The Proposition (27 page)

When he started wanting to eat it, to lick her neck, to pull her backward and down, roll on top of her
…
bloody hell, at that point, he slid away and stood up. "He doesn't
sound
pleasant, this cousin of yours." He was contradicting what she'd told him earlier, that he would like Xavier.

On the floor, she spun around on her skirts, pulling her knees against her chest. She arched her long, pretty neck to look up at him directly and said, "He tells good jokes," then laughed, shaking her head.

She bent it again, down till all he could see was the interesting way she held her hair up. With two sticks. It fascinated him. He couldn't understand how her hair didn't fall down. It looked heavy enough. It was abundant, shining; a light, coppery red. Lots and lots of colorful hair. Pretty.

She continued, "Someone said recently that he's changed. Not so funny, more solemn. But he wasn't when I last knew him. The day he inherited every last bit of family land, he was jubilant, the most miserably happy eighty-some-year-old man I've ever seen. Shortly after, by the way, he married a woman who was about my age now, a woman whom he'd adored for a dozen years. Can you imagine? That would make Vivian, let's see, about forty now. And I wish I could say she was a conniving, spoiled shrew who was only after his money, but the woman I met a dozen years ago was quite sweet. Shy. Obedient. People tell me she still is. The daughter of a rich Italian family, oh, with some title or other. Something high-and-mighty, since Xavier wouldn't have anything less. Very beautiful. She's with him still. She'll be there beside him the day he dies."

Mick sympathized. "That must annoy the hell out of you."

She laughed again, squeezing her knees. "Sometimes it does. It's as if one person, always one person, is dealt all the aces."

"It only looks like aces from here, Win. You don't know. You can't see—you can't play his hand, only yours."

She nodded. She was lost a moment, then looked at him. "Mick," she said. It was the first time she had ever used his given name, and it made his chest expand to hear it. It made him warm. "You are the most generous man I have ever met."

He liked that even better. He smiled widely. Then told her, "I'm not generous. It's just—" He shrugged. "Why blame people when they can't help their nature?"

She contemplated that a moment. Then she suddenly reached her arms out and lay straight back, all the way onto the floor.

"The ceiling is peeling," she said, then let out a long, delighted bubble of laughter, the sound of genuine humor.

Looking down at her, Mick thought: He'd stood too quickly. If he were down there now, he'd have stretched out beside her.

Before he could think of a way down to her, though, she reached up, holding her hands toward him, asking to be pulled to her feet.

He drew her up—and she made a little shriek. "Oh," she said, "my stomach lifts when you move me sometimes." Quickly, "So can you waltz, do you think?"

"No," he said gravely. "Or not like someone who's been doing it all his life. I need more practice." Dishonest again. Though not quite in the same formal manner as her way, he waltzed all the time at the Bull and Tun. He'd pretended not to know, just to spend the afternoon dancing with her.

And he wanted to "move" her some more. He held out his hand.

She put hers into it, and he took her into his arms in the proper manner, in the way she allowed. He began counting. "One, two, three. One, two, three." No music. Or just the music of the two them together, his whispering in her ear as he spun her around.

She felt so loose in his arms, warm and smiling. Oh, he liked her like this: waltzing in the byways of one of life's finer moments, in one of its little contentments.

They danced through supper, till their feet hurt. Sometimes they used her gramophone, but often, when it
grog
ged slowly to silence, he took over. He made up waltzes, humming to her, loving the feel of her in his arms, her laughing and dancing with him.

At the end, he made a ballocks of it, of course. Somehow their mouths got close. When he drew closer, her eyes widened. They filled with wonder—she was perpetually amazed by his interest. And confused by it: Her eyes filled with that funny fear of hers, too. She braced herself, ready for him to push her into it, but not ready to invite him in. Her posture shot a jab of frustration through him, with enough pinch to it to make him wince. Damn her anyway.

"Winnie," he said. "I want to kiss you. I want to do a lot of things, and I've been about as forthright as a man gets about it. But it can't be all me every time. Me pushing, me seducing, me making you do what we both know you want to do anyway. I can't keep chasing you and chasing you, even if you like
it,
without your giving back, letting me know you want
me.
Own up to it."

Her expression wouldn't. Her mouth grew into that tight pucker she could make. She didn't offer a word.

"Do you or not?"

"Do I what?"

He'd start at the most basic. "Want me to kiss you," he said.

She frowned down. She wanted him to.

"Say it," he said. "Say, 'Kiss me.'"

She opened her mouth, then closed it, shaking her head as if he'd asked her to fly up to the ceiling.

He continued, torturing them both. "Say, 'Touch me, Mick.' Oh, God, Win, I'd like to hear you say it. Say, 'Hold me, undress me, touch me, come inside me—'"

He had to look away. His mouth went dry saying the words. To the piano, he muttered a string of epithets under his breath, cursing himself, but her, too.

It rallied her sizeable frustration and rage. Starchy again, she said, "Most gentlemen don't swear as you do in front of a lady."

"Most gentlemen don't go through what I go through with you."

"You go through nothing—"

"I go through your tying my privates in knots, with you wanting to lather them up, me dodging, so as to keep you from shaving them off in a pique, trying to make me tame enough to get near." What a speech. He was half-sorry he said it.

Then sorrier it hadn't been worse, when she said with sarcastic wonder, "Oh! Oh, yes!" With emphasis, "That was splendid! You are quite getting the hang of being a gentleman. Why don't you just stick your hand between my legs?"

That did it. He leaned toward her. "Well, you'd never have gotten any part of man stuck there otherwise. You're terrified of sexual relations. Hell, you're foking terrified of life. Whatever brought you to this place,
Miss
Bollash," he said, "it killed off every speck of spontaneity and adventure in you, if you ever had any to begin with."

