by Judith Ivory
Done!
Joy came into her chest with a burst of relief. It came out her mouth with gusto. "Your turn!" she announced.
She dropped hems and petticoats with a loud rustle of silk and linen and lace. Heavens, the sweet charity of being covered again. Who would have thought that to have one's legs bare, from only the knees down really—after all, she had on her knickers—could be such an ordeal?
"Not till the last chime," he said from his chair. Like some almighty emperor from the throne. "Bring 'em up again, Winnie."
"No."
They hassled back and forth as the last chimes struck. In the end, she had to pull her skirts up, let him look for ten more seconds, before she could get him moving toward the staircase.
* * *
Chapter 10
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Edwina watched over Mr. Tremore's shoulder in the mirror, his reflection above the washbasin. She watched him touch his mustache. It was brief, just the tips of his fingers lightly combing it downward, almost with affection. She felt a small twinge of guilt. Ever so small. Then he rattled the shaving brush in the cup again and slopped lather onto his lip. He picked up the straight razor, taking hold of his face to make the skin taut. He rolled his lip under his teeth, then—scritch—he took the first swipe.
Oh! Edwina wanted to pat her hands together. Skin under the mustache! White, tender skin. She was gleeful to see it. She could barely be still for her feet's urge to dance.
He took another stroke of mustache off, glancing over at her, a deep frown. He returned his attention to the basin to sling the razor once, slopping foam into the bowl, then wiped the edge of the razor on a towel, raised his head, and scraped again. To get at the edge, he had to twist his mouth and hold his cheek, then had to make another contortion to get under his nose and over the curve of his teeth. Stroke, scritch, stroke. It didn't take more than half a dozen good passes, before the thick, bothersome mustache was in the basin mixed with a lot of shaving-soap lather.
Edwina looked down. Seeing it there, she felt as if she'd vanquished a dragon. Or a caterpillar at the very least; something that had been eating holes through her.
Mr. Tremore laid the razor down, then bent over the basin as he poured water from the pitcher. He splashed his face, rinsing over the bowl. Then rose up partway and stopped. He looked at his own face in the mirror.
He startled, blinked. They both did. He slowly rose, staring at his image in the glass.
Goodness, he looked different. Sharper. Cleaner. Smoother, of course. But unpredictably somehow … more severe in his handsomeness. Mick Tremore, clean-shaven, looked like an idealized drawing for a shaving-lotion advertisement.
With the mustache gone, his eyes became his predominant feature, and they, of course, were stunning. Light, mossy green eyes set beneath a jutting brow in a plane perpendicular to a long, straight nose. The bones of his face came forth, a near-patrician facial architecture of strong, masculine angles and planes. Oh, she'd been so right to insist, Edwina thought. So right to get rid of that animal tuft.
Mr. Tremore stared into the mirror, his unusual eyes focused on the lower half of his face. He put his hand over the wet, fresh-shaved skin, dragging his palm down his mouth, frowning. He pressed his lips, moving them, stretched his upper lip.
Whatever it felt like, he didn't dally with the sensation. He turned around just like that—they hadn't been in his bedroom a full minute, hadn't passed a dozen seconds beyond removing his mustache, when he pointed to the wood chair by the washbasin and said, "Get on that where I can get a good look. Then raise 'em up, Win."
Act II. Panic. She took a step back. "You're bossy."
"I'm not bossy. We're negotiating. I know what I want. Get on the chair."
"How did you get that right suddenly, all the I'm's and We're's. You're saying them correctly almost every time now."
"I've been listening to you. Stop stalling. We can be done in five minutes. Get on the chair."
"No." What she meant was she wasn't standing on anything.
How he took the reluctance in her tone though was, she wanted to back out of her second half of their agreement.
His face took on a look of genuine anger, a look, she realized, she'd never seen on him. It made her back up another step and talk faster than normal. "I'm not standing on the chair. The table downstairs—" She swallowed. "I didn't like it. It was too—" Awkward somehow. In some extreme sense.
