Bronwyn Scott (5 page)

Mercedes thumped the butt of her cue on the floor with disgust. ‘Devil take it,’ she muttered on her breath for good, compelling measure, her face a study of disappointment. ‘I had that shot.’

Barrington laughed. ‘You’re a bad loser.’ He said it with a certain amount of shock as if he’d made a surprising discovery. He shifted his position so that he half sat on the edge of the table, his eyes alight with confidence and mischief. But Mercedes already knew what was coming. Part of her wanted him to take the money and be done with it. If he was smart, he’d pocket that envelope, walk out of here and forget all about the Lockharts. His blasted chivalry was about to work against him.

‘I’ll give you a chance to win it back. One game takes all, I’ll wager
my
envelope against—’

She interrupted. ‘The road. Your envelope against the road. I win, you take my father’s offer.’
Don’t do it. The wager is too much and you should know it.

Barrington studied her for a moment. ‘I was going to say a kiss.’

‘All right,
and
a kiss,’ Mercedes replied coolly. But she wasn’t nearly as cool as she let on. This wouldn’t be like the previous set of games where she’d been entirely in charge of the outcome. She’d decided who’d won and it had been easy to control things simply by losing. She wouldn’t have that control here. Her only option this time lay in complete victory.

She chalked her cue and watched Barrington break one of his shattering breaks in the new style becoming popular in the higher-class subscription rooms. She studied the lay of the table and took her shot. On her next shot, Mercedes carefully leaned over the table, displaying her cleavage to advantage where it spilled from the square neckline of her gown. If he could take off his coat, she could make use of her assets, too. She looked up in time to catch Barrington hastily avert his gaze, but not until he’d got an eyeful. She smiled and went back to her shot. ‘Like butter on bread,’ she said after it fell into a pocket with a quiet plop.

Barrington shot again. ‘Like jam on toast.’ He raised a challenging eyebrow in her direction. His shot had been an easy one and he had the better lay of the table. None of his remaining shots would require any particular skill or luck. If she didn’t do something now, he’d outpace her and win. The shot she was looking for was risky. If she missed, it would assure Barrington’s victory and she’d have some explaining to do to her father. But if she didn’t try she would likely end up losing anyway.

She bent, eyeing the table. Unhappy with the angle, she moved, bent, sighted the ball and moved again. Finally pleased, she aimed her cue. ‘I find jam a bit sticky.’ She shot, the cue ball splitting the pair she’d sighted perfectly, each one rolling smoothly to their respective pockets.

The Captain favoured her with a sharp look. ‘Impressive. I think you may have been holding out on me.’

Mercedes lifted a shoulder in a shrug. ‘A lady must have her secrets, after all.’

* * *

Two shots later she claimed victory. Her risky shot had paid off.

Barrington settled his cue on the table, a not entirely happy look on his face. ‘You win. The road it is.’

Mercedes came around the table and stood beside him, guilt threatening to swamp her. She’d goaded him into this. She’d directed the evening towards this very outcome. Perhaps it hadn’t been fair. ‘You’ll like it. You can play billiards all day, all night, and my father will introduce you to a lot of people. You’ll have opportunities.’ She pressed the envelope into his hands. ‘And you’ll have your money. You won’t have to take up the home farm for a while.’ She tried for a laugh, but it fell flat.

‘I lost.’

‘I don’t recall asking for the envelope if I won.’ Mercedes smiled up into his face. She hoped he saw that smile as one of friendship. She’d been hard on him tonight, whether he knew it or not. But they were in this together now. He was her chance. His successes would be her successes, at least for a while, at least until she decided he’d served his purpose as he had tonight.

She boldly took the envelope from his hands and put it inside his waistcoat. His body was warm through his shirt where her hand made contact with his chest. She tucked the envelope securely into an inside pocket.

‘You don’t mind the road all that much, do you? I was fairly sure last night you didn’t have any plans.’ Mercedes was gripped by another bout of conscience. She hoped she hadn’t ruined anything for him.

‘No. I’m looking forward to it, actually.’ Barrington gave a fleeting smile, perhaps designed to appease her guilt. ‘I was merely wondering what my father would make of all this.’ Ah, the sainted Viscount with his empty coffers.

‘Sometimes fathers don’t always know best,’ Mercedes answered softly. ‘Especially if what they want for us is holding us back. Our paths can’t always be theirs.’

