Page 27 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match
Thomas stared up at the stone fa?ade of the house from which he had been unceremoniously ejected some hours ago with both determination and trepidation.
Mostly trepidation.
In retrospect, it had been a poor plan to come pounding upon Miss Nightingale’s door without so much as an ounce of circumspection or decorum. In fact it hadn’t been much of a plan at all, per se, except that he had been in an all-consuming hurry to retrieve Mercy and, with any luck at all, ease her mind about the future. Their future. The one they were going to share, just as soon as he could ask her and convince her to accept his suit.
He’d tied up every loose end—or so he’d thought. Unfortunately he’d forgotten the letter he’d sent to Mr. Fletcher, the one which had not garnered a written response. It had been an unpleasant surprise to find him there, tucked away in Charity’s flat with Mercy, and learn that he’d overheard every word Thomas had said whilst he’d been pounding upon the door awaiting admittance.
And he’d said rather a lot. Too much, in fact. Enough to have the door opened only briefly just so that it might be slammed in his face with clattering force. And then there had been rather a lot of shouting from within, in which he had not been invited to contribute. And then—once he’d worked up the nerve to make his way back to Mr. Fletcher’s house—he’d arrived to find his trunk already packed and to be summarily ejected straight upon the steps.
He’d been forced to take up residence in a hotel, though Mr. Fletcher had at least been good enough to allow Mother and the girls to remain.
It had been a relatively easy task to slip into the garden unseen after the household had retired, though the waiting itself had been agony. The trellis, however, was daunting. He would never be half so adventurous as was Mercy. And yet it seemed somehow fitting, now, to be faced with this obstacle which had given him so much concern. His turn to risk it, in the service of something he wanted more than life.
Which was in itself fitting, for if he fell—if he fell, he might just sacrifice his own.
Batting away clinging strands of ivy as he wound his fingers round the highest handholds he could reach, he carefully braced the toes of his boots upon it, held his breath, and—nothing. Miraculously, it held. He was perhaps six inches off the ground at most, but his journey up had not ended before it had truly begun. Craning his neck upward, he peered toward that distant window, where a faint light glowed behind the curtains.
Mercy was still awake, then, well past the time she ought to be asleep. But, then, she had often kept odd hours—and her mind was no doubt working through a great deal of information at present. Thomas had only four floors to ascend until he would see her once more. He repositioned his feet, grabbed for the next wooden handhold, and began to climb. The rough wood had been made for the creep of ivy and not the grasp of hands, and he found himself thankful for his gloves as he continued up, hand over hand.
The creak of the wood beneath his feet as he ascended resounded in his ears as if each strained sound might as well have been a gunshot. His heart pounding, Thomas hastened his climb, tried to control the frantic pant of his breaths.
Don’t look down, he chanted to himself like a mantra. Don’t look down.
∞∞∞
Mercy set down her sketchbook with a sigh and scratched her fingers through her unbound hair. Her busy brain again made sleep seem a far distant prospect as her mind reeled through the events of the day, and how she might soothe Papa from his well-earned pique long enough to permit Thomas to pay a call.
Papa had been justifiably furious, but that fury hardly boded well for her impending engagement. Especially as Thomas had been ejected from the house. And unless Papa could be brought down from his righteous anger, there was every chance that they might only see one another at social events—where she did not doubt but that they would be carefully supervised.
Pity. Mercy turned onto her side and buried another sigh into the pillow beneath her head. If only she had some inkling of where he might be residing, she would find herself unbearably tempted to go after him. But that knowledge—if indeed it was known—had not been imparted to her.
A curious sound caught her attention. Not quite a knock, but a tap. A gentle rapping, not from the direction of the door but upon the glass of her window. Soft, unobtrusive. Almost as if—
Almost as if it had been meant for her ears alone. She jerked herself out of bed, clambering to her feet and racing for the window. And there, just outside of it, eyes wild behind the lenses of his spectacles, Thomas peered in at her.
She shoved the window open. “Thomas! Whatever are you doing?”
Rather than answer, he rasped simply, “Help.”
And she was obliged to reach out and grab fistfuls of his coat in the service of aiding him in hauling himself over the sill. He all but fell into the room, landing upon the floor in an ungainly sprawl, and his chest heaved with exertion, and probably more than a little panic. “I am never,”
he managed to wheeze, lifting his trembling fingers to right the spectacles which had gone askew upon his face, “doing that ever, ever again.”
