The Proposition (8 page)

Once in bed, though, she didn't go to sleep. She wasn't sleepy, she decided, so she picked up a book instead. She opened it, then never read a word. Instead, she listened to the water cut off, the pipes clanking as the flow stopped. She jolted slightly against her pillow as she heard a
ka-plosh,
then, "Ai, that be hot!"—Mr. Tremore entering a tubful of water. She lay there listening to the substantial splashes and sloshes of his large body moving through the business of a bath.

She thought about his naked chest again. Her memory of it both fascinated and repelled her. Hair. It had been there again as they had argued in the bathroom. She shuddered. Who would have thought? Yet she had studied it with surreptitious care: a pattern of dark hair, two perfect swirls over muscles that bunched when he folded his arms, swirls that converged to become a dense pattern in the crevice between chest muscles, then (when he pulled his arms away to push back his hair) ran in a dark, ever-narrowing line, like an arrow pointing downward. Mick Tremore in the rude, as it were. This way to the widge.

Edwina started. Heavens! Up till now, she realized, she had carefully avoided forming in her mind any word for that part of a man. Even the scientific word made her vaguely uneasy; her sensibilities veered away from it. Still, she'd known immediately what Mr. Tremore referred to when he'd said
that.
His word seemed friendlier. A fond name. Were men fond of that part of themselves? It was certainly not the best part of statues; she made a point not to look there. And it changed, it grew. She'd read that astounding piece of information in a book. That was the worst part, the horror—or it had been the worst until this very moment, when it occurred to her that, goodness, a man might have hair there, too. She did. Oh, something that grew larger, up and out of a tangle of hair. How disgusting.

No, no, she mustn't think of it anymore. Enough. She must think of something else.

The mustache. From down the hallway came
ka-plosh, ka-plosh.
Mr. Tremore getting clean. Truly clean—taking off all the thick, wiry hair that grew on his lip. Good. With that satisfying thought, punctuated by the pleasant, occasional lap of bathwater down the hall, she fell into a doze. There was no telling for how long, but she came to herself with a start, her reading light still on, the house quiet.

Then no: she rose up onto her arms, for a different sound reached her. The noise of movement, someone walking in the dead of night. Edwina sat all the way up, thinking, What the blazes. It seemed to come from the direction of her father's study.

She hopped off her bed, putting her arms through the sleeves of her faded blue dressing gown. She walked quickly out into the hall, lifting her heavy braid from where it was caught with one hand as she pushed her spectacles up from where they'd slid down her nose with the other.

At the far end, the door to her father's study indeed stood partly open. The light was on. She walked toward it, continuing to hear the soft shuffle of someone moving about. She thought irritably, It must be Mr. Tremore prowling around. But when she pushed the door open further, she could only step back.

It was a stranger, standing in quarter profile and holding her father's crystal decanter of cognac up to the light.

The room's wall lamp made the brandy, as it tipped gently back and forth in the decanter, cast amber prisms across the side of his face, his shirt. Gold light. It made him look like an apparition. She might have said the intruder was a handsome, genteel burglar, for he was elegantly proportioned and certainly well-dressed, but he was in no rush—too much at his ease to be robbing the house. His shirttail was out, his shirt cuffs turned back. He wore a vest, but it hung unbuttoned. Less like a burglar, more like a ghost, one of her father's old friends come as a houseguest.

Mr. Tremore, she thought again, trying out the idea. Who else? It had to be him. Yet the man standing before her seemed so unlike her new student. Yet similar: He had the same dark hair, dark as night, but it was slicked close to his head and combed away from his face. Was Mr. Tremore this tall, so square-shouldered, so straightly built? This man looked leaner, neater. Handsomer. His clothes were simple, but nice. His white shirt was neatly pressed, open at the neck;
it
was missing
its
collar. The
vest—

She
frowned. His vest was
oddly familiar. As were the trousers somehow, or what she could see of them. He stood behind the edge of her father's desk.

