“And what kind are those?” she asked saucily.
“I suspect your plan is to tell me jokes not suitable for a vicar’s ears,” he replied. “But I know those jokes, and I don’t find most of them funny. They’re all to do with men making themselves like sailing ships and spending their main masts, and I can’t say the subject interests me.”
Lina burst out laughing. “I don’t know any shipping jests, Mr. Holland.”
“But undoubtedly your jokes are of the same caliber, Miss McKenna.”
She tossed a grape into her mouth. “It’s too late to save me, as they say, Reverend, so best leave the chastisement to your congregation. Why don’t you think of your time in London as an education in improper pursuits?”
Tom felt a wave of black rage. She was so beautiful, so witty, so utterly charming: how dare his brother have taken her to his house and made her into a concubine?
She seemed to guess his thoughts. “I expect you’d like a full confession,” she said with a little pout, “but you shan’t have it. I will tell you, though, in case you plan to lambaste your brother, that Rees effected no corruption. To be frank, Reverend, I lost my maidenly virtue back in my own home village.” Her eyes twinkled mischievously. “There are some of us who never agree with societal strictures. Haven’t you noticed that yourself? I listened to my mama’s dictates, but I couldn’t picture myself marrying one of the boys I grew up around. And I couldn’t see any good reason why I shouldn’t bed Hugh Sutherland, if I wished to. So I did bed him, and then I turned down his request for my hand, and then I left. And I haven’t any desire to return. I simply didn’t fit in.”
“I suppose you couldn’t return now,” Tom said, hardening his heart against her tempting gaiety. “ ’Tis base to be a whore, after all. It would cause your mother some grief.”
Her fingers froze for a moment. Then: “Am I that name, John?”
“I see you know Othello. But why are you calling me John?” he asked, irritated beyond all control. He drained his glass of wine and poured another.
“You are John the Baptist, are you not?” she said. In the candlelight, the skin of her throat glowed a creamy delicate white. And her throat led down to sweet mounds of breast, looking like snow against the dull gold of her gown. “I rather think that young Meggin called it right,” she said, and the husky amusement in her voice had deepened. “If I am the Whore of Babylon, perhaps I should serve as your temptation. Or have I got it wrong? It was John who was tempted in the desert was it not?”
“No,” he said, “it wasn’t. And I believe you know that as well as I do, given the rather surprising extent of biblical knowledge you’ve already demonstrated.”
“Ah, it must have been John who lived in the desert for years. Now how long did you say that you’d been a priest, John?”
He met her eyes. Hers were deep pools of chocolate-brown mischief, and yet with a hint of vulnerability. That label whore had stung.
“I shouldn’t have called you that word,” he said. “I wished to hurt you. I’m sorry.”
“It was very difficult to make my way to London on my own,” she said casually, peeling herself an apple, her hands absolutely steady. “Do you know, I actually contemplated, one night, whether it was better to live poor or die in sin? But I chose to live poor, Reverend. Believe it or not, when I chose to move to this house, it was because I thought myself in love with your brother.” Her smile was self-mocking now.
“I’m sure that he feels the same,” Tom said, cursing Rees. “No. He never did, although he might have experienced some sort of temporary infatuation with my voice.” There wasn’t a trace of self-pity in her voice.
“I—I’m sorry,” Tom said finally.
She shrugged. “He’s kind enough. He’s a gentleman, your brother, for all that most of the nobility think he’s a degenerate. He has rather wished I wasn’t living in the house any time in the last two years, but he’s caught by his own integrity, you see. He can’t put me out because he’s honorable, and he doesn’t really want me in, because he’s honorable.”
“And do you wish to leave?” One of the candles was guttering, casting her half of the table into a shadow that hid the sparkle in her eyes and made her look as if…but he couldn’t stand the idea that his cursed brother had broken her heart.
“I believe I shall return to the opera house in the very near future, and yes, I will welcome that.”
“But do you like London? Has it been as enthralling as you hoped to find it, back when you were a girl in Scotland?”
“No,” she said. “London is disappointing, like so many things in life. Don’t you find it so, John?”
“On occasion.”
“I find it so virtually all the time,” she said almost dreamily. “Your brother is a prime case in point. Disappointing.”
“I’m sorry,” Tom said, feeling a surge of gratitude for his brother’s shortcomings.
She stood up. “I am worn quite ragged with all this confession, John. I believe I shall retire.”