Mercy choked on a flutter of nervous laughter. “Why did you do it at all? You might have broken your neck.”
“God knows. I suppose I thought it would be romantic, or some such nonsense.”
Flat on his back, he stared up at the ceiling, his chest still heaving. “It wasn’t. I was terrified every moment. I would swear upon my life that I climbed for hours.”
“Three minutes at most, and that is only if you are particularly slow.”
She was, however, somewhat surprised that the trellis had supported his weight. Slowly she dropped down onto her knees beside him. “You must be very quiet,”
she said. “I wouldn’t put it past Papa to have set spies upon me, since he has already learned that I have sneaked out of the house before.”
“If no one heard me collapsing upon the floor as I have, I doubt speaking above a whisper will garner much attention.”
At last he seemed to relax, the anxiety his brush with danger had provoked deserting him as she stroked her fingers through the dark, sweaty locks of his hair. “I had to see you,”
he said. “And I was certain your father would turn me away.”
He’d be lucky to only be turned away, but Mercy thought it would not be prudent at this particular moment to mention it. “Still, you didn’t have to come through the window.”
“Well, I could hardly come through the door.”
A gusty sigh, and he turned his cheek into the cup of her hand. “I have got a ring for you in my pocket. That is advance warning that I am going to ask you to marry me,”
he said. “But before I do, I would like to tell you what transpired after you ran off to your sister’s home.”
“I suppose you must know you’re meant to be down on one knee,” she said.
“Couldn’t manage it at this moment if I tried. Here, come lie beside me.”
He patted his chest, and held out his arm to make a space for her there in the crook of it. As she settled beside him and nestled her cheek against his shoulder, he turned his head, buried his nose in her hair, and breathed deeply, drawing the cinnamon scent into his lungs as if it might sooth away the last of his frazzled nerves. “I told my mother and sisters everything,”
he said. “I offered them a choice. We join them in town for the social Season regardless of whatever scandal might rear its ugly head, or we absent ourselves from society and retire to the countryside. I told them also that I was going to marry you regardless.”
Mercy shifted uncomfortably, her stomach pitching. “What did they say?”
“That they’d rather have you in the family than social respectability,”
he said. “I also told Marina to send her gentleman round to pay a call upon me. Perhaps it’s early days yet, but I think…I think she will marry him, provided I give my approval.”
“And you will?”
“If she wants him, then I will give my approval,”
he said. His lips touched her temple. “Juliet said she doesn’t expect to marry for several years yet, but that she would never choose a man who would snub either of us.”
“And your mother?”
“Loves you more than she loves me, probably,”
he said gustily, and then wheezed at the advent of Mercy’s pointy elbow into his stomach. “She’s learned some unpleasant things about the people she had thought of as friends. That they are rather more small-minded and arrogant than she had thought. But she loves you. She always has.”
She had always been fond of the baroness as well, who had been more of a mother to her than her own had ever been. She had opened her home and her heart to a lonely little girl badly in need of some sort of maternal figure, had let her pretend to be a part of their family. And now—now she would be. Truly.
“Fordham paid me a visit today, as well,”
Thomas said.
Mercy gasped. “I beg your pardon? Fordham?”
“Yes; just as I was about to go in search of him myself.”
Thomas sniffed. “Do you know, I find it almost offensive in hindsight. I have spent so bloody long searching for the damned man, weeks scurrying about London employing all sorts of ruses in my efforts to find him, and he just…he just walked into the house accompanied by Mr. Sumner, as casually as you please. The audacity of it.”
Mercy nudged his shoulder. “Tell me what happened,”
she prompted.
“Oh. He gave it all back. And then some—or at least so claimed my solicitor, though I haven’t gone through the papers he left behind just yet.”
Thomas heaved a sigh. “He stole everything I had and wagered it all away, and then had the goddamned temerity to come into a bloody fortune from an investment he’d made years ago in a Welsh gold mine.”
“A Welsh gold mine,”
Mercy echoed. “Oh! The barkeep said when he was last seen, he was in the company of a couple of—”
“Welsh toffs,”
Thomas said. “I remember. It seems he wasn’t running through my funds then; he was celebrating his own good fortune. He went off with them to inspect it himself, and returned to London with a fortune in Welsh gold. It seems his conscience had got the better of him, for he tracked down Mr. Sumner and spent the day putting things to rights before he came to me to confess.”