He gave her a look that held her eyes and searched her soul. Before he could ask some difficult, probing and personal question, she stretched up on her tiptoes, put her arms about his neck and kissed him hard on the mouth.

He answered it; the evening had been too intense not to use the outlet the kiss offered, a place to spend the energy. His tongue found hers, duelled with it as their eyes had duelled over dinner, sending a trail of goosebumps down her arms. He unnerved her, excited her. It wasn’t that she’d never been kissed, never been physically courted by a man before. She was not one of the
ton
’s innocent débutantes. It was the sheer strength of him.

He pulled her close, that strength apparent where his hand rested at her waist, a reminder that this man exuded strength everywhere—physical strength, mental strength. He was a veritable font of it: strength, honour, and self-control. A lesser man would have devoured her mouth by now, swept away with his own base lust. Not Captain Barrington.

He released her, unwilling to make her a party to his baser urges right there on John Thurston’s billiards table. Not because he didn’t have them, but because it was what a gentleman did. That was a bit disappointing. Captain Barrington unleashed would be a sight to behold. ‘What was that for?’ It was not said unkindly.

Mercedes stepped back, smoothing her skirts, in charge of her emotions once more. ‘It’s your consolation prize. Go home and pack your things, Captain. We leave Thursday.’

Chapter Five

T
hursday morning found Greer sitting opposite Mercedes in an elegant black travelling coach complete with all the modern conveniences: squabs of Italian leather, under-the-seat storage for hampers and valises, a pistol compartment, large glass-paned windows with curtains for privacy when passengers tired of the scenery outside. Even his proud father would feel some envy at the sparkling new coach.

That didn’t mean his father would approve. Coveting did
not
equate with approval where his father was concerned. A gentleman might quietly desire his neighbour’s fine coach, but a gentleman would never lower himself to acquire it by working for it. A gentleman had standards, after all. Standards, Greer was acutely aware, he had violated to the extreme on several occasions in the last week.

‘Your father certainly knows how to travel in style,’ Greer commented appreciatively, trying to make conversation, anything to push speculations of his father’s reaction to his latest undertaking out of mind.

Mercedes shrugged, unconcerned with the wealth and luxury surrounding her, or perhaps just less impressed. ‘He likes the best.’ That was all she said for a long while. Mercedes proceeded to pull out a book and bury herself in it, leaving him to the very thoughts he was trying to avoid.

It was just the two of them at the moment. Lockhart had chosen to ride outside along with the groom overseeing Greer’s own mount, another circumstance with which his father would take umbrage—an unmarried woman alone in a carriage with a man. Or, in this case, an eligible bachelor alone in a carriage with entirely the wrong sort of woman, the sort who might take advantage of said bachelor in the hopes of marrying up.

Very dangerous indeed! Greer fought back a wry smile. It was laughable, really. He was an officer in his Majesty’s army. He could handle one enticing female. If Lockhart had intended anything to happen, such a ploy was obvious in the extreme.

Greer gave in to the smile, imagining all nature of wild scenarios. If Mercedes was to compromise him, how would she do it? Would she leap across the seat, provoked by the slightest rut in the road, and tear his shirt off? Would she be more subtle? Maybe she’d stretch, raise those arms over her head in a way that thrust those breasts forwards and exclaim over how hot she was.

His thoughts went on this way for a good two miles. It was a stimulating exercise to say the least. He had her halfway undressed and fanning herself before he had to stop. A gentleman had to draw the line somewhere. If Mercedes knew what he was envisioning, she might have chosen to engage him in conversation instead.

But since she didn’t and since he’d taken his thoughts as far as he ought in one direction, Greer spent the better part of the morning taking them in the other, most of which involved contemplating how it was that he’d packed up his trunk and his horse, the only two items of any worldly worth in his possession, and left town all for the sake of a beautiful woman.

It was definitely one of the more rash things he’d done in a long while. The military was not a place where unwarranted gambles were rewarded. An officer must always balance risk against caution and he was no stranger to the charms of beautiful women: the lovely
señora
in Spain, the mysterious widow in Crete. But looking at Mercedes Lockhart engrossed in her book, their loveliness paled for the simple reason that Mercedes’s beauty was not found in the sum of her features: her exotic eyes with their slight uptilt, the high cheekbones and the full sensuous lips that seduced every time she smiled. Nor was it that she knew how to enhance those physical qualities with the styling of her hair and expensive gowns.

