The Proposition (30 page)

Once she'd left, Winnie leaned forward and whispered, "You gave her the wrong name!"

"I couldn't give her
Tremore.
She knows it."

"She knows it!" she repeated, though her tone was more emphatic. It questioned him.

He didn't want to explain. Besides, they were past the problem.

Winnie, of course, didn't like to miss a chance to worry. "Oh, crumbs, oh, crumbs," she said. She put her long fingers to her mouth, pressing them, then spoke over the tips. "Now you have to remember 'Bartonreed'—where did you come up with that?—and answer to it. Will you be able to?"

"I'm sure. But we can go ahead and use—"

"No, we can't. She's the wife of the Master of the Hounds for the Queen. She'll be at the ball."

"Oh, bloody hell," he said and sat back. He did laugh this time, and richly. Bloody hell.

Winnie, though, was losing her sense of humor. "Stop it," she said. "You're going to mess this up."

"No, I won't."

She leaned toward him, her face furrowing, squinching up and down both, as it could. Intently, she asked him, "Do you know what it would be like to fail in front of the
bon ton?"

"The
bon ton?"

"Yes. Every. Single. Family in England that matters?"

He raised his brow. "Every single person at the ball matters to you?"

"Well, no." She made a befuddled frown, then shook her head. "Oh, I don't know. Some do; most don't. They all mattered to my parents."

"Ah," he said. He laughed gently at her. "Loovey, how sweet. I'll do my best. I'd love for your parents to be proud of me—and proud of you, too—even though they're dead."

She let out a laugh at this, a
squawk,
half of distress for being teased, half of release, then nodded, biting her lips together. She admitted, "I'm so nervous."

"I can see that." She nearly always was, bless her.

He hoped her nervousness this time didn't make her put her fingers into things beyond good judgment. He hoped she'd leave him be so he could do what he needed to his way. But she either would, or she wouldn't. He would deal with her as she came.

For now, he signaled the waiter, asking for milk instead of cream for his tea. As the waiter left, however, Mick watched trouble circle back around to them.

Smiling, a look of triumph on her face, the baroness left her own party once more to bear down on Mick and Winnie's table.

He leaned forward and whispered, "Finish your tea, loov. She's found something more to say to us."

The baroness walked up to their table again, wagging a thoughtful finger at Mick, and said, "Niece." That was the word she used, though he was fairly certain she meant a place, when she continued, "In Nice at the Hotel Negresco. You were on the floor." She frowned, as if it were painful to draw so hard on a memory that resisted. She bridged her flawed recollection with an invention of her own. "Yes," she said with certainty now, "you were the one who found my cat. Positively heroic, you were." She frowned, then smiled, doing that flicker of uncertainty again. Then, as if perfectly logical, she let loose a torrent of what he thought to be French.

He nodded politely till she finished, then took a chance saying, "Excuse me, but my fiancée doesn't speak French. May I present Miss Edwina Bollash. We're to be married in June." That should shut the woman up and make her leave him alone.

But, no, she was fascinated. "Miss Bollash? Lady Bollash?" she corrected. "Lionel Bollash's daughter?" The baroness was surprised, but riveted.

Next to Winnie, however, the woman looked calm. Win had been startled apoplectic by his announcement. "Michael," she began, then laughed, then couldn't get whatever else she was going to say out for a few seconds. "You're, um—ah, not supposed to say that. That is,
tell
people yet." To the baroness, apologetically, she said, "It's not official. We haven't announced it. We aren't really."

Mick reached across and patted her hand. "Winnie, my dove, don't start again. You promised. Don't say you're making me wait longer, because I can't. I can't wait to make you my own."

Win's jaw dropped. No halfway about it, her mouth looked unhinged for a second. Then she giggled, blushed, and looked away. The perfect picture of a sweet, shy bride.

Oh, to have it be true, he thought. Wouldn't that be something?

The baroness turned and studied Winnie now with rapt curiosity. She glanced at Mick, then once more attempted to speak to him in French.