“What did you do?”
she breathed.
“I let him go,”
he said. “I let him go because it would hardly serve us to endure the potential scandal of a public trial, and because I doubt he shall ever be in a position to misuse someone else’s funds again, and because—because he begged for mercy.”
She felt the slight lift of his shoulder beneath her head. “And because I thought…when all was said I done, I owed him. I owed him for what he’d done, because if he had not done it, I would not be here, now, with you. And at this moment, it feels like a damned miracle.”
Mercy took a shuddering breath, feeling the sting of tears behind her eyes. “Thomas—”
“No, you have got to let me get all of this out first,”
he said, and she realized abruptly that he was yet laboring beneath the misapprehension that she intended to refuse him. “I can’t solve every problem. Probably we’ll encounter more than it is possible to expect. But I can promise that I will never desert you. I will stay by your side through it. Whatever we might face, we can do it together.”
A little hiccough slipped up her throat. “Papa says I’ll drive you mad inside of a week.”
Thomas managed a hoarse laugh. “Yes, he has told me that, too.”
A short silence. Mercy nudged him again. “Well?”
“Well, what? It’s true. You will drive me to madness. You do menace me; it’s not in dispute.”
He chuckled at her frown. “I want that madness,”
he said. “I want it all. The chaos of you. I want to remind you to take your shoes when you leave them on the stairs, and to be certain you’re eating properly, and to stay up late with you when your busy brain won’t let you sleep. I want little Florentia, and—and—”
“Sherborne,”
she prompted in a whisper.
“God,”
he sighed, letting his head drop to the floor with a thump. “Really? Couldn’t we—”
He cut himself off abruptly. “We’ll argue about this later. What I want, Mercy, what I want more than anything else is—is—”
He turned onto his side, splayed his hand across her cheek to turn her face to his properly. “I want you,”
he said, “to let me be the one with my feet planted on the ground, so that you may stand upon my shoulders with your head in the clouds.”
Mercy made a small sound in the back of her throat, a curious mixture of a sob and a laugh. “I will cause problems for you,”
she said, swiping at her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “I know I can be maddening at the best of times, and you will have to accept that I will never fit the mold of the perfect lady. I don’t think I could do it if I tried. I won’t ever make myself less than who I am to become more of someone else’s image of who I ought to be.”
“I don’t think you quite understand,”
he said. “I love you because of those things, not in spite of them. Every maddening bit of you makes you precisely who you are. I don’t want you to be anyone else, because if you were, you would not be my Mercy. I’m only sorry that I have been so rigid, so inflexible in my opinions, that I ever made you feel you were not enough. You always have been. I was the one who needed to change.”
“I will have responsibilities,”
she cautioned. “Papa’s businesses will eventually pass to me, and it’s quite a lot to manage.”
“I’ll help keep you organized,”
he promised. “I know quite a lot about estate management. Probably I could parlay what I know into business, if necessary. I think—I think if we work together, we’ll be a force to be reckoned with. The numbers and accounting are well within my areas of expertise, and the creative aspects are within yours. Will you let me help you with it?”
“If you will let me visit the manufactories when I please.”
“If you will let me accompany you,”
he countered, pressing a kiss into her hair. “This is important to you,”
he said. “So it is important to me, as well. I am never going to be the man who throws caution to the wind and leaps in headfirst. But I will be the one who loves you beyond reason. And just occasionally, I might surprise you, just a little.”
He pressed his forehead to hers and whispered conspiratorially, “I stole a pair of your gloves weeks ago, when you left them in the library. I keep them in the drawer of my nightstand.”
Mercy bit her lower lip against a reckless laugh. “Why?”
“Because I knew they wouldn’t be missed,”
he said. “And—I don’t know. Initially I meant to return them, but then they became something of a token, I think. As close to having your hand as I could admit to wanting, before you knocked some sense into me.”
“Thomas, I’m not even certain taking a pair of mislaid gloves qualifies as petty theft,”
she said, though she felt a sliver of regret for the words when his face fell. “And besides,”
she added consolingly, rubbing her nose against his, “I don’t expect you to throw caution to the wind. I love you exactly as you are.”
