Mercy

by Jean Brashear

  Maybe she would call Kat. Kat never worried about being good. Never had. Mona felt like raising hell tonight, not that she had any experience at it. But Kat did.

  Her hand hovered over the phone, ready to dial. Then, very slowly, she pulled her fingers away and stared out into the millions of lights outside her window. If she called Kat, she’d have to explain her behavior—no way Kat would let this ride. Mona was not prepared to explain about Fitz to anyone. A crazy part of her was still hoping he’d relent, go back to being the real Fitz. Whether or not he did, though, Mona was not ready to concede the upper hand. Her role as the family’s Rock of Gibraltar was hard-won, nothing she was ready to give up. However rebellious she felt tonight, Mona was, above all, a practical woman. One did not take impulsive steps lightly.

  Rebellious. Mona’s mouth curved in a smile that looked altogether the Cheshire cat, reflected in the smoky glass window. She studied the woman there, in her simple black knit suit, pearl studs in her ears, tasteful makeup and all, and she wanted to tear that woman’s hair out. Muss it up, at the very least. Discard that slim gold watch, ditch the pearls and leave the jacket opened all the way down to there. Replace her sensible pumps with stilettos. Ditch the panties as Kat would.

  Mona caught herself as she removed the one pearl stud and asked the woman in the glass Who are you?

  The woman didn’t answer, but her brown eyes were huge and scared and—

  Excited. Fever bright.

  Mona grabbed her purse and left everything else exactly as it was, feeling the prick of the post of the one stud she knew she would not replace. Not yet, maybe never.

  With the soft clicks of her so-sensible pumps, Mona made her way out of the building and caught a cab.

  But instead of telling him the address of her apartment, she simply said, “East Village. I’ll tell you when we get there.”

  And with the post of one earring biting into her tender palm, Mona waited to find out what this new woman might do next.

  Kat emerged from the hell of the filthy bathroom after staring into a cracked mirror for far too long, ignoring the banging on the door. She scanned the crowd, not sure whether to hope Gamble had left or stayed. When she didn’t see him, her heart gave a curious lurch before it settled gracelessly into relief. Nowhere did she spot his towering frame.

  But despite her best intentions, the night lost its color. Gamble was a dangerous game, but the most intriguing one she’d had in a long time. Kat surveyed the room, saw no better opponent than Danny and decided it was time to call it a night.

  Gregory would have a good laugh. Eleven o’clock and Kat was headed home. She snagged her coat, slapped some money on the bar and walked to the door.

  Outside, the wind off the Hudson hit her, and she shivered, shaking out her coat before she donned it, wishing she hadn’t worn such a short damn skirt.

  “Here. Let me.”

  Kat whirled at the sound of his voice. Gamble emerged from the gloom outside the door, his expression troubled. He stepped forward and held her coat. She expected him to keep her at arm’s length but instead, he wrapped it around her and drew her close with careless strength.

  And for once, she dragged her feet, wary as an animal in enemy territory.

  Gamble bent down, his frame blocking out the streetlight.

  Kat arched away, but his grip meant that her movement only brought their lower bodies closer. “Gamble…” Whose voice was that, so high and thin?

  “Sh-h…easy…” Deep and low, his voice soothed. He licked at her lips, and the hair on her nape rose. As iron to a magnet, she swayed toward him, rising to her toes, plastering her body against his.

  But hard hands held her away, letting the cool air come between them as if it brought reason with it. “Last chance, Kat. I won’t love you, and I won’t be good for you.”

  A deep shudder shook her, and she hesitated, sensing that some hint of truth lay beneath his words.

  She grasped for the remove that had always been so easy. Pah. He was a man, and men didn’t scare her. Her father had force-fed her the best education a girl could have. She would never be left again, never ignored again.

  So Kat disregarded the still, small voice and gave him her best go-to-hell smile, then licked her lips with slow, lascivious care. “I don’t like men who are good for me. I thought you were smarter than that.”

