The Proposition (13 page)

Molly Reed? Was this Mrs. Reed's first name? If so, Edwina had never heard it till this moment.

She felt momentarily disoriented. As if he were unearthing startling objects, dropping them before her, out of familiar terrain, terrain that was her own.

Oh, enough, she thought. She was about to take what was offered, a clean exit.

But Milton interrupted. He came to the door. "Is everything all right, m'lady?"

"Yes." She frowned around at him, a plea for rescue.

As if nothing were amiss, he went on. "I took Mrs. Reed home. Her son's horse threw a shoe. I've locked up. Is there anything else you need?"

She shook her head. If there was, she couldn't define it well enough to ask for it.

"Oh," Milton added, "and the dresses from the seamstress arrived early this evening. I put the box on the table in your sitting room."

She nodded. What dresses? Oh, yes.

As if in echo, across from her a voice asked, "What dresses?"

"What?" She looked down.

Mr. Tremore's smile was gone, replaced by a strange, quizzical look. "New dresses?"

"No, old ones." She shook her head; it was of no consequence. "Brought up to date."

"Where?"

"Pardon me?"

"Where did you have 'em fixed?" It was apparently of consequence to him.

She frowned, wet her lips. "The seamstress's, Milly-something, off Queen's Gate." She remembered he knew at least the shop assistant there and couldn't resist asking, "How well do you know the ladies of that shop? Are they friends of yours?"
Until yesterday,
she wanted to add.

He didn't say yea or nay, though, only sitting back in his chair to stare at her, his attention so unwavering it could only be called rude.

After a moment, he shook his head, smiling slightly, shook his head some more, then looked down. He seemed almost embarrassed. Well, there was a change.
He
looked discomposed. One strange outcome for certain: He tried to speak, then couldn't. The man who loved talk was completely without words.

Chapter 8

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M
ick
spent the better part of the next week gawking at Winnie Bollash's skirts, half-hoping his stares would burn a hole through them. God knew, for all that was going through his head—while he ogled the way the fabric of her skirts moved when she crossed her legs or when she stood or sat or stretched her long self out—hell, if a man's hot thoughts and stares counted for anything, her
skirts should've bloody well been on
fire by now.

They sat side by side today in her laboratory. He was going through a drill of vowels—she'd given him a pencil to point down the page, so he could follow along, sound at a time, with what she'd written out. He was supposed to mark the sounds he thought he was ready to record for the stupid
gramophone.

Lessons. They'd been going at all kinds of tricks Winnie Bollash knew to make a man talk different, ten and twelve hours a day for a week. They'd had things in his mouth. Her taking notes. Him saying sounds that weren't even words. Or sitting alone much of the time repeating exercises for so long, that were so boring, even Magic got up and left.

They worked at a table together now, her to his right, to his left a tall window that looked out onto the front street of her fine London neighborhood. For eight days, he'd woke up in the same bed, each day surprised to
find himself there, each day amazed anew to get up and walk around a house where, from any window a
man
looked, he could see tall houses made of brick,
clean glass blinking at their windows, flower boxes,
trees neatly shaped, hedges, iron gates. He didn't feel
like he belonged here, that he deserved this life—who did? he wondered—but he was happy that, for a
change, the injustice of life was working for him, not
against him.

He tapped the pencil on the page, looking at the
sounds he was supposed to be saying to himself. He should've mentioned they were written out in a way that didn't make much sense to him. He was bored. He'd spent the morning on
is's, am's,
and
are's, was's,
and
were's.
Yesterday,
ing's
and
th's. He
couldn't keep them all straight. He was ready for some amusement
to
break up the dreariness.

Winnie looked at him, at his
hand
tapping
the
pencil. His heart gave a little leap. She was going to talk to him. He loved to talk to her. He liked the sound of her, the way her voice was soft and classy, smooth and fine. He liked the words she used and how she used them.

The words she used this time though, as she glanced over the tops of her eyeglasses, were: "You should really shave your mustache, Mr. Tremore. It doesn't have the refined air we are trying to cultivate for you."

He rolled his eyes, but she didn't see. She went back to writing. Bloody hell. She had only told him a dozen times to take a razor to the fine growth of hair on his lip. "I like it," he muttered.

He watched her touch the tip of her pen to her tongue to make the ink flow better. Without looking at him, she said, "It's not stylish."

"It's thick. Not many men can grow a mustache like it."

"Not many men would want to."

"Oh, I don't know about that." He touched the hair that grew under his nose. "It's funny, though, you think you got the right to get rid of it, like you can reach over and tweak my lip. Kind of brassy of you, when you think about it."

She looked up from her writing, her pen stopped over the page. "Brassy?"

"Full of yourself. Cocky, you know?"

She squinched up her face like she could, then laughed not unkindly, which made him feel a little bad. "I'm not the least bit"—she paused—"brassy, as you put it."

He was being testy, he knew, but he just felt … itchy or something lately. "Well, no," he conceded. "You're a nice woman. Gentle-like. You mean well. But you sure think you run everything."

"Ha." She put the pen down and looked at him. "I don't think anything of a sort. If I run anything, it's my own legs. I'm usually running as fast as I can, figuratively at least. I'm scared most of the time." She made another face, sheepish, like she wished she hadn't admitted it. He liked her face, its funny features that could move so many ways, bend. She had a thousand expressions.