He came to his feet, and walked to her side in order to escort her from the room. He stopped her with a touch on her arm, just as she was about to open the door. “Please don’t call me John.”
She looked up at him, and there wasn’t a hint of sadness in her eyes; he must have imagined it. Instead, she came up on the tips of her toes and brushed her mouth across his. Tom froze.
“Don’t do that,” he said, and he was shocked by the roughness of his own voice.
She didn’t seem to realize her own danger. She thought it was all a game. “Tempting the vicar?” she said pertly. “A crime, I’m sure. But I never could tempt you into sin, Mr. Holland. From everything Rees told me about you, back a few years ago when we used to converse, you are the perfect son.”
Tom tightened his jaw and kept his hands at his sides.
“Always kind, always forgiving, always Christian. I suspect Meggin is not the first waif you’ve rescued. If I remember the stories correctly, you’ve never put a foot wrong, isn’t that right?” She smiled up at him, as seductive a woman as he’d ever seen in his life. In fact, he had never seen anyone like her.
And just like that, he snapped. He put out his hands and drew her into his arms. His blood was pounding so that all he could hear was the roar of seawater in his ears. And all he could see was the tempting sweetness of her mouth.
It was the kind of kiss that brings drowning men back from the edge of death. He pulled her against him hard, relishing every inch of silky satin flesh, so giving to his hardness, so very unlike his own body. He even pulled her off her feet because he had to have her closer, all that soft, warm flesh. And she didn’t protest; instead she melted against him, curling her arms around his neck, letting him ravish her mouth. After a bit, she started teasing him with her tongue until he growled and sucked her tongue into his mouth. She made a little noise, a funny little hoarse noise but it didn’t sound like a giggle.
Still, that tiny noise reminded him of where he was. Of who he was. He put her back on her feet and tried to think of an apology. If there was an apology for that sort of behavior.
But she cut him off. “Am I to suppose that the Baptist has succumbed to temptation?” There was a trace of wonder in her voice, and the words seemed to hang on the air. For a moment, she stood there, staring up at him with her beautiful lips stung by his kiss and her eyes all lazy with pleasure.
Then she turned and was gone.
Eighteen
Dancing in the Desert
Two days later, Tom was fairly well convinced he might as well be John the Baptist. Lina made an excellent Salome: everywhere he turned, she seemed to be dancing, just like Salome before the King, and he had the feeling he was about to see his head on a platter. She left the room before him, and the only thing he could think about for an hour afterwards was the curve of her waist. She bent to pick up Meggin, giving him a view of the deep hollow between her breasts, and Tom could scarcely breathe for the hunger that swept over him. She smiled
at him over the table, and her skin gleamed bronze in the candlelight. He wanted to lick it, all of it. And when she touched him lightly on the arm, and said cheekily that she had been practicing the dance of the seven veils, his whole body went rigid with the effort not to pull her into his arms and kiss her silliness into silence.
So he did the only thing he could think of: retreated to his bedchamber and prayed for help. At first, he prayed for guidance. Then he gave that up and started just praying for self-control. For help.
On Tom’s third evening in London, Rees announced that he would begin to train Lina in some aria or other. Tom trailed into the sitting room after them even though he was conscious that an ice water bath was a better proposition. When Lina started to sing, his heart almost stopped from the pure beauty of it. Her voice fluted higher and higher, dancing in the rafters of the room.
“Her voice is incredible,” he breathed to Rees, sitting next to him.
But Rees was frowning at his score. “Lina!” he said, cutting her off. “Try that last bar with the count as written. It’s a dotted quarter and an eighth note, not two quarter notes.”
Lina nodded, but her eyes slid to Tom’s, holding him prisoner. She took a deep breath and began to sing again. For a moment it looked as if her breasts would surely topple from her bodice. Tom found himself tensing, as if to jump forward and protect her, shield her beauty—and from whom?
There was no one in the room but himself and her protector. His own brother. Tom felt a surge of primitive hatred, one that went back more than twenty years, a gift from their father. The old earl had reveled in creating divisions between his two sons. He whipped them with his taunts from the moment they were out of the nursery. Who knew why? From the distance of the five years since the earl’s death, Tom rather thought that their father was afraid that they might present a unified front and rebel against him. Not that they ever had. Obedient as hunting dogs, they turned out exactly as he had prophesied. The earl had told Tom that he was too wet to marry, and that he would end up in a minor parish, unable to get his spineless self into a sufficiently political position to achieve a large parish. That was true enough. Tom couldn’t seem to bring himself to flatter the right people, to grease the right palm, to take those steps that would have him rising toward being a bishop. The fact that he loved his small parish and his wayward parishioners wouldn’t have mattered to their father.