She blinked, and the fight in her rose up. She came back with, "Spontaneity and adventure? What big words, Mr. Tremore, for
randy.
For being a rat who wants to climb up into the flounce and froufrou of every silk petticoat."

He saw red. He wanted blood. "Not yours," he said. "I'd rather be gnawed to death, thank you, than have to deal with what's under your petticoat. Every bloody moment'd be anxious. I'd be ready to shoot myself, trying to tow a line you'd snap in my face every ten seconds."

He'd gotten her, a direct hit. He wasn't proud of it the second it happened. Her face fell. He'd confirmed to sweet Winnie, who thought no man wanted her, that he didn't either.

He took a breath, then said quickly, "That's a lie. Winnie Bollash, I want you so badly, you're making me say things I don't mean." Then that was wrong, too. "No, you aren't making me do anything. I'm wagging my own tongue. Winnie, I'm sensitive about the fancy ladies I've slept with. Oh, they all wanted me. For the day. I'm a good time, but nothing more. I'm tired of it." He took a breath, looked around, then stepped back and shoved his hands in his pockets. "You're right, I'm wrong. I wouldn't enjoy being a good time to you either in pretty short order. It would make me feel terrible." He shook his head, then looked at her.

She was wide-eyed.

"I'm going back downstairs now," he said. "Bloody hell," he muttered, exasperated. "If you need me, pull the bell cord. It'll ring below stairs, and I'll hear it. Me and your butler. Other than that, I'm staying away from you. That should suit everyone. Even me," he added.

Chapter 18

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E
dwina, Mick, Jeremy, and Emile Lamont awaited tea in her father's upstairs study. On the rare occasions when gentlemen called, she always felt it more gracious to speak to them in the room where her father had conferred with his colleagues. A room of large, heavy chairs and dark wood, of bookcases full of philology and linguistics as well as a bit of poetry and fiction that, she presumed, appealed to men.
Moby-
Dick. The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Richard Burton's
Arabian Nights.
The most delicate
accouterment of the room was a cut-crystal brandy decanter that sat in a polished niche with two matching snifters set upside down.

Jeremy and Emile Lamont had arrived at a propitious time. She and Mick had been arguing over a bill that had come in the morning's post. It was from the tailor, for every piece of clothing Mick owned at present, and the bill was addressed to Miss Edwina Bollash.

Mick, of course, had rolled his eyes. "I think we should take as much back as the tailor will allow. Those two fellows—" He referred to the Lamonts, and, though he left the thought unfinished, there was no doubt about his feelings for them. "We could end up having to pay for all this. They're up to something, Win."

She only shook her head. "You can't take anything back," she told him. "It's all custom-made. Besides, the bill is a mistake, a simple mistake."

And, of course, it was. These things happened.

Though Winnie realized how much Mick's suspicions were coloring her own thinking by the magnitude of her relief when Jeremy Lamont said, "Dear, dear!" He turned the envelope over, frowning down at her address on it. "They confused the address to which they shipped the parcels with the address where they were to send the bill." He looked at her with what seemed genuine regret. "I am so sorry. What an embarrassing confusion. Here."

He reached into his ever-deep pocket and took out the ever-full notecase. It was, as before, packed with bills.

He counted out several, then looked up at Winnie. "And how much do we owe
you,
Miss Bollash, to date?"

She glanced at Mick. Emile sat off to the side, Mick stood by the window, his hostility so dense in the air, it all but left a haze.

He had greeted them at the door a few minutes before like an ogre guarding its lair, then had been actually offended by their astoundment.

They kept looking at him now, then passing looks between each other. There was no doubt that Jeremy in particular was thrilled by Mick's sound and appearance.

Winnie's own accounts were prepared. It was a matter of retrieving them from her sitting room, which she did. She hurried. Leaving the three of them alone in the study together felt chancy somehow.

When she returned, all three men were exactly as she'd left them, as if in her absence they had not moved or spoken, but only glared at each other. Oh, dear, oh, dear. She presented the list of her fees and expenses. She'd computed them carefully, hour by hour, and was prepared to go over them. She'd been generous, if anything.

Jeremy glanced at them, then, without question, counted out more crisp notes of British pounds sterling. He set a stack on them on the mantel, saying, "I've put in twenty pounds extra to cover anything that might come up till we're back. Emile and I are going to the coast for a few days, but we'll return the day before the ball. We'll bring the invitation then."

He looked at Mick over his shoulder, then, putting a monocle to his eye, he studied the man in the center of the room, up then down, walking around him. To which Mick responded by folding his arms over his chest and looking faintly truculent.

"I must say," Jeremy told her,
"Emile's
money is extremely well spent." He chuckled and glanced at his brother, a goad referring to the fact that the loser was to reimburse the winner of their bet.

Emile remained in the far chair, though he studied Mick with no less interest, only less kindness. He said, "He hasn't done it yet, you know. Though I admit," he said grudgingly, "Miss Bollash has wrought a miracle. If I didn't know those clothes and that face, I'd say it was a different man."

It.
"He," she corrected. "He's in the clothes you picked for him. They're excellent—"

"No, no," Jeremy insisted, "he greeted me at the door. His manner is completely different, and what I've heard him say sounds marvelous. You're brilliant, Miss Bollash."

Her pride puffed a little. Yes, she was doing first-rate work, it was true.

Mick snorted. "Right," he said. "You all have done a bloody fine job."

Ah. Winnie said quickly, "No,
we
all." To the Misters Lamont, she declared, "Mr. Tremore is the most able student I have ever taught. He is at the heart of the change."

Any rapprochement among the men her words might have won, however, was immediately lost when Jeremy said, as if he spoke to a trained monkey, "Say something. Talk."