Page 12 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match
“Damned woman cannot help herself but to be entirely exasperating,” Thomas muttered to himself as he prowled the halls of the grand house. Exasperating when she was present—and exasperating even when she was not.
Which she ought to have been. Or rather, she ought not to be any longer, because she was meant to be out with Mother, Marina, and Juliet at the modiste. Only she had failed to arrive to breakfast, and thereafter failed to make her way downstairs ina timely manner as the time of her scheduled appointment approached.
With two other girls bristling over with enthusiasm to shepherd into the waiting carriage, Mother had not had the time to hunt down her missing charge, and so that duty had fallen upon Thomas’ shoulders. Blast it, how was it possible that he had lost the wretched woman in less than twenty-four hours?
His boots pounded upon the stairs as he dashed up them, producing hollow-sounding thumps that echoed with the force of his discontent. Her room was on the fourth floor at the very end of the hall overlooking the garden; a fact which he had only filed away because it was directly above Mr. Fletcher’s study, which had made attempting to sort through his correspondence the afternoon prior a difficult endeavor over the excitable shrieks and giddy stamps of feet above his head. Choosing dresses from amongst whatever Mercy had had in her dressing room, he supposed, as Mother had said.
He’d have to talk to her about that, as well. When he foundthe blasted woman.
He struck his fist against the solid mahogany of her door, which could not possibly have gone unnoticed. “Miss Fletcher,” he shouted through it, uncertain if the silence from within was due to its vacancy or the thickness of the door.Hell. There wasn’t time to wait.
The door opened silently, the hinges well-oiled. A single walking boot lay perhaps three inches from the door, turned over upon its side. A silk stocking dripped down the back of a wingback chair set before the hearth. Drawers in various states of closure poked from a massive dresser. Across the room, a massive four-poster bed sat against the wall, curtains haphazardly cast back, blue velvet counterpane spilling over the side of the mattress in a lazy fall toward the rich rug spread across the floor. The room looked as if it had been upended,shaken, and set back in its place none too gently.
And it was empty. Of course.
“Miss Fletcher?” he called again, and his foot crossed the threshold of the room with only the vague sense that he was doing something he ought not—which wouldn’t matter a whit, truly, provided she was not in the room.
Another door stood ajar within, and the light spilling in through the window illuminated a dressing room stuffed to its gills with gowns, fine fabrics glittering with silver and gold thread in the thick stream of sunlight that fell upon them.
For a moment, Thomas found himself nearly dazzled. Everyone knew Fletcher was wealthy. Some might even have said obscenely so. Butthis—this was so far beyond ostentatious.
Somehow he’d crossed the room and thrown open the dressing room door without having consciously done it. Small wonder Marina and Juliet had shrieked fit to wake the dead. There had to be at least fifty gowns crammed into the room—all woefully outdated, unless he missed his guess, but made of the finest cloth.
Mercy had left them behind? A bloody fortune in gowns, and she had left them all in town? He could not recall seeing her in anything but day dresses for years. But the gowns she had abandoned were fit for a damnedprincess. What woman in her right mind would have simply left them?
A muted gasp from somewhere behind him. And then Mercy’s voice, infuriated, incredulous: “What are you doing in my room?”
The back of his neck heated with mortification to have been caught snooping. Somehow, through sheer dint of will, Thomas shoved the feeling down, recalled his own outrage. “Looking for you,” he said as he snapped the dressing room door shut. “Have you any idea of what time it is?” he asked as he turned to face her.
Mercy stood in the doorway, her arms folded across her chest, cheeks glowing with a flush of fury. Still in her nightclothes, though at least she’d had the good sense—what little of it she seemed to possess—to have donned a dressing gown. Her bare toes curled into the plush rug that had been laid across the floor. She gave a sniff and a toss of her head that sent her untidy plait sliding over her shoulder, little flyaway strands suggesting that she hadn’t so much as run a brush through it since she’d woken. “I haven’t, really,” she said.
“It’s nearly noon,” he ground out. “Youdidn’t even bother to come down to breakfast.”
“I forgot,” she said, with a challenging lift of her chin.
“You forgot,” he echoed, skeptical. “You forgotbreakfast.”
“It is perfectlypossible to forget, when one does not find oneself possessed of much of an appetite!”
Thomas threw his hands up in aggravation. “Mother and the girls are already in the carriage,” he said. “Waiting upon you—and you haven’t even bothered to dress. I suppose you conveniently forgot you were meant to have an appointment with the modiste today as well.”
For a moment her mouth gave a queer little tremble, her chin dropping an inch or so as her shoulders pinched higher. “I’m sorry. I truly did forget,” she said in a muted murmur, her dark eyes drifting away from his, her gaze sliding across the floor as if she could not bear to meet his. “I won’t be a moment. Please tell them I’ll be down directly.”
Something uncomfortably akin to guilt settled in his gut. “Make your apologies to them yourself,” he said tersely. “In the future, I trust you can be relied upon to be prompt. I have neither the time nor the inclination to chase you down for every forgotten engagement.”
The color in her cheeks burned hotter still. “I will be ready,” she said in a low grumble, “as soon as you remove yourself frommy room. In the future, I would appreciate it if you did not go pawing through my things.”
Hardlypawing. The worst of which he could be accused was further opening a door which had already been opened. And perhaps invading the privacy of her room—which would not have been necessary, had she bothered to recall her appointment.
There was simply no point in arguing, when each moment he wasted was one more it would take her to ready herself. And she could not do that while he yet lingered within her room. “Make it quick,” he said frostily, and she edged out of his way as he headed for the door, ignoring the scathing little sound she made in the back of her throat.
He’d nearly crossed the threshold when he recalled the dressing room full of gowns. “Miss Fletcher,” he said severely, one hand wrapped around the door hand, “as generous as I am certain you meant your offer to be, I would remind you that my sisters are well provided for. They do not wear anyone’s cast-off clothing.”
As he closed the door slowly behind him, a faint disappointment curled in his chest. He’d expected more ire from her. Instead he’d received only a studiously blank look and a grim silence. That unexpected quiet, thick and unsettling, followed him as he retreated down the hall. As if, with that one glance, she had set him adrift in a formless fog of shame.
He’d said nothing particularly untoward, to his recollection. Someone had had to take her to task, to impress upon her the carelessness of her actions. So why had he been left feeling rather like he’d kicked a puppy?
Chapter Six