  He studied her for a long moment, his eyes older than time. Then with a muffled oath, he turned and pulled her after him, crossing the street with determined strides. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Kat’s throaty chuckle felt oddly like whistling in the dark.

  He stopped at the far curb and wheeled, his mouth closing swiftly on hers. But before Kat could even kiss him back, he took off again, still clasping her hand while she tried to keep up with him.

  They crossed the last few blocks in that fashion, Kat stretching her long legs to maintain his pace. They neither spoke nor touched again except where her fingers were caught fast in Gamble’s steady grip.

  Within Kat sang three discordant notes: a catgut string of anticipation drawing tighter with every step, a low bass hum of ever-growing need…and a faint, tinny quiver of warning that she just might have found her match.

  A few feet from his door, she was seized by an overpowering urge to stop. To think. To reconsider. “Gamble, wait.” She dragged her heels against cement.

  His face was drawn tight, all sharp planes and angles. In the streetlight, the hollows cast him in the too-possible role of sorcerer, a sense of power enveloping him like night-dark robes. But his eyes were what gave her most pause; no longer glowering, for one brief second before he shuttered them, they held shadows of well-deep pain.

  He shifted away from her and busied himself with the lock, as though he didn’t care. “Second thoughts?” His smile was false, a pasted-on, brittle one. “I won’t make it simple for you, Kat. I won’t push your buttons. I won’t let you turn this into a pissing contest so you can tell yourself you’re just keeping the upper hand the way you need to do so badly.”

  He held the door open and gestured inside. “You walk through this door you’re doing it as a grown woman, not a spoiled brat. No games. You won’t order me around and you won’t fuck with my head. For some godforsaken reason, I want you, and you want me. Body to body, we’ll come together—no promises, no regrets. No tears when it’s over.”

  Stung pride demanded its due. “I never cry. Or have regrets. And I don’t need promises.”

  “You don’t have the first idea what you need.” His eyes were surprisingly calm now, almost soft.

  “Ever think you might be the one shedding tears, Gamble Smith?”

  His grin was anything but cheerful. “Tough guy to the last, huh? Just remember I warned you.” He opened the outside door wider. “Now, you in or you out?”

  She closed the gap between them, then pressed her pelvis against his, wrapping one leg around his calf and grasping a handful of hair to bring his mouth closer to hers. “I’d like to have you in, if you’d ever stop talking.” She laughed against his lips and heard his chuckle. And the night’s colors came rushing in.

  “I’ll give you this, Ms. Gerard—you’re definitely not boring.” He backed her against the wall and yanked her thigh higher, bringing himself snugly against her as he devoured her mouth.

  “Now, Gamble. Damn it, I want you now.”

  He picked her up, and she clamped her legs around his hips, nibbling at his jaw while he climbed the steps, then fumbled at the lock on his loft door.

  Finally, it was open, and he swept them both inside, heading across the floor. Kat tossed her head and laughed as his mouth worked down her throat, his tongue sliding toward one breast as he hitched her upward and ran his hands under her skirt to grasp her hips and bring her tighter against him. She could feel the matching tension in his body, the hard evidence that he wanted her, the faint trembling of his arms, the groan as he discovered that she had nothing on under the skirt.


  She smelled oils and turpentine, heard the rasp of his zipper just as he spread her on a mound of cushions covered by an ancient quilt.

  Towering above her, he appeared to be some avenging angel, a son of the morning fallen from grace. He held her hips in his big hands and his eyes locked on hers. Without a second’s hesitation, he entered her in one savage thrust. There was no need for foreplay; Kat had been ready for him for days.

  Then he stopped, hard and full inside her. She wanted to scream for him to keep going. Every nerve in her body was strung wire-tight; her very blood boiled. She clutched at his arms, her nails scoring his skin. She rocked her hips to seat him deeper, arched her back to force him to move.

  He smiled, slow and wicked, one eyebrow cocked. But she could see the strain on him, too, could feel a matching quiver in muscle and bone.

  “I’m going to make you scream, Kat.”

  “Oh, God, I hope so,” she sighed. “Please, Gamble. Now.”

