mercy managed not to flinch at the words. Instead she let her eyes drift across the ballroom, where they landed upon Marina there at the refreshment table beside the baroness. She, too, had danced little this evening, but Mercy expected that was because the one gentleman with whom she would most have liked to dance would not be found within the ballroom. Nor would he be likely to receive an invitation to any of the other society events at which Marina would be present.

Mercy swallowed a sigh with the last of her champagne. Oh, Marina, she thought. We shall both be heartbroken this Season, you and I.

∞∞∞

At last, the waltz. Thomas had selected this one specifically for where it had appeared in the schedule of dances. Roughly halfway through the evening, when the vast majority of the invited guests—even those known to be habitually late—would have already arrived, while still far too early for much of anyone to have decided that they had had done with the evening’s entertainment.

A perfect opportunity, he thought, to slip away once the dance had concluded.

Soon enough there would be no need to slip away, to exercise any subterfuge such as this. They would be married, and no one ever batted an eye at a married couple strolling off in one another’s company.

Probably, he thought, they’d still slip away anyway. For the very thrill of it, the excitement of the clandestine. And with a houseful of his relations, there was bound to be a certain rarity in true privacy which they would enjoy.

He pulled Mercy through a turn and bent to her ear. “I’m sure you’ve been warned,”

he said, “of the dangers of going wandering during an event such as this one.”

Her slender fingers clutched his a little tighter. “Of course,”

she said, blinking those dark eyes up at him in all innocence through the fan of silky black lashes.

“You’re meant to stay within the company of your chaperone,”

he said. “And to avoid deserted corridors, any private areas of the residence, gardens—”

“Terraces as well,”

she suggested mildly. “And, in general, to eschew the company of known rakes and gentlemen of impure intentions.”

“Just so,”

he said. “They’re firm rules, set in stone. Sacrosanct, as it were.”

And then, on the next turn: “I thought perhaps you might be interested in breaking a few of them.”

She laughed, full-throated and melodious, attracting a few curious glances from other dancers. With some effort, she managed to restrain her amusement until the interest she had inadvertently drawn had waned once again. “Which?”

she inquired, a smile still caught in that merry dimple etched into one cheek.

“Lady’s choice,”

he said, pitching his voice low. “But I would be remiss if I did not point out to you that the door to the garden is just past the refreshment table, and this particular residence features a rather large hedge maze.”

Or so he had heard.

“I’m sure it would be, in daylight,”

she said, with a roll of her eyes. “How are we to see it in the darkness?”

“Counterpoint,”

he said. “How is anyone to see us?”

She gave a short snicker, which died with the minute widening of her eyes. “You’re serious,”

she said, her voice had gone breathy and low.

“Quite serious, yes.”

“You want to—to—here?”

It had ended in a scandalized little squeak, which Thomas found rather amusing, given that nothing he had ever known or learned of Mercy had thus far indicated she could be scandalized. But scandalized she was—and titillated, and intrigued, and fascinated.

He leaned close, closer than was proper, and whispered in her ear: “I want to take you out to the gardens, find a secluded spot within that hedge maze, and do what I told you I would that first night in your bed.”

A shiver raced down her spine; her fingers clenched upon his as if she feared wilting to the floor without the support of his hand in hers. “I don’t know that I could keep quiet,”

she admitted in a raw whisper, nibbling at the lush swell of her lower lip.

“The grand virtue of a hedge maze,”

he said, “is that you must be found to be caught.”

A whisk of a laugh puffed over her dry lips. “If you had been watching instead of entertaining lurid thoughts,”

she said, “perhaps you would have noticed just how many people have already slipped out into the gardens ahead of us.”

His brows lifted. “I hadn’t, really. Were there so many?”

“Oh, yes. I made a game of it in my head for a while. I counted at least twelve, and only four have so far returned.”

She canted her head, reflecting upon it. “I suppose the hedge maze must be a favored rendezvous spot for lovers?”

“I haven’t the faintest. I’ve never been out to see it myself.”