But one predominant state of mind. He said, "Scared 'cause the world ain't working to your plan. Scared someone's gonna find out and blame you for it."

"That's not true. And it's
isn't."

"What?"

"Pardon?"

"Oh." She was fixing him again.
Isn't.
Right. He
said, "Scared we all isn't falling into your line."

"Aren't."

Mick stopped talking, finding a back tooth to push his tongue against, twisting his mouth. Twisting his mustache at her. Stupid. All these different words for the same thing.

He pitched the pencil onto the sheets of paper in front of him. It tapped end over end once, making a light mark, then clattered still. He sighed. "All I can say, loov, is it must be hell running the whole blooming place. Especially when so much of it depends on
things that are about as dependable as, oh, just one
damn roll of the craps after another."

Whatever he was trying to tell her, Edwina didn't
understand it. Though she knew, when he made a faint grin and lifted his eyebrows at her, he was trying to jolly her out of any offense.

He picked up his pencil again, flipping it over in his hand, playing with it, then beat on the edge of the table.
Tap tap tap tap…
He kept the rhythm going
lightly as he said, "'Course the chanciness is damn exciting, you gotta admit." He threw her an unac
countable smile. "Like now. Either of us could do
anything
in the next second."

It
was involuntary; she drew back. More of the ca
pricious philosophies of Mr. Mick Tremore. She was always dodging them.

She might or might not, she thought, have him speaking and acting like a viscount by the end of next month, yet she had come to believe quite firmly that Mr. Tremore could grab hold of the lapels of a Regius professor of philosophy on the street, expound in his face on one amusing topic after another, then let the fellow go, dizzy with his own sense of unoriginality when it came to words and theories on life.

"Speak for yourself," she said. "I couldn't do anything"—she paused, then used his word for it—"chancy."

"Yes, you could."

"Well, I could, but I won't."

He laughed. "Well, you might surprise yourself one day."

His sureness of himself irked her. Like the mustache that he twitched slightly. He knew she didn't like it; he used it to tease her.

Fine. What a pointless conversation. She picked up her pen, going back to the task of writing out his progress for the morning. Out the corner of her eye, though, she could see him.

He'd leaned back on the rear legs of his chair, lifting the front ones off the floor. He rocked there beside her
as he bent his head sideways, tilting it, looking under the table. He'd been doing this all week, making her nervous with it.
As if there were a mouse or worse, something under there that she should be aware of. It was never anything though. Or nothing he wanted to mention; she'd asked already more than once.

She phrased the question differently today. "What
are
you doing?"

Illogically, he came back with, "I bet you have the longest, prettiest legs."

"Limbs,"
she corrected. "A gentleman refers to that
part of a
lady as her limbs, her lower limbs, though it
is rather poor form to speak of them at all. You shouldn't."

He laughed. "Limbs? Like a bloody tree?" His pencil continued to tap lightly, an annoying tattoo of ticks. "No, you got legs under there. Long ones. And I'd give just about anything to see 'em."

Goodness. She was without words again, nothing readily available to say to yet another of his impertinent comments.

And he knew it was impertinent. He was tormenting her. That much knowledge she had gained of him. He liked to torture her for amusement, like a child pulling legs off a bug. Though something about him today felt at more extreme loose ends, more bored than usual, capable of "chancy" mischief.

He tipped back further on the rear legs of his chair, giving the waving front leg a quick double tap of the pencil,
ta-tick,
on his way to dropping his arm down, out of sight. His position was quite precarious, she was thinking—

She felt the tickle up her ankle before she understood what it was. His pencil. He ran the tip of it, quick as you please, up her anklebone along the leather of her shoe. It flipped the hem of her dress up.

She brushed it down. "Stop that."

He bounced the pencil once off the leg of the table,
tick ta-tick,
then puffed his top
lip out, squelching air between lip and teeth to make a strange little rude sound; it bristled his mustache. Oh, that mustache. Then she caught the word:
anything?

To see her legs? Her legs were nothing. Two sticks that bent so she could walk on them. He wanted to see these?

For anything?

She wouldn't let him see them, of course. But she wasn't past provoking him in return: pointing out that, while some people wanted to see what they shouldn't, others were forced to look at what they'd certainly like to be rid of. "Well, there is a solution here then, Mr. Tremore. You can see my legs, when you shave your mustache."

She meant it as a kind of joke. A taunt to get back at him.

Joke or not, though, his pencil not only stopped, it dropped. There was a tiny clatter on the floor, a faint sound of rolling, then silence—as, along with the pencil, Mr. Tremore's entire body came to a motionless standstill. He was caught in that awful, boyishly crude pose, leaning back on the legs of his chair, a recalcitrant look on his face.

He opened his mouth as if to say something, then just wet his lips.

Edwina wasn't sure where the knowledge came from, but she understood with sudden, sure insight: He was keen to see a pair of legs that no one else cared a fig about. Long, rangy legs, their proportions to her body about as graceful as those of the legs on a colt.

As to her joke—oh, my. His expression said he was considering it as a genuine offer, an idea that made her more uncomfortable than she would have thought possible. His stillness, the look on his face…
The combination made her run her hand over the tops of her knees, hold her dress against her shins.

He wet his lips again as if trying to lubricate speech. "Pardon?" he said finally. He spoke it perfectly, exactly as she'd asked him to. Only now it unsettled her.