  He held her still one second longer, staring into her eyes with an expression she couldn’t read, but one that made her remember the painting where he’d stripped her naked.

  And then she spotted it, over his shoulder. She shivered, feeling both voyeur and spectacle.

  He saw where she was looking. “First this, until we both collapse.”

  “And then I’m going to paint you this way.”

  Caught between thrill and fury, Kat only tightened her legs around him. “You talk too much.”

  Chapter Ten

  Lucas stood on the sidewalk in the darkness, staring at Tansy’s window. This part of town was too quiet and still at this late hour. It was cold, the buildings were mostly dark and where there were lights, they were not for him. Solitude was a deep hollow in his chest tonight. He’d been alone for a long time; he thought he’d gotten used to it, but now there was Tansy.

  Loneliness lost its edge when you didn’t know any different, but Tansy had opened him up again. Made him feel the sharp ache the way he’d only experienced it twice before: the first night in prison, and the night his mother had left.

  On the latter, he’d awakened with a nightmare and crept quietly from his room. He was eight years old, too big to seek out comfort, he’d been told. But the dream gripped him in a huge fist, his pajamas soaking wet with the sweat of fear.

  So it was that he slipped down the hall and across, quietly. Very quietly. The old man might hear. And in the silence he realized two things: one, that his father, with his smell of sweat and whiskey, was gone from the apartment. And two, that his mother was whispering into the phone.

  “Pick me up now,” she said. “I can’t stay another minute with him.” There were tears in her voice. Then a gasp. “No—are you crazy? Don’t come up here. Stay around the corner. I’ll be packed in ten minutes, and I’ll meet you there.”

  Packed? They would go far away. They would be free at last. Hope danced a little jig in his heart. Barely able to breathe for the joy crowding in, Lucas forgot all about the bad dream and raced back to his room to pick out what to take.

  As he’d done before when they’d skipped out just ahead of a landlord, Lucas stripped the case from his pillow and began stuffing in his belongings. First, he set aside the sock monkey his mother had made when he was a baby; that would go on top. Clothes—he grabbed jeans and T-shirts and his secondhand jacket with the Phillies badge worn almost colorless. In went the toy truck he’d had since he was five, along with a book he’d read until the pages were falling out. Last went George the monkey, his mother’s attempt at re-creating the Curious George who’d made Lucas laugh and laugh as a child.

  One ear alert for her progress down the hallway, Lucas was pulling a sweatshirt over his head when she appeared. “I’m ready, Mom,” he said. His head popped through the top almost as fast as the joy was rising up his chest.

  And then he saw her shock. For one endless moment they regarded each other. “Oh, baby…” In the sinking of her voice, Lucas heard the sound of the end of his childhood.

  “Mom?” But he already knew.

  Her eyes, gray as his, slid to the side. “Baby, I’m just—I’ve got to go out for a little while, but I’ll be back.”

  He wasn’t sure where he got the nerve to push. “Take me with you.” When she didn’t answer, he didn’t let go. Couldn’t. “Don’t leave me here with him.”

  Soft gray, a little shiny, met his. “I can’t,” she murmured.

  Can’t? he wanted to say. Or won’t? But his adult moment was over. Not an innocent anymore, but still a child. His eyes stung, and he wiped them with the back of his hand as his heart shriveled like a balloon when the party was all over. He blinked hard and tried to figure out what he could say, how he could convince her. Please was the best he could do, and it wheezed out of him like an old man’s defeat.

  “Please,” he said again, louder now, and rubbed his eyes again, then sought her out.

  But it was too late. She was already gone. Not for a little while, but forever.

  Tonight as Lucas stood on the sidewalk waiting, he was not a small boy anymore. He had long ago abandoned illusion. But he wished for Tansy, for her sweet smile. After five long days, he hadn’t been able to stay away anymore, even though she would be in bed asleep. Al had been down with a flu, so Lucas had been working long hours to keep things going. It was the least he could do to repay the only person who’d given him a chance since he’d returned.