He bit off a sigh. “Too crowded, then?”

“With eight still remaining at last count, notwithstanding any who might decide to try their own luck after us? Yes, I should say so.”

She wrinkled her nose, a charming expression of mild distaste.

“The terrace?”

he suggested. “I grant you, it’s likely not the most comfortable—”

She shook her head. “Too confined,”

she said. “And too visible besides. There must be doors and windows. We’d have to dodge notice.”

A quandary. But he had been an invited guest of their hosts a few times before, and was not entirely unfamiliar with the house itself and what rooms might be within their reach. Tentatively he ventured, “There is a salon just down the main hall. You won’t rouse suspicion by approaching it so long as you are not observed entering. It’s a large room, lots of convenient furniture”—and therefore many equally convenient hiding places—“but you will have to be quiet. It’s just before the ladies’ retiring room.”

“Hmm.”

With a purse of her lips, she truly seemed to be considering it. “Do you know,”

she said. “It’s really quite loud in the ladies’ retiring room, with so many ladies chatting whilst repairing their hair or attending to their toilette. Unless we are very indiscreet, I think it is likely we won’t be noticed.”

Yes. His heart escalated to a rapid patter, thrumming with an illicit thrill. “We’re agreed, then?”

“Oh, yes,”

she sighed as the dance concluded at last, and he kept hold of her hand a few moments longer than was strictly proper. “The salon, then. I’ll meet you there in ten minutes.”

∞∞∞

One more occasion to be wicked. She would have agreed to any of it, really, just for the sake of savoring that wickedness while it lasted. But she was glad that Thomas had bargained with her anyway. It was a memory that would persist; stern, proper Thomas debating the advantages and disadvantages of various locations for an amorous tryst in the middle of a crowded dance floor, as if he hadn’t anything more than a passing interest in whether or not he would be overheard.

Thomas had gone on ahead of her, and since the hallway was deserted except for two ladies chatting with one another on their way back to the ballroom, Mercy assumed he had made it safely and unobserved. She kept her steps slow and meandering, waiting for the ladies she had passed to proceed back into the ballroom, and darted for the door the moment they had, lest anyone else emerge from the retiring room before she could make it inside.

The door opened into the room, without a sound from the hinges. Mercy squeezed herself through the crack she’d opened. The tiny sliver of light that had followed her in extinguished itself the moment she closed the door behind her. That light had revealed little before the room had been plunged once more into darkness, and she paused there near the door, her chest heaving with a sort of frenzied energy, willing her eyes to adjust.

A burst of laughter from the ladies’ retiring room next door—loud enough to shear clear through the wall which separated the rooms—startled her enough to make her jump. Perhaps they ought to have risked the hedge maze after all, she thought, as her heart pounded through a few harried beats.

There was a muffled laugh off to her right.

“Thomas?”

she whispered into the darkness.

“Here.”

He’d been lingering there close to the wall, had probably watched her come in. Invisible upon entry, because he’d been so perfectly concealed behind the door as it had swung open to admit her.

The room itself seemed a maze, clustered with nebulous deep shadows that she assumed must be furniture of some sort, but Thomas had had several more minutes than she had for his eyesight to adjust itself to the darkness, and he seized her hand in his, navigating toward the right side of the room.

“Has anyone come in?”

she asked in a murmur. “While you were waiting?”

“Yes,”

he said. “Once. Not to linger. It was only a gentleman searching for the card room, I think. He didn’t see me waiting.”

Trepidation lifted the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck. “We can’t be caught,”

she whispered. If they were—if they were, he would feel honor-bound to marry her. Even if she ruined him. Even if she ruined his entire family. Even if all that would ever come from it was resentment and, eventually, loathing for what she had cost him.

“We won’t be. Because when he came in, I saw this.”

He stopped, lifted their joined hands, and pressed her fingertips to—

A screen. Decorative, she thought, designed more for the illusion of privacy than the reality of it. But it was made of thick wood, segmented into five panels connected by hinges, and it stretched from the floor to perhaps a few inches over her head.