He held up his hand, shaking his head, a man being firm. "In English, Lady Whitting. Please."

Lady Whitting, ha! He was enjoying himself! Nonetheless, he thought they should cut their tea short. His luck was holding, but he had no idea what the baroness might latch onto next.

To Winnie, he said, "Are you finished, darling?" He took out the chiming watch that he loved to look at for any reason, and that he was probably going to have to return. Too bad. He popped its cover.
Ding-ding, ding-ding…
It continued to chime till the
hour exactly. Four o'clock. "Goodness," he said. "I had no idea it was so late. We have to meet Lord Rezzo at five. We'd best be going." He stood. To Winnie: "Dear one, you gather your things, while I take care of the bill."

She grabbed his forearm. "You can't pay," she hissed, though suppressed laughter was now making her all but delirious. She tried to speak under her breath, but her voice carried anyway. "You have no money," she said.

"Of course, I do, dear heart. I have a fresh twenty." He turned toward her fully, wiggling his eyebrows, a gesture only she saw. "A very, very fresh-sh-sh"—he let the sound run—"twenty. Let's go see how it spends."

"Michael!" she said with giddy panic.

But he freed himself from her and backed with a slight bow from the table. Behind the baroness—who followed him, looking disappointed and bewildered—he watched Winnie put her hands over her face, aggrieved, laughing, hiding. He called to her. "Winnie, gather your things. We're leaving."

Indeed, they'd best be gone. He wondered if the baroness were truly going to the ball on Saturday. Or if any of the other upper-class women he knew, several of them more intimately, would be there. Bloody hell, what a shock to realize he might actually know people at the gathering. An ugly shock. He laughed. A challenging shock.

Outside, down the street, with Winnie's hand safely in his, he caught sight of an omnibus. A number six. Perfect. "Come on," he said. He started to run, pulling Winnie along.

She followed, still laughing, a gamine making her escape. He could hear her, delighted by their strange encounter, drunk on it. "Where are we going?" she called.

"We're trying to catch that bus." He pointed and tugged, encouraging her to move faster.

"My carriage—"

"One problem at a time, loovey. Come on, be quick."

She wasn't as quick as he was. She held her hat and clopped down the pavement behind him, skirts kicking up around her wonderful legs.

They weren't going to make it. The omnibus stopped. One man got off, two women got on. Mick called to the driver, but he and Winnie were still too far for anyone at the bus to hear him. Mick slowed. Still a block away, the horses of the omnibus lurched forward.

"There'll be another," he said.

Then a woman across the street, closer to the vehicle, called to the driver. The omnibus slowed and Mick said, "Come on. Run."

Winnie did. She remembered the breathless chase he'd led the first day she'd set eyes on him. Now she ran with him, and it thrilled her. No other word to describe it.
Thrill.
Feeling his dry, warm hand around hers, his pulling her through traffic, then his arm about her back, her waist, lifting her, propelling her up a curb, taking her with him, then boosting her up the steps of the bus when she hesitated—oh, it was so bold and simply too much fun. She started laughing hard somewhere along the way, uncontrollably; she couldn't stop.

In this condition, Mick wound him and her both all the way up the steps to the roof of the bus, the bench seat. From the top, she stood on her knees and waved to Georges, the coachman she shared with two neighbors. He saw her, then a second later, her own carriage pulled away from the curb to follow. She turned around and slid down into the seat, and Mick's arm—he'd braced it on the bench back—slid down, too. He gripped her around the shoulders. He squeezed her to him as both he and she laughed without reserve.

As they clopped past Hyde Park, then along the side and around Buckingham Palace, the two of them laughed like fools, recapping the baroness's confusion and surprise till they were slouched against the seat and each other, gripping the arm pieces to hold themselves up, till Winnie was wheezing from it. She couldn't catch her breath from the wild run topped off by laughing too much.

When he became concerned with her breathing, she waved her hand. "It's all right. Asthma. It'll go away as soon as I settle down." She tried to get hold of herself, drawing in deep breaths, then letting them out slowly, with giggles.

