The Proposition (26 page)

Just like that, he stopped.

She opened her eyes to see him walk across the room himself to the gramophone. It was groaning again. He cranked it, then two seconds later was pushing her backward into pivots around the floor, the jangle of a recorded violin moving them.

Let him know?
she thought.

Kissing him, she remembered, "really kissing him," as he called it, had been
…
exciting. Such a surprisingly powerful and tender connection to him. Unforgettable. As she spun backward round the room—as he let go of the counting, gathering himself into the rhythm alone without it, incorporating it into himself—she remembered how vital it felt when his mouth opened hers and he breathed into it.

She was supposed to ask for this?

She couldn't. She murmured, "You want too much."

He danced and answered with his usual candor. "You criticize me and cry, Win. You curse me and slap me and move me downstairs." He shook his head at her. "Is it too much to want that you take a look at what you're doing?"

She was saved from having to think about what he meant. Just then, as they moved across the dusty floor, the ball of her foot stepped squarely on a small and sharp object.

"Ah— Wait— I've tramped on something." She halted them, hopping on one foot as she grabbed the other one under her skirt.

The music kept going, though it wasn't as pronounced to Winnie as the sound of their breathing, both slightly breathless from waltzing and talking, both.

She was clutching his arm, holding her foot, trying to figure out what she'd done, while he supported her balance. He was close. His arm remained around her back. Her hand gripped his wide shoulder.

Yes, she thought, she wanted him to kiss her. Yes.

But she didn't want to say. How unfair. She frowned, then scowled. How miserably unfair. She stood there sluicing her eyes sideways at him, flatfooted in one stockinged foot. She opened her mouth, closed it, skewed it to the side, then looked up, scrutinizing him.

Chapter 17

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H
olding Winnie, with her standing on one foot by the piano at the side of the music-room floor, Mick watched her screwed-up face—her brow furrowed downward, her mouth twisted up. She was trying to say something—

By God, she was going to say it! he thought. He just knew she was. She clutched his back. He let her hang onto him. God bless, they were all over each other today.

He could almost see her mind review the problem—how to get kissed without admitting she wanted it—from a thousand angles, trying to process each one.

She opened her mouth.

He leaned forward so as to hear every syllable or to grab a shred of one, at least, if she couldn't get it all out.

Then Winnie said, "My foot hurts," and folded. Her long frame simply collapsed downward into her dress like a deflating balloon onto the floor.

Mick stood above her, stymied, not sure if this were a good sign or not. After a moment, he sat down beside her, tried to reach under her dress for her foot, then got his hand slapped for it.

Glumly, he protested, "I was going to look at your foot, see if I could find anything. Is it a splinter?"

"No, I tramped on something larger than that."

"This?" he asked, rotating to lean out onto one arm and pluck a small black screw off the floor. He showed her.

She nodded. "It has to be from the piano. I slipped on it earlier, I think. I should have stopped. Look, it cut through my stocking." It made a pinprick of blood at the round swell of the ball, as if she'd tramped full force, all her weight.

He dropped the screw into her hand, then took her foot. Like everything else, they fought over it, but he won by massaging his thumb up her arch.

"Oh," she said. Then "Oh," again. "Oh, crumbs. What you're doing feels wonderful."

She leaned back as, reluctantly, there on the floor, she let him take her foot into his lap. She stared at the screw in her hand. "I think it's from the music stand. It fell off last week."

He rubbed her foot down the bottom strongly to the heel, then rotated her ankle.

"Oh," she said again. "That feels impossibly good."

He said, "So, when you were bad, what did they tell you? What did they do?"

Her eyes blinked up from where they were policing his possession of her foot, taken by surprise to find the game on again. "Who?"

"Your parents."

"My parents didn't say anything."

"Truly? Not a word?" He was puzzled. "Someone then. Someone else."

She frowned and looked away.

"A governess," he suggested.

She whipped her eyes around to him, as if he'd read her mind.

"So what did she say? What did she do?"

"I had a lot of governesses." She frowned then said quickly, "Miss Nibitsky."

"Ah, Miss Nibitsky," he repeated, sliding his hand up her leg a little, kneading the back of her lower calf. "So what did Miss Nibitsky say when you were horrid?"

"She'd say, 'You little brat, if you don't do what I say, I'll break all your toys.'" Then she laughed shyly and looked down. "I've never told anyone that. How peculiar to say it to a grown man."

"No, no." He shook his head, surprised, interested. "Would she break them?"

She answered with a shrug. "I just stopped playing with anything I liked in her presence. One year, she canceled my birthday. She said I simply couldn't turn six. I'd have to wait till the following year."

"What a wretched woman." He didn't like any of this. He withdrew a little. He rubbed the bottoms of her toes and asked, "Didn't you tell someone?"

"Who? If I said anything to my father, he waved me away vaguely. If I told my mother, she got angry; she didn't believe me."

Mick frowned and tried to get hold of his original notion. "Then what?" he asked. "What if you still wouldn't listen?" There must have been gentler reproofs, he told himself. He wanted to use them, to see if he could counter all that held Winnie back with reasons to go forward expressed as rigidly. He rubbed up her ankle, playing at the hem of her dress. "What if you were just a little bit bad?"

She said nothing. He stopped, tilted his head. He had to look for her face. When he found it, the look on it—it was bloody terrible. "There was no 'little bit bad'?" he asked. Then he guessed more than he liked: "She hurt you," he said, "really hurt you."

Winnie defended her upbringing quickly, yet it shocked him. She said, "She only used a cane once. She said that, if I were a boy, I'd be in boarding school by now, where in a blink, when children were as bad as I was, they sent them to the headmaster who made them stand on a pulpit and—" Her voice broke. She stopped.