No, the core of Mercedes’s beauty lay in something more—in her very being, the way she carried herself, all confidence and seduction. She wasn’t afraid of her power or her ability to wield it. Mercedes Lockhart was no blushing,
ton
nish virgin or even a woman who affected false modesty in the hopes of appearing virtuous. His father would not approve of Mercedes Lockhart any more than he’d approve of the reasons Greer was in the coach. Both were scandalous adventures for a man of Greer’s birth and station.

However, his father would be wrong, Greer thought, if all he saw in Mercedes was a woman of loose scruples. Woe to the man who mistook her for no more than that. What she was was potent and alluring and quite possibly deadly to the man who fell for her. The French had a term for women like Mercedes.
Femme fatale.

Well, he’d faced worse in battle than one beautiful woman. Greer settled deep into his seat and smiled, deciding to play another secret little game with himself, one that left her better clothed than the previous. How long could he stare at her before she looked up at him? Thirty seconds? One minute? Longer?

At thirty seconds she started to fidget ever so slightly, trying desperately to ignore him.

At forty-five seconds, she was taking an inordinately long time to finish reading the page.

At one minute she gave up and fixed him with a stare. Greer grinned. His
femme fatale
was human, after all.

‘
What
are you looking at?’ Mercedes set aside her book.

‘You,’ Greer replied. ‘We’re to be together for an indefinite period of time and it has occurred to me as I sit here in
silence
, watching the morning speed by...’

‘Watching
me
,’ Mercedes corrected.

‘All right, watching
you
,’ Greer conceded. ‘As I was saying, it has occurred to me that I’ve set out on a journey with two strangers I hardly know even though my immediate future is now tied to theirs.’

Mercedes favoured him with one of her knowing smiles. ‘Perhaps you’re more of a gambler than you thought, Captain.’

Greer considered this for a moment. ‘I suppose I am. Although we don’t have to remain strangers.’

‘What do you propose?’

‘A little Q and A, as we call it in the military.’ Greer stretched his legs, settling in to enjoy himself. ‘Question and answer.’

‘Or a consequence,’ Mercedes supplied with a smug little smile. ‘I know this game, Captain. You’re not so terribly original.’

‘No. No consequence,’ he explained, watching Mercedes’s smug smile fade. ‘There is no choice to
not
answer. Question asked, answer given. There is no option to refuse.’ Greer folded his hands behind his head. ‘Ladies first. Ask me anything you’d like.’

‘All right then.’ Mercedes thought for a moment. ‘Have you always wanted to be a soldier?’

‘I was raised to it, ever since I can remember,’ Greer replied honestly, although he was cognisant of the omissions that answer contained. ‘How about you? Were you always good at billiards? Born with a cue in your hand?’

The beauty of the game was that it allowed the participants to ask directly what they’d never dare give voice to in polite conversation over dinners and tea trays. They traded questions and answers over the dwindling hours of the morning, his knowledge growing with each answer.

Greer learned she’d travelled with her father until she was eleven and he’d sent her off to boarding school. After that she’d come home on holidays and wandered the subscription room, watching and studying the game around which their lives were centred.

He learned her mother had died from birthing complications, that her name was Spanish for mercies—although in Latin it meant pity—quite apropos for a baby girl left to the tender sympathies of a single father, a gambler by trade, who could have just as easily have abandoned her to distant relatives and never looked back. But Lockhart hadn’t. He’d taken her, cradle and all, on the road and continued to build his fame and his empire until his baby girl was surrounded by all the luxuries his ill-gotten gains could buy.

Those were the facts and when Greer had accumulated enough of them, he did the thing that made him so valuable to the military: he took those singular facts and coalesced them into a larger whole. In doing so, he saw quite well all the fires that had forged Mercedes Lockhart, that were still forging her—this incredible woman of refinement and education and emotional steel.

Was she doing the same to him? Her questions, too, had dealt only in basic, general curiosities—did he have a large family? What were his parents like? What did he like to read? To do in his spare time? Was she taking all those pieces and digging to the core of him? It was an unnerving prospect to think she might see more than he wanted to reveal. But that was the risk of the game—how much of oneself would one end up exposing?

As the game deepened, the questions moved subtly away from generally curious enquiries about each other’s family and history and towards the private and personal. ‘Who is the first girl you ever kissed?’ Mercedes flashed him a mischievous smile as she added, ‘And how old were you?’

‘Oh, it’s multiple questions in a single shot now, is it?’ Greer quipped good-naturedly. He didn’t mind. The question was harmless enough.

