Page 54 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match
Good God, it could never bejust 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 hadclung 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 thanyes. 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 bloodycare. Because he’d have Mercy as his wife, and that was all that mattered.
“It meanswe 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 doorbehind 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 longpull 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 couldnot. Shehaddelighted 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 damnednothingof 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—”