Mick let go of her foot and smoothed her dress down. He leaned back onto his arm, putting his hand up to his mouth, a finger across his bare lip.

"What's wrong?" she asked, as if she'd offended him.

In a way, she had. It was his turn to feel sick. He, who could cosh a rat bloody senseless, was revolted by Winnie's childhood. It was a good thing her story took place a long time ago, because, if he ever saw this Nibitsky woman, he would want to do her violence.

"Did your parents know?" he asked.

"I think so."

All Mick knew about boarding schools was that they turned out snobs. He hadn't known about their discipline habits, and certainly had had no idea about evil governesses, though he understood what caning was from stories of orphanages and poorhouses.

"It wasn't really so—" She tried to shrug it off.

He was too distressed on her behalf to let her. He said, "No, Win. English gentlemen and gentlewomen don't deserve the word
gentle,
to put such fear into their own children. Or to pay someone else to do it. The upper class is"—he looked for something to say that was sufficiently disgusting, then found it in his growing stockpile of words—"barbaric."

"I was a frightened child before she ever—"

"I'm sure. All the worse."

She looked at him as it seemed to dawn on her. "It
is
horrid, isn't it, what she did?" She frowned at him. "Have I made you loathe me then?"

"No!" He laughed, then slid her around and pulled her up against him. "Sh-h-h," he said. "Oh, Winnie."

He felt homesick all at once, a sweet, sharp longing for rocky moors and jagged coastline, where a boy was never more than twenty miles from the sea no matter where he stood. And always on solid ground with his family.

"Let me tell you about Cornwall," he said. He scooted her till she sat in the cove of his legs, nestled her into his arms, and kissed the top of her head.

He did: He told her of playing in Celtic ruins, ducking through half-tumbled-down archways, unmindful of the hands that built them. His castles. He told her of running along the sea with several of his brothers, then sisters, too, as more children came along, until he was running in a pack of fourteen wild siblings, some of them barely nine months apart.

"That's a lot of children," Winnie said.

"Mum was Catholic. She didn't believe in preventing a child the Lord wanted her to have. She even took in one He didn't put on her. My brother Brad isn't even hers. His mother died, then his father beat him, so he came and lived with us, the wild Tremore brood. He fit right in."

"If your mother couldn't manage you all, did your father do it?" Winnie wanted to know.

"God, no. My father left after the fourth or fifth one, I think."

She puzzled over the information. "Then how did the sixth one and the rest come about?"

He got a good chuckle out of that. "God did it," he said. "That's what my mother would say. The rest were all immaculate conception. She was a crazy one, my mum. Or else she thought we were." He laughed again, fondly. "She did her best. She tried to put the fear of God in all of us, and always succeeded for a while with the littlest ones. But they'd come to me, crying, scared, you know, and I'd explain. 'No, God won't punish you. He loves you. And your mum does, too, only she's angry with you and can't give you the good swipe you deserve.'

"Being the oldest, I thought it my duty to put them on to her, wise them up, you know? No use scaring little children with a lot of talk about damnation. Then I'd say, 'But see, I can take a swipe at you, so do as you're told. Your mum's too kindhearted to hit you. That's why she invents all these things.'" He laughed. "It worked. We all helped her."

"You especially," Winnie said.

He ran his mouth down an inch of her crown, feeling her hair against his lips. "Yes, me especially. I pretty much ruled the roost as the oldest. It was my job to use that the right way, to help the rest with it."

She thought for a minute, then said, relaxed now, her body fitting sweetly against his chest, between his legs, "That explains why you act as if you're king sometimes then." She was teasing him.

"I am king," he said. "King of the life of Mick Tremore. And you, my pretty thing, are queen. Queen of yourself."

"Why did you leave if you liked Cornwall so much?"

"To feed us. After my mother died, we about starved to death." He laughed. "I'll be honest, Win. I think some of my brothers and sisters were the result of my mother's enterprise." It was funny to him, sad, too; his mother struggling to feed her brood, but doing it in a way that only made her more children. "Anyway, with just myself and three brothers working in the mines, trying to feed fourteen, it wasn't enough. So I put my younger brothers and sisters with aunts and uncles then came to the city. I brought Freddie, a great ferret. You met her."

"Yes, you said she's your best."

"Was. I lied a little. She's old now." He paused, thinking. "Because of her, though, I sent home money my very first week, enough to buy food and a bit of clothes, something the younger ones sorely needed. We wouldn't have made it another winter. Freddie saved us. That's why I have to take good care of her, right to the end."

"Fourteen," Win repeated. "That's a big family."

"It is, but I managed and the older ones help now. Five brothers, eight sisters. My youngest sister is eleven. I support the ones who can't support themselves yet, with a bit left over for me after I give extra to the three aunts and an uncle who care for them. It works out. Don't know what I'd do without family."

"Or them without you," she pointed out.

He laughed. "I guess." Then he corrected himself. "I imagine." He refined it. "I rather imagine." He made a snort, a vocalized breath that heard—but wasn't certain it liked—how upper-class he sounded. "Anyway," he continued, "it wouldn't even have occurred to me to keep the money all to myself." He made indirect reference to her cousin. "I mean, how could I enjoy it, knowing I had so much when they had so little?"

If she understood his expressed loyalty, she didn't acknowledge it.

They sat on the floor there in the dancing room, saying nothing for several minutes, just sitting together. He liked it. He brushed his lips across the top of her hair again. It was silky. Like the rest of her. It smelled lemony.