“It was placed against the wall,”

Thomas said, his voice pitched to a murmur. “I made some…minor adjustments. Nothing that is likely to draw attention, so distant as it is from the door.”

Of course. Meticulous, logical Thomas was the consummate planner, the organizer, the architect of order even within chaos. In the darkness here within the corner, where the door would largely block the light’s reach, he’d pulled the screen away from the wall just enough to create a private alcove behind it. He’d sourced a chair from one of the arrangements of them peppered throughout the room, but there were so many that one chair would hardly be missed from amongst them.

“We’ll be effectively invisible,”

he said, as he placed his hands upon her waist and pressed her down into the plush upholstery of the chair. “But notably not inaudible,”

he added, and his voice had come from much lower, as if he’d gone to his knees on the floor before her. “You really will have to remain quiet.”

Such an easy thing for him to say as he slipped his hands beneath her skirts, rifling through layers of petticoats to reach her stockinged legs. Chill bumps prickled along her arms as his fingertips slid up her calves, and her hands curled over the arms of the chair, nails digging into the smooth varnished wood.

Cool air whisked about her legs as he drew her skirts up, bunching them upon his arms to drape the bundle of fabric around her waist. Probably it wouldn’t wrinkle too severely, she thought inanely, as the heat of his breath burned through the silk of her stocking. Probably.

His lips touched her skin just above the line of her stocking. Mercy’s toes curled in the confines of her shoes as his right hand gripped her thigh, pulling her closer to the edge of the seat. He wedged his shoulders between the awkward splay of her legs, hooking her knee over his shoulder. The wool of his evening coat abraded the sensitive skin at the back of her thigh.

Warm hands slid beneath her bottom, and his thumbs coasted through private curls to find the seam of her body, spreading sleek petals apart. Too dark to see much of anything, she reassured herself, but she could feel the heat of his breath there between her legs, so close.

An odd tension stole through her limbs. Did she really mean to allow this? Here? Where anyone might stumble upon them?

His tongue touched her in a long lap, setting every nerve afire with a single stroke.

Yes. Yes, she did.

Mercy slapped one hand to her mouth, muffling the sound that clawed to escape. A whimper slipped through the cage of her fingers, and it sounded mortified—and aroused.

Thomas turned his head and touched his lips to the tender flesh of her inner thigh, and a low, dark laugh vibrated over her skin. “I am going to lick you until you come on my tongue,”

he said. “And then I am going to bend you over this chair and fuck you until you scream.”

Her knees trembled. “I can’t scream,”

she whispered desperately. “You can’t let me—ah!”

Her nails bit into the wood of the chair as his tongue touched her again, laving her sensitive flesh with exquisite precision. “We’ll be caught,”

she managed to whisper through a few frenetic breaths.

“We won’t be caught.”

A little flick of his tongue, and her back arched.

Could he promise that? She couldn’t hold the thought in her head for longer than a moment. He found that tiny bead of flesh buried beneath the sparse curls, curled his tongue around it, and sucked. Mercy heard the harsh pants of her own breath, realized belatedly that she had removed her hand from her mouth to stroke his hair and tangle her fingers through the soft strands.

He made an approving sound, rather like a large cat enjoying the affectionate touch, and his hand released its grip on her bottom. Two fingers slid inside her in a firm glide, rendered easier by the skillful manipulation of his tongue.

“I can feel you, when you’re about to come,”

he said, between flicks of his tongue. “I can hear you. Your breaths grow faster. You gasp.”

Another plunge of his fingers. “You twitch. Inside, you clench around me. You pulse and tremble.”

He seemed to have some instinctual knowledge, some innate understanding of exactly where to stroke, how much pressure to use. And she did tremble and twitch and gasp and clench as sensation built in a coiling spiral, mere moments from breaking free. “So soon?”

he murmured, and she fancied she could feel the smile upon his lips. “Come hard, then.”