  But he’d worried about Tansy every hour of those endless days. No way he dared to phone the apartment to explain. Tonight he had felt the call of her so strongly that he’d risen from his cot, weary to the bone, and come anyway, certain he wouldn’t see her.

  And suddenly, he did.

  Like a pale, beautiful ghost, she appeared in her window as if conjured up by the force of his need to look upon her bright head, to feel the calm that stole into his bones when he was with her. To gaze into her sky-blue eyes and feel hope stir.

  Tansy, don’t come out.

  Tansy, come—come now. I need you.

  Lucas raked one hand through his hair and stared at the ground. She was not his Tansy, this one, yet somehow it didn’t matter. That she was softly, sweetly mad did not change how she lightened his world-weary heart. The days without her had shown him that his desire to protect her had not died but only cloaked itself to save him all those long years he was locked away.

  An unlikely savior he was, more so than ever. He owned the clothes on his back and nothing else. He could not support her even if she were so foolish as to want him. He could barely support himself. Tansy was too bright and precious, too fragile and lovely to subject her to the vagaries of his very dim future.

  And he owed her. More than he could ever repay.

  But none of that seemed to matter to his ancient, scarred heart, too stubborn to die, a foolish bundle of cells steeped in long-ago dreams.

  Then she was running toward him, and his heart literally leaped. Without stopping to remember why he shouldn’t, he opened his arms, and Tansy flew into them as though it had happened many times before and not only in dreams.

  Lucas felt her tremble, those delicate bones, the finely-drawn curves, quivering as if some small, wounded bird. He tightened his arms around her and brushed his lips over her hair. “What is it, Tansy? What’s wrong?”

  She didn’t answer, only pressed herself closer as though to crawl inside his skin. Lucas yearned to sweep her away, to find some still, quiet place to take her, warm her…keep her safe.

  For an instant, he thought about swooping her up, carrying her off, leaving this town and their past forever. Spiriting her to some haven of sunny skies and fields of green, simple white houses and sheltering trees. A sanctuary where no one knew them and no one would care.

  He would heal her. He would make it all up to her. He could do it, and he would. With time and space enough, he would find a way to knit her whole again.

  “Tansy—” Come away with me, he wanted to ask.

  Then
he recalled his mother, worn and beaten by all the moves, by the constant, grinding poverty, the mean surroundings of dingy walls and scarred furniture. Even before she’d left, her once-startling beauty had faded to a monochrome shadow of the woman she’d been.

  Tansy lifted her face, her blue eyes swimming with trust and hope. “What?”

  He had a room at sufferance, a few changes of clothes. A job in a dingy bar that could vanish tomorrow.

  He shook his head. “Nothing.” Carefully, he stepped back from her, pulled her hands from his sides, feeling tender pieces of him ripped away as they withdrew.

  She seemed bereft, stepped closer. “You didn’t come.”

  He shoved his hands in his jacket and looked away from the impossible lure of her. Forced all warmth from his voice. “I was busy.”

  “You’re here now.” Quiet satisfaction hummed in her voice.

  “You shouldn’t be out here. It’s not safe.”

  Tansy laughed, clear, spring water singing in a brook. “You’re here. Nothing can hurt me.”

  Impotent fury scorched through him. He turned on her. “You’re wrong. It can.” It already had.

  In the streetlight’s glow, he saw something flicker, a dark shape swimming beneath the surface of her gaze. Her slim, graceful fingers tangled together, twisting. Her eyes darted to the side. “I dreamed—”

  A hot ache crowded his chest. No, Tansy. Don’t. He had to get away from here, away from her. He should never have returned. “I have to go,” he said abruptly.

  Blue eyes locked on his. “I dreamed a name. In the bad dream.”

  The air went still around them. If there were sounds, he couldn’t hear them for the rasp of his own breath, the dread that choked out everything else.

  “A name,” she said. “The bad dream came, and no one could help me. I was so afraid and I couldn’t breathe and Mama wouldn’t answer. I cried for Paris, but he—he wasn’t there. I was all alone and I—” Her breath was only quick gasps. Roots of that terror smothered the light in her eyes.