Free The Proposition by Judith Ivory Page A

around the words even as she said them. "I want you to know"—she paused, gathering herself—"that I am not angry with you." Just the bare bones, Edwina. Just make him stop. "Um, you caught me off guard, Mr. Tremore. You can't do, well—do what you just did. Don't ever do that again." There. Hold to the rules, she thought, and all will be fine. "It's not right. You can't do what you normally do." Something made her add, "I'm not a shop girl who can be flattered into believing nonsense, just because it suits your cheeky sense of fun."
    He laughed. "Fun," he repeated, saying that particular word exactly right. "Miss Bollash, life be rich. Why don't you bite yourself off a piece?"
    She had no answer. Speaking to him in the middle of the night in a dim hallway—about whether or not he could kiss her—was like walking into an unfamiliar, pitch-dark room. She wasn't sure which way to turn without running into something, without hurting herself. Every direction was potentially unsafe.
    His head bent. He was looking at her nightclothes.
    As if her simply standing there in them was somehow provocative. Now that was an unusual feeling. It made her spine shiver. It made her heart beat in a panicky rhythm. The shadows of his shirt rose and fell, his chest making it move, a deep rising, falling. The sight sent such a shot of apprehension through her, her knees turned liquid.
    She'd already told him once, and he wasn't stepping back. She burst out with, "I wouldn't be standing here in my nightclothes, Mr. Tremore, if you weren't prowling my house in the wee hours like a piece of Bow Bells riffraff, taking stock of what he can steal."
    He cranked his head back. Light from the study cut across his shoulder, revealing a plane of his face: the look of insult. She regretted having said those precise words, yet couldn't think of different ones, better ones.
    He tilted his head to look at her, then said quietly, "You can rest easy, lovey." Loovey, he said. "I ain't no thief. I work hard, and I be good at what I do."
    She continued to be up in arms. "Not so good that you can keep yourself clean and in decent clothes."
    His insulted expression softened into a kind of disappointment. He folded his arms over his chest, letting his weight fall against the edge of the door frame. "You be a snooty thing, ain't ya? Think you know everything there be to know about a bloke, because he don't talk like you, because he catches rats for a livin'—"
    "I know a man too lazy to sew the buttons onto his coat. And who ends up being chased—"
    He let out a single snort of laughter, loud enough to silence her. "First," he said, "who I be chasin' or who be chasin' me ain't none of your business." His face took on the shadows of his crooked smile before he added, "At least not yet. Second, the coats what I can afford don't right off have many buttons, and what buttons they do, I sell. See, I got ten younger brothers and sisters in Cornwall what depend on me to support them. I send most of me money home. And third—you will notice, I can count, by the way, all the way to third, and I can read, too, Public Education Act, you see. And third, loov, you ain't so funny to look at as you think. You be right nice to look at. True, you ain't pretty exactly, but you be—" He struggled for the right word, frowned, looked down, then said, "I can't explain it. I like lookin' at you." The dim light seemed to show him grinning again; it was hard to be sure. But there was wryness in his voice when he offered, "Different. A long pretty thing with the face of a moppet. You be loovly, Miss Bollash." He repeated softly with satisfaction, "Loovly."
    Lovely, he meant, of course, but the softness and rhythm in the way he said it struck her.
    "Loovly," she repeated, saying it his way. Then laughed. She meant her laughter to be ironic, a hollow humor full of disdain. Her usual kind of laugh when confronted with her own looks. But despite herself, she felt genuine amusement. "More on