Standing on the table downstairs, she thought, had made the strangeness at the end, the eerie feeling that had made her hot and light-headed. "I'm not doing that again," she reiterated. "You have to look where you are."
He twisted his mouth, an instant's displeasure, then pulled the chair he'd indicated around, straddling it backward. He dropped himself into the seat, bracing his arms on the back. "Fine," he said.
It was her word. He said it exactly as she often did. The man was a parrot today, soaking up more than she wanted at the moment. She backed a step further, staring into his newly revealed, somehow sharper features. He didn't look as kind without his mustache. She almost missed it for a moment. He didn't look himself.
"Take up your skirt," he said.
She let out a huff. "Don't make it any cruder than it is."
"I can make it any way I want: It's my turn."
He touched his lip again, and his brow drew into a deep, preoccupied crease. One elbow braced on the chair back, he absently fiddled with the newly shaved skin.
Edwina hadn't been aware she was retreating further until her bare heel stepped rudely into the baseboard. By then the weight and balance of her substantial body was already in motion. She collided, her shoulders hitting the wall.
"You gonna start, or do you need some help?"
She brushed at her skirts, getting herself settled on her feet, wishing somehow for more time, a delay, which wasn't of course going to happen. Get on with it, she told herself. "No, I don't need any help." She grabbed her skirts, two handfuls, looking down at them.
"Good," he said. "Because I want to get to the last minute as quick as I can."
The last minute? Oh. Her stomach dropped. The touching part. She wouldn't think about it. She lifted her eyes—she would look at his clean lip and do what she'd done before.
It was harder this time. She had the memory of the odd, tingling embarrassment that in the last instant had just about leveled her. Added to this now was knowing that the odd sensation his eyes made on her would become somehow the concrete feel of his hand. How was she supposed to manage that? Just stand here? Let him walk up and put his— Oh dear heaven, she thought.
She stared at his lip and kept telling herself it was worth it: as she gathered up her skirts. She began again, taking the fabric up more and more into her fists. The air was warmer than downstairs. She felt a draft on her legs that was almost balmy as her hands claimed scrunching silk and underlinens. When her fists couldn't hold any more, she pressed the scroopy stiffness of her skirts back against her knickers, hiking, pushing skirts up under her forearms. Skirts rising, rising … bare feet then shins. When she saw her knickers, where they began at her knees—
She suddenly remembered what he'd said he wanted, the part about kissing the backs of her legs. No. She looked at him. "You can't—you have to—" She couldn't say it. "You can't use your—"
"Mouth," he finished for her. He laughed, a release. Of sorts. It wasn't a particularly nice laugh—dry, ironic. There was a subtlety to him she hadn't given him credit for till now. He understood nuance. And perhaps even some sort of double entendre she couldn't grasp: "All right, loov. I won't put my mouth under your skirts where you don't want it. It ain't my intention to make you unhappy."
Ain't. The word let her breathe. Thank God he still said it occasionally. Still her Mick. Funny, joking Mick. Who wasn't joking now. He bit the inside of his mouth, a movement that sucked his lower lip in at the edge. His eyes were hooded, half-closed from watching the show that was lower to the ground than before. Looking, l
ooking, not a moment's reprieve…
Winnie got the whole wad of her skirts pulled up into her arms and against her hips. She didn't know how long she'd stood there, fretting and rubbing her thumbs at the silk, standing with her skirts up in front of a man who gave the sight his full concentration. She only jerked to greater consciousness when he rose, swinging one leg back and off the chair, standing up to his full, rather imposing height. He seemed huge when he came toward her.
"What are you doing?" she blurted.
"I'm going to touch your legs. We agreed—"
"No, we didn't." The wishful lie choked out.
"Yes, we did."
"Once," she recanted plaintively. "We said you could touch one leg once."
He didn't answer but bent down on one knee in front of her. She looked down on his head, his glossy hair. He'd put himself at her legs, within inches. "Turn around," he said.
"No."