Just as he loved her. She needed his caution, his level-headed perspicacity and practicality, especially on those occasions in which she might be overly tempted to leap in before she had adequately assessed some risk. She needed it in exactly the same way he needed her enthusiasm and exuberance, to pull him from his starchiness for a bit of fun occasionally. A sort of balance they could only have found with one another.
His chest rose and fell with a fervent sigh of relief. “So you’re going to marry me, then?”
“I haven’t decided. Let me see the ring first.”
Thomas slapped a hand over his mouth, stifling the laugh that threatened to shake the rafters. “You mercenary wench,”
he said, rolling atop her. “I’ll have a yes out of you eventually.”
∞∞∞
He’d had a yes out of her within moments, and the ruby ring he’d placed upon her finger glittered in the lamplight, a hidden fire contained within its depths.
She’d have to return it to him, of course, before he left her this evening. It would be an impossible thing to explain if she arrived to breakfast wearing it. But she was loath to surrender it for even a second, and a wistful sigh slipped from her lungs as she watched the scintillating sparkle of it, the inner flame dancing within the gem.
“Dear God,”
Thomas hissed through clenched teeth, his thighs tensing. There was the faintest squeak of the ropes beneath the mattress as his weight shifted where he sat at the edge of her bed.
Mercy pulled a pout as she drew away. “Thomas,”
she chided gently, looking up at him from her position kneeling upon the floor before him. “You really will have to be quiet. Papa is still exceedingly vexed.”
And would undoubtedly become more so, if Thomas were to be caught within the house he had so recently been ejected from.
And yet he clearly found himself no more capable of keeping himself quiet than she had in similar circumstances. His chest heaved with the frenetic breaths that he sucked in one after another; his fingers kneaded the nape of her neck. “Where the hell did you learn this?”
he asked, in tortured tones as she slid her lips down his throbbing shaft, one slow inch at a time.
“Ah, well.”
She let her shoulders roll in a shrug, and he blew out a breath of relief at the brief reprieve the sheepish words had afforded him. “I’ve had a few rather frank talks with Charity.”
Another pained hiss as she set back in once again, but the expression upon his face was blissful, and his fingers stroked through her hair in praise. “I’m beginning to understand,”
he said thickly, “that there are certain unforeseen benefits to having a famous courtesan for a sister-in-law.”
She could feel the strain rising in him once again, in the way his thighs tensed and trembled beneath the clutch of her fingers. The way he braced his feet upon the floor, the fingers upon her neck that had grown significantly less gentle in these last few moments.
With each stroke, each delicate flick of her tongue he seemed to grow harder, thicker. Until at last he rasped, “Mercy. Sweetheart. I’m going to come.”
A last, lingering suck which wrested a groan from his lungs, and Mercy sank back again, once more admiring the flicker of the ruby ring as she wrapped her hand around him instead. Slow, steady strokes, as he’d once shown her himself.
“Do you know,”
she said idly, “Charity says a proper apology is best delivered upon one’s knees.”
And she had found it fair enough, given that he had got to his to propose properly, once he’d recovered himself enough to do so.
His hands framed her face, warm and admiring. “A wise woman, your sister.”
He shivered as her fingers slid down the length of his cock, bit back an intemperate sound. “For what are you apologizing?”
“I shouldn’t have left,”
she said. “I just—”
“Panicked,”
he said. “I understand. I’m only glad you had somewhere to go where you would be safe. And that Charity was sensible enough to keep you there.”
Which was a rather generous admission from a man who had once been so determined to avoid even the tiniest hint of scandal, who had once valued his reputation so highly. “She’s sensible about quite a lot of things, really,”
Mercy said, and she let her fingers fall away from him to grab up fistfuls of her nightgown to draw it over her head as she rose to her feet once more. “She has got a tea she brews that is known to prevent conception.”
“Does she?”
His lips brushed her shoulder as she climbed over his lap, bracing her knees on either side of his hips. “As I said, a wise woman.”
“She offered it to me,”
Mercy said lightly as she settled there, relishing the groan he buried against her throat as she sank down upon him. His fingers dug into the flesh of her bottom, anchoring her as he slid deep, and she came to rest with a sigh of satisfaction. “I didn’t take it,”
she added as she wound her arms about his neck, felt the mist of sweat that had broken out upon his hot flesh.
