“Your servants are a little freer with their gossip than I’d like.”
“Yes, well, he’s had to do rather more shuffling people about the city than is quite usual for him. I suppose he’s entitled to be a bit sour about it.” This time, she took her shot while speaking, and neatly sank the red ball he’d missed before he could distract her, clinching the game entirely. “What were you doing in Cheapside, then?”
“I believe when I asked you a similar question, you rather condescendingly informed me that it was too personal a question,” he said.
“So I did,” she allowed, as she collected the ivory billiard balls from the table and returned them to their silk-lined case. “But then I am notoriously nosy, so I can be forgiven for asking all the same.”
“Can you?” Incredibly, he wanted to laugh. Laugh!
“I ought to be, given that I certainly didn’t shout at you for undertaking the very same action as I.” Mercy wrested his cue from him, though he was loath to relinquish it. She’d been entitled to boast over her victory, so it rather surprised him that she hadn’t.
“Idid not leave the house unaccompanied in the dead of night,” he said. “But I’ll make you another deal. You tell me what you were doing, and I’ll tell you what I was doing.”
For a moment, perhaps a bit longer, she genuinely seemed to consider the offer, canting her head and peering at him as if she could see into his damned soul. “No,” she said at last. “I think not.”
Which was a shame, when he considered that he thought they’d been getting on rather well this last half hour or so. At least, he hadn’t been tempted to throttle her, and she hadn’t needled him at every potential opportunity.
It wasn’t so much that he wanted to confide in her so much as he thought shecouldbe confided in. Probably she was an excellent keeper of secrets, given that she guarded her own so closely.
“Shame,” he said. “And here I thought we were getting along so well. Would you care for a drink?” He nodded his head to indicate the sideboard set against the far wall.
“No, I thank you.” The muted gold silk of her skirts swished across the floor as she retreated toward a couch and sank onto itwith a sigh, briefly revealing her stockinged feet, since she’d absently discarded her slippers upon the staircase—which she had done several times in recent memory. “But do help yourself,” she added. “Papa keeps liquor in nearly every social room of the house. He says it makes visitors somewhat more pleasant.”
“To him, or for him?”
“Do you know, I never thought it prudent to ask.” The quirk of her lips suggested she had been amused by the question. “It was good of you,” she said, “to allow me to leave when I had done with the ball this evening.”
Ah, yes. She had tired of waiting at the edge of the ballroom inside of an hour, though she had waited a half an hour after her single dance—with him—to do it. And she had, in point of fact, turned out to be a fine dancer. Light, graceful, elegant. “I said I would,” he replied as he poured himself a glass of brandy. “It was good of you not to step on my toes.”
“Iwastempted, I’ll admit. If only because you should have been obliged to pretend that I had not, and I would have found it terribly amusing.” She toyed with a curl that had come down from its pins, wrapping it about her index finger in a perfect spiral until it bounced free. And once again she wound it up around her finger, as if she found the repetitive action somehow soothing. “I don’t think your mother believed me about the headache, though.”
“In fact, she did not.” But then, he’d told Mother in advance of the bargain he had made with Mercy, in an effort to convince her to let Mercy leave when she wished. “Still, she was glad of your company. Perhaps, if you had stayed a bit longer—”
And there; she turned up her nose at him immediately. “What, perhaps someone else would have asked me to dance?”
“There is always that possibility, yes,” he said as he sipped. “Regrettably, some gentlemen will only follow where otherslead. They’ll clamber to introduce themselves to a woman who has already acquired more than her fair share of attention, but shy away from requesting an introduction to a lady who is—”
“Unpopular,” Mercy interjected sourly, and that curl sprang free of her finger once more as she folded her arms over her chest. “Past her prime. Beneath his social class.”
“I was going to say anunknown,” Thomas said, with a lift of his brows. But she’d expected him to say worse, and that—that was some excoriating critique of his character on its own. He supposed he could not hold it against her; he’d been at least half an arse to her for nearly twenty years now, when he hadn’t been avoiding her at any and every opportunity. But there hadn’t been even the tiniest whisper of his father’s voice in his mind the whole evening, and that was something to her credit. That with her very presence she silenced that nasty, subversive murmur in his mind.
“Oh,” Mercy said, and her shoulders drooped to a noticeably less defensive angle. “And which are you, then? Leader or follower?”
“Oh, follower, without question,” Thomas said, absent hesitation, and he leaned back against the wall, crossing one ankle over the other. “All my life, unfortunately. Father made right certain of that.”
Mercy’s brows pinched together, her lips pursing as if against an unwise remark. “I’m sorry,” she said. And then a moment later, she decided to let that unwise comment loose anyway. “I never liked your father.”
Thomas felt a startled laugh climb up his throat. “Yes, well, neither did any of us. I suppose he must’ve been pleasant enough at one point—at least pleasant enough to convince Mother to wed him—but he was an arse as far back as my memory goes.” He rolled his shoulders in an uncomfortable shrug. “I hear his voice in my head on occasion,” he confessed. More occasions,really, than he would have liked to admit even to himself. “Chiding me for some infraction or other, or undertaking some action of which he would have disapproved. Only—”
Mercy inclined her head, expression free of anything but curiosity. Not a shred of judgment, no matter how queer a thing to which he had just confessed. “Only?” she prompted.
“Only just lately, that voice has begun to sound less like Father’s and more like my own,” he said. And he hated it. Hated that somewhere along the way he had become his own worst enemy, made himself into the very manner of man he had wanted to avoid becoming. A man in the image of the father who had never truly earned that appellation.
There had been a time he had been so damnedjealousof Mercy, for her loving, attentive father. Who had let her do things no girl ought to have been permitted to do, and who had laughed with her and played with her as he had wished his father would have done with him, back when he had foolishly, childishly, nurtured some faint hope of earning his father’s love.
Instead his father had found only flaws within him to be eradicated. With extreme prejudice. And he found himself confessing another unpleasant truth. “Luckily, Father reserved the worst of his recriminations for me, and so the girls were spared the worst of his venom,” he said down into his glass. “I had the most dreadful stammer as a child. I still do, on rare occasions, when I’m under particular stress or otherwise agitated.”
“Yes, I know,” Mercy said softly.