He turned toward her, lowering the decanter in front of him, as if suddenly aware of her. Their eyes met. His face changed, drawing up into a crooked smile, showing a deep dimple to one side of a thick, well-trimmed mustache that rose up on a lot of even, white teeth. A remarkable contrast. Edwina was halted for an instant in the warmth of his smile, the way a small animal is stopped foolishly in the road sometimes when the beam of a carriage lamp swings, too bright, suddenly onto it. Lord, the man was good-looking. A sharp good looks, the sort that absorbed a woman's good sense and turned it to mush in her head. Refined, cultured somehow, with a subtle air of competence.

Not Mr. Tremore, who certainly was vigorous-looking and masculine, but—

He held out his arms, the bottle in one hand, the other palm up, and said, "Well, whaddaya think?"

Edwina quite nearly fell over as he offered himself for inspection, turning slowly. It was, of course, none other. "Mis-Mister Tremore," she said, though almost as a question, looking for confirmation. "I—um—ah—you—" she stammered.

Even staring right at him, she couldn't quite believe it was the same man. To say he cleaned up well was so much an understatement, it stood reality on its head.

"How do I look?" he asked.

"Unbelievable." His mustache. Someone had trimmed it, made an attempt—not all that successful a one—to tame
it.

"Diabolical," he suggested, wiggling his eyebrows, then laughed. He loved the word; he must, he used it enough. "I look like a bloody lord, don't I?"

Edwina cleared her throat. Well, yes. And here stood another unwelcome bit of truth: The handsomest "bloody lord" she had ever seen was a ratcatcher wearing her father's outdated trousers, shirt, and vest—and wandering her house in the middle of the night so as to steal brandy or whatever else he could find, no doubt.

She drew herself up, then demanded, "Put that down."

He looked at the decanter, seemingly surprised to find his fingers around its neck. "Ah," he said, as if now understanding. He made a knowing cluck with his tongue, then grinned gleefully, a man smiling at a good joke. "Wasn't pinchin' none, if that was what you be thinkin'. It just shook me, see, a little—"

"Put it down."

He put it on the desk, though he frowned, doing a very good imitation of a man unfairly called to account. He repeated, "Wasn't pinchin' none. See, I have this dream sometimes—"

"I'm not interested in your dreams of easy liquor, Mr. Tremore. You may not enter this room, unless you do so in my company."

He grinned again. "Well," he said. "Then come in, Miss Bollash."

When she only stood there scowling at him from the hallway, he came toward her.

Lord, with his mouth shut, he even moved right. Lithe, graceful, a male who was physically confident of himself, in the full flush of bold health—and probably used to smiling at women who stood in a dim hall in the middle of the night.

"You be a right fine sight in that, Miss Bollash."

She looked down. Her dressing gown was unsashed on her night-shift. She quickly pulled the gown around her. Not because there was anything here to make a man misbehave, but for pride's sake, so neither one of them had to admit there wasn't.

He stopped at the doorway, her in the hall, him in the room. "Do your mates call you Edwina?" he asked. "Ain't you got a sweet name?"

She stiffened, frightened somehow. "I don't have any 'mates,' Mr. Tremore, and
Miss Bollash
sounds respectful—sweet enough to my ears."

He screwed up his mouth, making his mustache slant sideways—it looked more fashionable for its coiffing but no less rough, bristly.

"Winnie," he said suddenly.

She jumped.

He put his hands on either side of the doorjamb, arms spread, elbows bent, and contemplated her for a few moments. Then he repeated, "Winnie. That be it. That be what you call an Edwina, right?" He smiled because she admitted, either by her frown or her jump the moment before, that she identified with the name, a name she hadn't heard in ages. "Ah." He nodded. "Much nicer. Soft. Dear-like, you know?"

The way he said it… His tone gave rise to a kind of confusion. Embarrassment somehow. Fright again. His expression invited her to smile back at him, but she couldn't have if she'd wanted to. And she didn't; she certainly didn't want to, she thought. He was playing her for a fool, trying to distract her from the fact that he'd been stealing liquor, which, of course, she had to put a stop to.

She said, "No,
Winnie
is not nice. When I was little, my cousins used to neigh like a horse when they said it. They used to call me Wi-i-i-n-n-ie." She whinnied for him as she said her name. Then she wished she hadn't.