That tension burst in a blinding array of fireworks behind her closed eyes, and her throat tightened around the first warbling notes of a scream. It never emerged. The cup of his palm flattened over her mouth, smothering it before it could begin. It died like a fire deprived of air, as her lungs deflated and her limbs went lax, her head lolling against the low back of the chair.

“You’ll scream,”

he said, with a last kiss to her knee, which remained draped over his shoulder.

But he would ensure that she would not be heard, she understood at last.

“Can you stand?”

It was a guttural growl in the darkness, and if not for the fact that the words had been intelligible, she might have been tempted to attribute it to some beast of the wild, some hungry predator coiled to pounce.

“I don’t know.”

She licked her dry lips, managed to slide her leg off of his shoulder and plant both feet on the floor. Her knees trembled as her skirts drifted down over her hips once more.

Warm hands seized her waist, lifting her from the seat, and for a moment she felt like a child’s ragdoll, limp and malleable. Her knees locked to hold herself upright, and she listed against his chest, drawing what felt like the first full lungful of air since she’d entered the room.

A scrape, as of furniture moving across the floor. The sound was sharper than it ought to have been in the silence, burning in her ears.

“Turn,”

he instructed gently, and his hands cupped her shoulders to move her through the motion she found she could not quite navigate without aid. The toe of her shoe touched something solid, and she stretched out her hands in the service of finding that obstacle in her path. Her fingers knocked against the back of the chair, grasping it on instinct. That scraping sound she had heard—it had been the legs of the chair sliding across the floor as he’d turned it, repositioning it with his booted foot.

The wall of his chest against her back seared her even through the fabric of her gown. Those hands upon her shoulders urged her down, firm but gentle, and slid along her arms, stretching her hands out to place them upon the arms of the chair. And he—he was stretched over her, his hips pressing against her bottom. “There,”

he said in her ear. “This is how I want you.”

Mercy drew a shuddering breath through the constriction of the back of the chair against her stomach. Her hands curled into claws, clutching the arms of the chair for dear life. And she let him nudge her legs apart with the gentle pressure of his feet, let him draw up fistfuls of her skirt and petticoats, tossing them up over her back to expose her bare bottom to the cool air.

With one hand, Thomas caressed the curve of her rear, slid his fingers between her legs, and found the bead of her clitoris. Mercy shuddered, her skin prickling with the violent resurgence of arousal, her private flesh still aching with the sensitivity that had not yet faded. There was the soft sound of buttons falling free, and then the heat of his bare thighs so close to her own. The blunt head of his cock brushed tender tissues, teasing tender flesh. A gasp caught in her throat as he nudged inside her, and her body clutched at the very tip of him as he taunted her with only the smallest concession toward that thrust she yearned for. And still he tortured her, for a minute or more, enjoying with ruthless pleasure the way she strained to capture more of him.

“Please.”

She didn’t know if he could even hear the ragged whisper. Her lungs were starved of air, every bit of her straining for what he denied her. His palm, pressed between her shoulder blades, kept her pinned in place, motionless. “Please. Thomas. Please.”

She thought he must have been waiting for that breathless little plea. One hand clamped at her waist, as if to hold her perfectly still, and she sensed him bracing himself to end the torment at last.

A slice of light cut across the floor, shining through that scant inch at the bottom of the screen. The strains of music from the ballroom floated through the door. And Mercy froze, arrested by the sound of footsteps entering the room.

Thomas, too, stilled, poised upon the brink of a thrust, his fingers clenching on her hip. Still concealed in the shadows behind the screen, Mercy could only hope the ragged puff of her breath was not audible.

“Here,”

a voice said to an unseen companion. “Another table for the card room.”

Servants, she thought wildly, sent to retrieve additional furniture.

Another set of footsteps paced into the room, and the slice of light grew wider, stretching toward the far wall in an arc. “Is this one large enough, do you think?”

“Seems so. Chairs?”

“None of these; too fine. Her ladyship will be apoplectic if some drunkard stains the upholstery. We’ll fetch some from the dining room instead.”