As she wheezed her way into sanity again, Mick frowned, smiled, shook his head, then touched her cheek. "Oh, you are a mess, my sweet duck. Such a sweet mess."

He turned in the seat, his shoulder against the bench, his chest close enough to her arm that she could feel his humidity and warmth. He wanted to kiss her. She was becoming aware of the signs, how he moved close, how he watched her face, her mouth. Then she remembered that he wanted her to say it, to tell him. He waited.

Oh, dear, if she were honest, she'd admit she loved all this kissing business. She could do it forever, give up eating, sleeping, just kiss his mouth, maybe lie down beside him, press her body against him. Just the kissing. She remembered it sometimes so vividly from that time in his room that memory brought a near-perfect echo of sensation, a lovely ripple of the same, if muted, pleasure.

Sometimes, too, she remembered the other thing he'd done. The way his hand had sought her lower, the way he'd so fiercely seemed to want to touch her there. When she thought of it now, it wasn't so awful. Only intimate. Very, very intimate.

Yes, she wanted him to kiss her, quick and strong; hard, as he had that time when his mustache was just freshly off. She wanted to say it.
Kiss me.
She wet her lips, opened her mouth—and her mind went blank. She sat there like a nit, nothing coming out but horrid, faint asthmatic wheezing. Which made her close her eyes in despair as a wave of the old feeling returned: a sense of being the least appealing woman on earth.

Why did she have to ask? Pretty women didn't, she was sure. If she were only pretty enough, only a more powerfully attractive female, she'd have kisses bestowed
…
kisses everywhere
…
that would arrive on their own.

Since they wouldn't, though, she tried valiantly to get past her misgivings about her own worth so as to ask for what she wanted. The concept was simple enough. Yet she tried all the way down Birdcage Walk and onto Whitehall to no effect, save a lot of wheezing.

As they approached Trafalgar, Mick laughed beside her, then his lips brushed her cheek. "You're hopeless, Winnie," he said. "But it's a stupid game. Arrogance made me invent it, and I'm suffering now for it. We both are. I'm kissing you anyway. Just let me."

Then he lifted her chin, brought her face to his, and breathed into her mouth as if he could supply her oxygen.

God above. He may as well have. He certainly did something to the flow of her blood. It began to pound. Oh, yes.

He kissed her in front of all of London, on the roof-top of a horse-drawn omnibus as they trotted by Lord Nelson looking down on them from his granite column. In front of the world, clever, handsome, humorous Mick kissed her, while her heart thudded and her belly squirmed and something low inside melted. Then better still, Mick moved her around, pulling her legs over him, and scooted her up into his lap.

Goodness. Oh, goodness. He pulled her against him as he kissed her strongly. She let him; she helped. She put her arms about his lovely, sturdy neck, reached tentatively into his hair, and kissed him back. She devoured him.

His soft hair. His hot, tender-wet mouth, reaching, wanting hers. He scooted himself down a bit, till her weight rested against his chest, until she lay against a hard, broad wall of muscle. Then something new and strange. Where she sat she could feel through her skirts the vague outline of him under her. He grew hard, becoming a noticeable, rounded ridge.

The sensation wasn't repellent, though she had believed somewhere it would be. Someone had left her with that impression, but, whoever they were, they were wrong. It was
…
mesmerizing. She could sense the length of him against her buttocks as well as a kind of heaviness, a substantive presence. He was changing right there under her, growing longer and thicker, information she acquired through the unlikely source of her bum, while he kissed her mouth. Heavens, what a sensation. She didn't know what to make of it. Too much to assimilate, too different from what, all her life, she'd thought a man would be: both more sleek—elegant—and more formidable.

It was the formidable part, of course, that gave her pause. She backed away from his face, looking into it, both of them knowing what she was feeling. The size of him felt threatening when paired with what she knew of simple biology, with where he was supposed to put something that large. She couldn't imagine it.