Because he winced, reacting to the pain of it. His concern made her look away. She heard him say, "Well, you bloody well fooled 'em, Miss Bollash. 'Cause you be a beaut, if ever I seen one."

She glanced at him—as harsh a glare as she could muster—then contradicted his malarkey. "Mr. Tremore, I am a gangly, plain woman with speckled skin, who wears glasses on a nose that looks like an eagle's. I'm taller than any man I know." In a moment of confusion, she had to rethink that statement. "Except you." She went on with forced patience, "But I'm an honest woman, a smart woman. And I don't hold truck with a lot of lying falderal from some Cockney-Cornish womanizer who thinks he can talk his way out of being caught red-handed in the liquor shelf. If you wish to drink, you may go to the public house on the corner of the next block. Sit in the pub, drink till your heart's content, then come back when you are sober."

Goodness, she couldn't remember telling anyone off like that. Of course, she couldn't remember anyone trying to flatter her so dishonestly. The injustice of it made her angry. Surely there was something else she did right, something he could praise, without dragging her odd looks into the matter.

His face remained focused on her, furrowed with curiosity and consternation. He shook his head. "I didn't take a drop," he said. He smiled his crooked smile that, despite herself, was somehow appealing. A charming villain, this one. "Want to smell me breath?" he offered.

God, no. She took a step back.

He took a step closer, letting go of the doorjamb, coming through the doorway into the dim hall. He smelled of soap and something else, barber's talcum perhaps. Milton had taken some scissors to his hair. It was shorter, neater. Up close, with her standing there in her bare feet, he was tall enough that she had to bend her neck back to look up at him. She wanted to laugh: She felt short next to him. "I'm not pretty," she murmured.

His shadow, a silhouette with the room's light behind him, shook its head. As if speaking to a dim child with whom he was having difficulty communicating, he said, "Miss Bollash, we already know you be better with words than me. So all what I can tell you be this—"

His head bent toward her. No, he wouldn't, she thought, almost giddy now from the absurdities that ran through her head. He certainly wouldn't … well, no— Men had to know women well to do that, didn't they? So, no—

But, yes. Much to her dismay, her new student's moustache brushed her lip, then his mouth pressed to hers. The feel of his lips, the warmth that radiated off his face were such a surprise—a disarming surprise—it didn't leave her with the presence of mind to do anything. She just stood there befuddled. Being kissed.

Strange, what her first kiss, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, brought to mind. Her first reaction was to cry. To just plain weep and wail. Damn you, she thought. Damn you. Don't play like this.

Her second thought, though, was to simply blank out the first thought. She said nothing, did nothing—half-waiting for him to laugh, to announce his funny joke on her, half-praying he would be kind about it: while one of the most elegant-looking men she had ever seen pressed his mustache, warm and dry, against her mouth.

It wasn't prickly at all. Not bristly. Not broom-like. It was soft. Cushiony. It moved gently with his mouth.

She backed away a little; he followed. She drew in a breath, though it sounded more like a hiccup of air than breathing. He caught her arm, pulling her toward him a little, his hand strong, warm, sure. The skin of her lips was more sensitive than she would have dreamed. His mouth was smooth against hers, and so soft—she would never have thought a man's mouth was so soft to touch, when the rest of him looked so hard and rough. As his mouth skimmed hers, she knew a tiny place on the curve of his lip where it was chapped. She could feel so much with her own mouth. Who could have imagined it was so … alive with feeling like this?

His thumb touched her cheek. She made a small jerk to realize his hand was at her face. Jumpy. Nervous. While pleasure materialized in the pit of her belly like smoke, wisps of it that became soft billows. The feeling was so keen and foreign, she didn't know what to do with it. His mouth stayed on hers till the clock downstairs suddenly began to chime.
One, two, three
…
It awakened good sense. She jumped at
four,
shoved away at
five.
It continued chiming, counting off the moments till midnight, while her palm lay flat against the chest she'd seen. Its predominant feeling was hardness, as solid as a cliffside under the shirt. And warm. His chest was several degrees warmer where it provided resistance against her hand.