Page 48 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match
Her head listed toward his shoulder, her warm breath feathering across his throat. Close enough to kiss. He splayed his fingers over her cheek, turning her face to his. “You are what you are,” he said, “just as I am what I am. Steady; reliable. Too severe most days. Starchy and boring and without much predilection for spontaneity.” His lips brushed hers, a light, teasing caress. “Not much fun at the best of times.” A counterbalance to the chaos.
“I wouldn’t say that,” she murmured.
“You have before,” he chuckled. “And it’s true. I’m not offended. There’s a time and a place for starchy and boring.” Hopefully before she took any further ill-advised climbs down trellises. “Just occasionally, I think I could benefit from a little more spontaneity. Do you want to learn what can be done in a carriage in”—he flicked his gaze out the window, judging their approximate location—“ten minutes?”
“I thought I was being lectured.”
“You are. I’m rather adept at accomplishing two tasks at the same time. And this way”—he slid his arm beneath her knees, and she shifted, winding one arm about his neck to brace herself—“I know you will pay close attention and remember. This lecture is going totake.”
The carriage rattled along the street and Thomas splayed his legs and settled Mercy between them to keep her steady through the jostling. He braced one foot upon the opposite seat and wrapped one arm about her middle. She startled when the fingers of his free hand fell upon her thigh, grasping a fistful of the material and a pinch of the petticoats beneath, slowly dragging them upward.
“You are going to make me a promise,” he said, and rubbed his chin against the soft flesh above the neckline of her gown.
A tiny shiver slipped down her spine, which curved toward him as if she had entirely forgotten how to keep it straight. “What promise is that?”
Another fistful of her gown, and he fancied he could hear the kick of her heart beating just a little faster as the cool night air swirled about her ankles and up her calves. “You are going to promise me you will never again undertake any action that might prove dangerous.”
Her shoulders lifted, pinched. “Thomas, I—”
She didn’t want to make a promise to him which she was not certain she could keep, he realized. “Without first speaking with me,” he clarified. She jolted again as his fingers grasped her bare knee and began to slide up the soft flesh of her thigh. And sighed when he touched his lips to the delicate skin beneath her ear. “I expect never again to catch you sneaking out of the house from a goddamned trellis. What were you thinking, Mercy?” he chided.
Her thighs flexed as his fingers slipped between them; her fingers clutched the edges of the seat on either side of his legs, and he heard her nails catch at the underside of the upholstery with a scratching sound that was startlingly loud. “I—ah—better to ask forgiveness than permission?”
Despite himself, he laughed. It vibrated against the skin of her throat, and her head fell back against his shoulder. The spicy cinnamon scent of her hair assailed him. “Never again,” he said, pressing the words with a kiss against her cheek. “And you didn’t even ask for forgiveness, did you?”
“No. But Iamsorry,” she said, and her lashes fluttered as her eyes drifted closed.
“But for what, I wonder?” he murmured. The soft, curly hair between her thighs slid through his fingers like silk.
“For frightening you?” she ventured, and it sounded too much like a guess. He had been so far beyond frightened that the word hardly scratched the surface. His fingertips breachedpetal-soft flesh, already damp and dewy. Her hips lifted toward that tender touch, and one hand peeled itself from the upholstery, fingers trembling as she clutched at his nape. She whispered his name through tiny, panting breaths, fogging the lenses of his spectacles as she turned her face toward his.
“I don’t want to own you,” he murmured in her ear as he stroked her, and that—that was a lie. He wanted to own every magnificent inch of her. Presently he could lay claim to only stolen bits of her time; a dance, a game of billiards, a drink. He wanted all of it, every damned moment. From rising to sleep, and all those thereafter and in between. He wanted her to wear his ring and to have his name, and to be his in every way a woman could belong to a man.
He wanted to be hers.
“I don’t want tocontrolyou,” he amended, and that sounded more honest. “I don’t want to be your jailer. I don’t want to clip your wings.” Because she had been made to soar, his Mercy, and it would have been a particular kind of cruelty to deprive her of the skies. But she had the distressing tendency, like Icarus before her, to fly too close to the sun.
Her nails raked through the fine hair at his nape as he found the entrance to her body, sank his longest finger inside her, felt the clutch of her inner muscles. Her lungs expanded with each frenetic breath she took. “You are going—to have to be—a bit more specific.”
“I need you not to put yourself in danger,” he said. “I need you to talk to me before you go off half-cocked. Let me think through the consequences you don’t often consider. I don’t want to keep you from flying. I want you to let me be there to catch you if you fall. Do you understand?”
Her back arched as his thumb rubbed the little bud at the apex of her thighs. “I—I—” An anxious little cry, half-smothered in his throat. “There is just…one thing I can’t—”
That persistent little secret, which she had thought she had kept so closely.C. Nightingale. “Do you intend to tell me?” he asked. “Eventually?”
“Yes,” she breathed, and he felt the first tiny flutters of release. She said in a fierce rush, “But don’t ask it of me now. Please, Thomas.”
He hadn’t asked yet, any more than in passing. Despite his disapproval, she was still her own woman, above the age of majority, capable of making her own decisions. With some minor modifications, perhaps they could find terms acceptable to both of them. “If you go out again,” he said, and slowed the careful manipulation of his fingers until she made a plaintive little sound, “You will not sneak aboutto do it. You will take the carriage. You will tell me where you are going and when. I will trust your judgment of it—for now. So long as you intend to trustmewith it, eventually. Will you promise me that much?”
Her breath hitched. He heard the warble of uncertainty in her voice. “Thomas—”
“Two minutes, Mercy, and we’ll be home. Do you want to come?”
“Yes.Yes.” She trembled, poised upon the precipice of release.
“Then make me the promise I asked of you. You willtalkto me.” The tiniest stroke, and her whole body shuddered with unrelieved tension.
Her fingers clenched in his hair. “I will,” she gasped. “I will! I promise.”