Mercy held her breath, her fingers gripping the arms of the chair. Even her heartbeat seemed too loud in the quiet room, the frantic pound of it roaring in her ears.

And Thomas—Thomas was done with waiting. He bent over her back, cupped his hand over her mouth, and thrust inside her. A long, sure plunge that forced her onto her toes, and would certainly have wrenched a cry from her lungs if not for the stifling of his palm.

The chatter of the servants who had invaded the room faded to little more than a murmur in her mind, nothing but ambient noise. A slow withdrawal dragged across sensitive tissues, and preceded another decisive plunge. Measured and deliberate, he invaded her over and over, and she could only accept those urges he had unleashed.

Wicked in a way she had never imagined, and she reveled in the atavistic nature of Thomas unbound by convention, by propriety, by anything even remotely resembling civil behavior. He took her, and took her, unconcerned with the sounds of the footmen wrestling the heavy table out of the room one grumbling step at a time. They only served to mask the panting breaths he issued near her ear, the quiet rustle of their clothing, the stifled little sounds she might have made but for the pressure of his hand.

The light faded with the closing of the door at last, and she should have felt relief that they had gone undiscovered. Instead there was only the primal thrill of that illicit pleasure ratcheting up once more as his hand released her hip and slid down over her belly to rub her clitoris. The escalating pound of his hips against hers drove a series of gasps from her throat, which ended up muffled within the warm cup of his palm.

His thrusts grew wild and forceful, driving her inexorably toward that peak she had reached already only minutes ago, and she managed a spare shred of gratefulness the servants had left, because nobody could have mistaken the lascivious sound of flesh meeting flesh for anything other than what it was.

Every muscle tightened in a burst of pure, wrenching bliss. She screeched into his palm, and only a muted shred of sound slipped through the tight cage of his fingers, fading to nothing in a moment. Still he drove into her, as if he would force every last twitch of radiant pleasure from every last quivering muscle.

For a moment, just before her trembling arms gave out and her elbows buckled, she thought he might, in his frenzied intemperance, fail to withdraw. For a moment, as she sucked in breath after breath in the hope of clearing the swirling stars from her vision, she longed to feel him in those last moments, to know what it was like to have him spend himself inside her.

A last, erratic thrust, and then, with a hissed oath, he withdrew. The warm pulse of his seed landed across the upturned globes of her bottom, painting her tender skin with him. Now, she thought, as she closed her eyes and locked her knees to keep herself from wilting to the floor in sheer exhaustion, she knew what it meant to be ravished.

Thomas fumbled with his clothing and managed to produce a handkerchief from somewhere, with which he cleaned up the mess he’d made of her—at least to a point. “I’m sorry,”

he whispered as he helped her straighten once more, upon legs that trembled like a bowl of blancmange. “Your hair is unsalvageable, I’m afraid.”

Of course it was. The elegant style had been fashioned for nothing more strenuous than a dance. Being bent over the back of a chair and pushed to her very limits had been well beyond what it had been made to bear. Probably her gown had seen some damage, too, given that he’d taken little care with it there at the end.

One arm encircled her waist, his warm hand resting upon the small of her back. “You’re all right?”

he asked, and there was an odd hesitance in his voice, as if her silence had troubled him.

“Yes,”

she said, and the word crackled over her dry lips as she tipped her cheek against his shoulder. Probably it was the last time she would be all right for some time. Perhaps ever. “But I am ready to go home.”

“Good.”

He smiled against the top of her head, pressed a kiss to her mussed hair. “I’ll fetch the carriage while you repair your hair. We’ll slip out as quietly we can. Mother probably assumes we’ve gone home already.”

A last kiss to her temple, and he departed, leaving Mercy alone in the shadows behind the screen. Her hands still trembling, she pulled out her hairpins one by one, winding her hair back into some semblance of order and pinning it back into place.

With a deep draw of air into her lungs, she headed for the door, steeling herself mentally as she prepared for the inevitable breaking of two hearts this evening—his, and her own.