He glanced up. "Winnie, my mustache is in the washbasin. If you think I put it there for some child's game, you're wrong. I guess we said once, but it's gonna be a long 'once.' I'm touchin' you all the way up your leg. If you say I can't use my mouth, I won't. But turn around. I'm touchin' your legs at the back."
"Leg," she said.
"All right, leg. But I'm sliding my hand up the whole, damn, gorgeous length, from your sweet heel there"—he pointed—"up the back of your calf, the inside of your knee, all the way up the back of your thigh"—his finger drew an imaginary upward path in the air that gave her goose bumps, then, when his hand got to hip level, his hands took real hold of her hips, turned her around by them, pointing in the process, still without touching—"to the curve right here under your bum. Thank you."
She was facing the wall.
She leaned her head against it, with the "curve under her bum" tingling. God help her, he hadn't done anything yet, and she was in a state. Goose bumps kept running up her legs in waves. Her belly felt as if she'd swallowed something animate that squirmed to get out.
While uncertainty made every single sensation acute. She waited, a woman up in the air, kept aloft on emotions she hated—dread and suspense.
Yet there was another feeling here niggling, as she stood against the wall waiting for Mick Tremore to do something he shouldn't. Why did she allow him the leeway to turn her, to even consider touching her? She couldn't answer the question. She didn't like what was happening, she promised herself. She wanted it to be over. The tension it brought was abominable.
Yet as she stood there, waiting, tortured, unhappy, anxious, she was somehow also … thrilled beyond words.
Nothing she had known of life till this moment had ever been this exciting.
Mick, on the other hand, was fairly clear about what was happening. He had hold of a guilty virgin he was pushing a little harder than he should. He tried to calm her. He tried to feel bad about it. Winnie here was getting fairly wrung out, and he was the culprit, challenging a hesitant, fretful woman … who, buggeration, come to think of it, couldn't be all that timid, since she'd found the courage to have his mustache.
Anger again. It kept shooting through him in bursts, bright and startling like fireworks in the night sky on St. Agnes's birthday. He told himself it was just that Winnie didn't know exactly what she was doing here, how hard she was being on him. She didn't have a lot of experience in matters between men and women.
He murmured, "Just be still," thinking that would help her get through it—he couldn't make himself feel bad enough to let her off.
He put his hand to her ankle, and, with the contact, his shoulders jerked. "H-h-h-h—" he said, unable to hold it back: her aspirated H. Here was how to get him to make the sound. From pleasure. Pleasure honed on the sight of her bare legs so that it cut into him like the edge of a knife. Her skin was so bloody smooth … ten times smoother than his. Her ankle was narrow, the calf a long swell—
She jerked, pulled away, taking her leg with her as she turned around. "There," she said. "You did it. Your ten minutes are over." She let go of her skirts.
He caught them and stood up, carrying them to her waist.
He pushed the wad of dress at her, putting pressure against her stomach. "I hate a cheater, Winnie. Let's do that again. I know you're scared, but you can get through this. Here. Take your skirts."
She refused them. "You're done," she whispered, a little hiss.
"No, I'm not. You've been trying to short me on this idea from the first second you thought of it. Now, you notice, please, I came upstairs and took my mustache off in under a minute. I didn't dodge or argue or give you a moment of trouble. Now hold up your skirts and bear the last minute of the bargain you invented."
He held the bundle of skirts against her belly, leaning into them, letting her feel his existence on the other side of all the silky stuff of her clothes. He was scaring her, he knew. Winnie didn't like not to be in charge. Well, stuff her, he thought.
Except that was the point, of course. He couldn't. And the idea of "stuffing her" was pretty much running wild through his head. Ho-o-o-o, he wanted to have at her. He wanted to lay her so bad his eyes were hot at the backs from being so close to the burning thoughts in his head. He was trying to be rational, trying not to act as crazy as he felt—galled, goaded, teased, and naked. A feeling he'd known the instant he raised his head and stared into the mirror at his own bare lip. Stuff her, he thought again.
But since he couldn't, he descended down her body, inches away without touching, to do what she'd said he could.
