If he were honest with himself, he could hardly recall a time he hadnothad something recriminatory to say of her or to her. She was not wrong in her assessment, and for the first time he was forced to admit that he hadbeen rigid and unbending and—perhaps a bit more of a starchy, high-strung arse than he would have liked to acknowledge even to himself.
A man in the image of his father. The sort of man whom people tended to tiptoe around as if they were walking upon eggshells, leery of taking any action which might provoke disapproval. The sort of man who was close to no one, who could find fault in anything. The sort of man who could turn his son into a stammering, anxious mess with only a look, whose censure was legendary, and who had not been particularly missed by his family after his death.
Was that truly the sort of man he wanted to be, so cold and unforgiving that Mercy truly could not consider a possibility that existed in which he did not intend to take her to task for some infraction or other? Would he wish for Marina or Juliet to marry a man in Father’s image? In the one he had cultivated for himself?
Hell, no.
“In fact, I have got something to say,” he said, and he caught the arm of a wingback chair, dragged it across the floor toward the desk, and cast himself into it. “Pour me a glass.”
∞∞∞
“You bear a remarkable resemblance to a badger.”
Mercy blinked, nonplussed, and paused in the act of replacing the stopper back into the neck of the decanter. “That’s quite a rude thing to say to a woman who has kindly poured you a drink.” The temptation hovered to cast it into his face, but she doubted she could aim well enough at this point. Things had gone a bit soft and wibbly, and she was certain if she had so much as another drop of brandy herself, there would quite suddenly betwoThomases to contend with, when one was quite enough to manage already.
“Well, it’s what I wanted to say. And it is true, besides. You’ve smeared graphite all over your face.” He took the glass from her hand, took a small sip. A cautious one, she thought.
“What?” She lifted her hands and stared down at the right one, which had somehow ended up covered in a thick sheen of pencil lead. “Why did you not tell me?”
“Because it was amusing.” He gave a careless shrug, but there lingered the tiniest hint of satisfaction in the very corner of his mouth. “You said you often find yourself unable to sleep. Is this a frequent occurrence, then?” he asked, with a vague gesture of his hand, which she guessed was meant to encapsulate the whole of the situation—the room, the liquor.Her.
“I do not frequently drink to excess,” she sniffed, uncertainwhether or not she was meant to be offended. “But I am frequently awake at odd hours.”
“Hmm.” His glass dangled from his fingertips, and that was curiosity etched into the lines of his face rather than judgment. “Why?”
Why? “How the devil should I know? Have you not ever found yourself unable to sleep?”
“Yes, of course. But I would not describe it as a frequent occurrence. It’s curious that you would.”
“Well, I don’t knowwhy.” The query itself seemed to scratch at something in her brain, prodding uncomfortably close to a tender area. A sense of abnormalitythat had been with her all her life. “I have always been this way. I did not choose it,” she said, defensively. Crawling out of her bed even as a child to walk deserted corridors when her brain had just felt too busyfor sleep to settle in. Sometimes nodding off around dawn, if she were lucky to snatch at perhaps a few hours of sleep before she was woken for breakfast.
“I didn’t intend to imply that you had.” Another small sip from his glass, as if the brandy had been little more than a ritual in which to participate. Behind the lenses of his spectacles, his dark eyes were a little too sharp, a little too keen.
Mercy rubbed at her tired eyes, remembering too late the graphite smearing her face. “Get on with it,” she said. “The lecture.”
“I don’t want to lecture you.”
“What rubbish,” she said with an inelegant snort. “Of course you do. You always lecture.”
“I—” Thomas hesitated, a wrinkle of a frown appearing between the arches of his brows. “I suppose I do, don’t I?” he mused, almost to himself. “Well. I don’t mean to do it this evening. May I see your sketchbook?”
“For what reason?” Mercy inquired, laying her hands over itprotectively.
“Curiosity,” he said. “I thumbed through it once before—”
Her fingers curled tighter around it at the reminder. “Which was not very good of you to do.”
Thomas had the good grace to affect an abashed expression, pitching his shoulders in a shrug. “No, I suppose not,” he allowed. “Even so, I was impressed. Your sketches were precise, exact. I could see where the pattern was meant to be repeated, how the lines would join from one block print to the next. How did you learn to do it by hand, with only a pencil?”
“I don’t know. Practice, I suppose.” Years of it. Her first patterns had been inspired, but inelegant. They had required the talents of others to adjust them to suit the printing blocks and rollers used in Papa’s factories. Now, she could simply see the repeats in her head, create a pattern with seamless lines with only the stroke of her pencil across the page.
“I once visited a fabric mill in which I briefly considered investing,” he said. “Not your father’s; he’s never been much in need of investment. But the patterns on offer were clumsily rendered, poorly aligned. It had the regrettable tendency to make the prints look cheap, which is why I declined to invest. It’s clear enough that yours are done with far more care.”
That had sounded remarkably like praise, and for a moment Mercy almost wondered if her brandy-clouded brain had invented it. But since he had expressed some manner of interest… “Incidentally,” she said, contriving to keep her voice light and steady, passably nonchalant, “I shall have to meet with the mill manager to pass along my latest patterns.”
Thomas’ dark brows drew down, interest replaced with severity. The imperious lord of the manor once again. “Out of the question.”
“It wasn’t a question to begin with. I was merely being courteous enough to inform you of my intentions.”