“You didn’t.”
The words emerged from his lips in a ragged tone as she rolled her hips, rose and fell in a sinuous glide.
Mercy gave a short shake of her head. “Nine months,”
she said. “That’s enough time for it to be just us. Don’t you think?”
Somehow, Thomas managed a quiet, strained laugh. “You’re angling for a swift wedding,”
he said, and he pressed a kiss to her cheek, to the point of her chin.
“Oh, scandalously swift,”
she said. “As soon as possible. It’s quite fun to sneak about, I’ll admit. But I should like to do it only for the fun of it.”
“Christ. Mercy.”
His hands squeezed her hips, held her just a little longer on each downward plunge. His lips found hers through the messy tumble of her hair and he braced his feet upon the floor, rocking up into the fall of her hips so that he stroked her inside and out. “You’re certain of this?”
“Yes. Yes.”
She gasped the words as a liquid fire raced through her veins. It had been wisest to avoid such a thing when she had been certain that they could not marry. But now—now she had his ring upon her finger, and there were no secrets left between them. “I don’t want you to withdraw at the last.”
By the pound of his pulse in his throat, she guessed he didn’t want that, either.
Those first delicious flutters of release began low in her belly, and she felt her back arch into the rapturous glow that suffused her. Thomas’ fingers tangled in her hair, pulling her head down to smother the revealing little cry that slid up her throat before it could emerge. And in those last seconds as every muscle relaxed into sated bliss, she murmured against his lips, “I want a baby.”
He didn’t withdraw. Instead his arms banded about her with the strength of steel, and at last she knew the intimate pulse of him inside her, the fierce tremble of his limbs, the thunder of his heart against her own in those final moments, the quiet groan he muffled against her lips. His breath shuddered from his chest in the aftermath of it, and as if she’d felled him like a particularly stubborn tree, he collapsed onto his back by inches, taking her down with him.
Absently, he rubbed strands of her hair between his fingertips as he draped one arm about her shoulders. “It’s going to have to be a very swift wedding,”
he said at last, his voice low and only the tiniest bit disgruntled.
The warmth of her delighted laugh briefly fogged the lenses of his spectacles, and she snuggled against his chest. With the tip of one finger, she traced a pattern just over his heart. “Tell me where you’re staying,”
she said. “I’ll come to you tomorrow night.”
“Absolutely not.”
Stern Thomas had reemerged, but he softened the crisply-delivered refusal with a kiss to the top of her head. “But I will allow you to help me sneak out later this evening.”
“And sneak in again tomorrow evening?”
“So long as it keeps you safe and sound at home and me off of trellises, yes.”
He flopped one hand about, caught up a handful of her counterpane, and yanked it over both of them.
“But we’ll still sneak about just occasionally, won’t we?”
she asked, tucking her head against his shoulder with a sigh. “Even when we don’t have to?”
“God, yes. The Season can be interminably boring. We’ll create our own fun.”
His hand slipped up and down her spine in soothing strokes. “Mercy,”
he said, and she thought she heard a note of concern in his voice. “You were joking, weren’t you? About Florentia and Sherborne.”
She hid a smile against his shoulder. “Hmm.”
“Tell me you were joking.”
Increasing tones of desperation now, and a definite twitch in that muscle in his jaw. She wondered idly how long it might take to get that muscle beneath his eye twitching, too.
Mercy rolled her shoulders in a blasé shrug and wedged her knee between his. Her fingertips, still caught in the lazy motion of sketching some curlicue pattern over his heart, moved in a slow path down his chest, and disappeared beneath the cover of the counterpane.
The muscle beneath his eye twitched. “You are a menace,”
he said in a rumbly thick tone of encroaching desire. A long swallow, and a longer hesitation, as if he struggled to hold the thought in his head. At last he managed, “A shrug is not an answer.”
Mercy swallowed back a laugh. “Do you really want to discuss this now?”
she asked lightly, and turned her head to nibble on his earlobe. “At this very moment?”
A shudder slid down his spine. His hand, which had come to rest over the curve of her bottom, grew heavy and proprietary. “No,”
he admitted begrudgingly, as he rolled her to her back once more. “But we will discuss it,” he added.
“Later,”
she said as she settled into the curve of his arm and smoothed the affected sternness from the pinch of his brows with the tips of her fingers. Much, much later.