Winnie watched him go, then lost sight of him. She could only stand rigid and stare at his shoulders over the bunch of silk she clutched. She felt his head brush against the wad of her skirts, then nestle into them a little. She could feel the warmth of his closeness at her legs, a sensation so extremely pleasurable it was horrible. She was breathing with small vocalized gasps at the end of each breath, embarrassing mews she'd never made before. What was wrong with her? Her mouth was parchment from her trying to find air.
Mick meanwhile turned his head, and his cheek brushed where the hem of a petticoat hung down. The linen was still warm, fragrant from her body. Clean, sweet, starchy. A womanly smell that stirred up a lust the likes of which he hadn't felt since he was a boy just discovering the female sex. In half a second, he lifted in his trousers, all the way out to a full, stiff erection. Oh, bloody hell, he thought. What was he going to do with this? From here, touching her, and not having her, should be one great, big, old Buckingham Palace of torment. Halls and gardens and monuments to it.
No sooner had he grazed her calf, though, than she jerked and twisted away again.
She let out a panicked breath. "Enough. That's it. We're done."
Rage. It stood up with him, pure and clean. He couldn't remember the last time he'd known such a potent, simple emotion. "You cheat," he said. He stepped against her dress before it could fall all the way. He bent his face toward hers, almost touching her nose with his, eye to eye. He dropped his hands with force on the wall at either side of her shoulders—he watched her jump as his palms hit, the daylights all but leaping out of her.
She pulled back, hit her head on the wall. Old Winnie was going to brain herself before she accepted that right here was where her game had got her to and she wasn't going backward: She was going forward.
Forward into what? Mick stood there, blinking, panting, furious, flummoxed. He winced over how hard her head had clunked on the plaster—then the crack to her fool head knocked some sense into him.
He wasn't getting to touch her leg. She couldn't do it.
Mick wanted to howl at the injustice. He'd grazed her leg, thought about touching her. Hell, where he'd got to was worse than not touching her at all. He rolled his lips together into his teeth, feeling his upper lip stretch, cold, numb, and bare as a baby's.
They argued with their strength for a minute. Winnie was a sizeable girl. When she shoved him, he knew it. A big girl. The way her hands grabbed his shoulders, though, and pushed—hard, bu
sinesslike, not joking—it took more wind from his sails.
He started looking for options.
While Winnie was all but choking from how narrow hers were. Mick was all around her. She shoved, but his weight didn't budge. It didn't even lift.
In fact, she felt him shift. He stepped his feet apart, making himself as heavy and immovable as a boulder, then whispered into her ear, "So what is the penalty for breakin' faith?"
Her heart leaped into her windpipe. "I didn't—"
"Oh, yes, loovey. Let's see. I think the knickers. They have to go."
"Ac-k-k!" That was all that would come out Winnie's mouth at first. Then, "N-no, absolutely not, you—"
"Now, now. You cheated. Or you've tried and tried to. You have to pay."
"No," she said. Her voice sounded pathetic, even to herself. What he was doing genuinely frightened her. It was too much. He asked too much.
He took pity. "All right, Win. You can buy your knickers back."
She let her anxious eyes find his. His face was so close, and oh, God, she'd somehow gotten her hands flat against his chest. It was wide, the muscles curved, warm, as hard as the wall behind her. And hair! God help her, at the edge of her thumb she could feel the light cushioning of hair that ran between contours of muscle. His body made her dizzy, near-delirious: as if one of the statues she'd admired had grown warm under her hands, then started to breathe.
"H-how?" she asked.
"Cooperate for a minute." He put his nose near her cheek, brushed it against her. She could hear the sound of air, his smelling her. He brushed his mouth along the same place, his clean, freshly shaved mouth. It set off a series of shivers, little quakes through her.
She took her cheek away, bending her neck, and he put his lips onto the arch of it, lightly brushing his dry mouth up to where her jaw met neck at the back of her ear. They both grew still.
Winnie because she was afraid to move. He, she realized, to take the time to consider how and what to ask of her: The toad, the miserable, mean toad was making it all up as he went along.