‘A first kiss is only a good question if age is attached. It adds perspective,’ Mercedes replied, willing to defend her ground in good fun.

‘Well, it was Catherine Dennington,’ Greer recalled with a fond smile. ‘I was fourteen and she was fifteen. Her father was the village baker and she was plump in all the right places.’ He feigned a sigh. ‘Alas, she’s married now to the butcher’s son and has two children.’ Greer winked at Mercedes. ‘How’s that for perspective?’ He studied her with the exaggerated air of an Oxford professor. ‘Speaking of perspective, Miss Lockhart,’ he said in his best mock-academic voice, ‘It’s only fair, if you want to talk about kisses, that you tell me about your first intimate encounter.’

He’d asked mostly out of spirited mischief. She couldn’t stoke the fire and then run away. Even with the intended and obvious humour behind the question, Greer had half expected her to scold him for such impertinence and he’d let her wiggle out of her obligation to answer. He’d not expected her to answer it.

She narrowed her catlike eyes and returned his studied stare, making sure she had the whole of his attention. ‘Dismal. It was a wet, messy foray into adolescent curiosity. He was in and out and done before it really began for me. And yours, Captain? Better or worse?’

The fun disappeared, replaced by something far more serious. They weren’t talking about kisses any more. But Greer matched her with a succinct answer of his own. ‘Better, much better.’ But it was more than an answer. It was an invitation, one no sensible gentleman would have issued and they both knew it.

* * *

‘Well played, Captain.’ Mercedes leaned back against her seat, impressed. He hadn’t been frightened off. Instead of being embarrassed for her, he’d gone on the offensive with a self-assured disclosure of his own. She could choose to take him down a notch with a sharp comment about the natural arrogance of men when it came to estimating their sexual prowess. But such a rejoinder merely led down a tired road of well-worn repartee.

‘Now we know each other’s secrets,’ Greer said quietly in a manner that fit their newfound solemnity, ‘what’s next?’

Mercedes peered out the window, buying some time to put together an appropriate answer. The coach began to slow and she couldn’t resist a smile. Perfect. ‘Lunch. That’s what’s next.’ She couldn’t have timed it better herself. The stop would bring their game to a close and with it an end to any awkward probes into her past. The things in her past were best left there. She’d made mistakes, trusted too freely. She didn’t want to create the impression such a thing would happen again. It wouldn’t do to have Captain Barrington entertaining any untoward notions.

She knew what those notions would be: to get her into bed, have a dalliance and leave her when the differences in their stations became too obvious to go unremarked. Sons of viscounts could offer her no more than a bit a fun. It was not that she’d mind an affair with the Captain. He’d already demonstrated a promising propensity for bedsport and he was certainly built for it. But such a venture would have to be on her terms from beginning to end. Mercedes fanned herself with her hand. Was it just her or was it getting hot in here?

It felt good to get out of the carriage and stretch her legs. The morning mist had cleared, giving way to a rare, sunny April day. The spot her father had found was delightful: a place not far off the road, and populated by wildflowers and a towering oak with a stream nearby for watering the horses.

Mercedes took herself off for a few moments of privacy, letting the coachman and the groom have time to take care of the horses before she began setting out the food. But when she came back, she saw she was too late. Someone had taken charge and set up ‘camp’ without her. A blanket was spread beneath the oak tree. The hamper was unpacked and the man most likely responsible for all this activity stood to one side of the blanket, his blond hair falling forwards in his face as he worked the cork free on a bottle of wine with a gentleman’s dexterity, a skill acquired only from long practice.

It was yet another reminder of the differences in their stations. Her father had never quite mastered the art of uncorking champagne on his own. He always laughed, saying, ‘Why bother when I have footmen paid to do it?’ Her father had come late to the luxuries of a lifestyle where champagne was considered a commonplace experience. Not so with Greer. He could talk all he wanted about the hardships of the military and the lack of wealth in his family. The indelible mark of a gentleman was still there in the opportunities that surrounded him. Boot boys from Bath hadn’t the same experiences.

Greer looked up and smiled when he saw her, the cork coming out with a soft pop. He poured her a glass and handed it to her. ‘It’s still chilled.’

The wine, with its light, fruity tang, was deliciously cold sliding down her dry throat. At the moment, Mercedes couldn’t recall anything tasting better. It wasn’t until Greer had poured his own glass and had gestured for her to sit down that she realised they were completely alone—the servants off at a discreet distance, her father peculiarly absent. ‘Where’s my father?’