Bronwyn Scott - A Lady Risks All

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, tonnish 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.’