“I suppose you’ll marry one of those prim do-gooders who flock in churchyards,” their father had sneered the day Tom fastened on his collar. “Thank God one of my sons has red blood in his veins.”
Something died in Tom’s heart every time Rees snapped at Lina, every time she took a deep breath and started singing again. If he was the man his father had prophesied, Rees was exactly the rakehell that their father had wanted him to be: a man of vicious habits, a man who would bring a young girl into his house and make her his mistress, a man who would force his wife to return to the same house.
Lina was singing the same bar for the tenth time. Her voice was not soaring quite as easily now. There was a little line between her brows, and she’d stopped throwing Tom teasing glances. Surely she was getting over-tired.
“Damn it all,” Rees bellowed, “don’t you listen to anything I say, Lina? Read your score. That trill begins on E-flat, not G-natural. I shouldn’t have to be your répéteteur, teaching you each aria note by note!”
She glared at him and her soft mouth trembled. Tom longed to spring to his feet and take her in his arms, but he stayed where he was. Lina was Rees’s mistress. Not his to protect.
With very little emotion, she picked up her glass of wine and tossed it in their direction, stalking out the door.
“For Christ’s sake,” Rees muttered, shaking the papers he was holding, and paying no attention to the red splotches marring his shirt.
Tom wiped the wine from his face. “You drove her too hard. Do you have to be so brutal?”
“Stay out of what you don’t understand,” Rees growled.
“I understand that Lina has the voice of an angel,” Tom said hotly. “Yet you keep shouting at her. I don’t know why she puts up with it.”
“She has to. I’m trying to prepare her to sing a lead role.” Rees tossed the papers on a stool. “Lina has a gorgeous voice but she doesn’t have the drive to be a great singer. If I don’t prod her, she won’t practice. You saw her. She pays no attention to the score, even when I’m standing before her, shouting the notes.”
“You made her sing one phrase over and over!”
“She should be doing that on her own: over and over until she could sing it correctly in her sleep. But she doesn’t want it enough.” He rubbed some drops of wine from his forehead wearily. “I know you’d like to make me out to be some sort of miscreant, Tom. But in this case, I’m actually doing my best.”
“I fail to see how shouting is doing your best.”
“I’ve promised her the lead in my next opera. She’s not ready, and she doesn’t deserve it. But if I can somehow whip her into shape before the management realizes that she’s inadequate, and perhaps even make her smooth enough so that she’s a success—and that’s doubtful—the victory might just carry her into another lead role. After that, it’s out of my hands.”
“Oh.”
“You always see things in black and white.” Rees was leaning his head back against the couch, staring up at the ceiling. “If I’m shouting at Lina, I must be evil.”
“What about you?” Tom asked boldly. “Did you always know you were a rakehell, or did you have to be instructed in your wicked ways by father?”
“I suppose I received instruction,” Rees said, sounding rather bored. He was still staring up at the ceiling.
“How well we both understood our orders.”
Rees turned his head so that his eyes flicked over Tom’s face. “Is that why you’re here, then?” he drawled. “Are you sick of being the godly vicar, and you’ve come to the house of sin for lessons in titillation?”
“No!” Tom said, horrified to find that some part of his soul leapt at the idea. Could that be the truth?
“Good,” Rees said, turning his head and staring back up at the ceiling. “Because for all Lina looks like a little strumpet, she’s not.”
“I would never treat her so,” Tom said, and the memory of the way he had kissed Lina, the way he had pulled her body against him, lent urgency to his tone.
“I didn’t mean to imply such a thing,” Rees said, sounding utterly exhausted. “I’d better take a nap. I have to work all night.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
Rees was already off the couch and heading for the door. “If you could keep Lina out of my hair tomorrow, I’d be grateful,” he said over his shoulder. “She has an annoying habit of wishing to leave the house, and she expects to have an escort.”
Tom sat there by himself for a while, staring at the washes of paper surrounding his boots and thinking about temptation.
But thinking about temptation, let alone praying for help, never seemed to help much when he was faced with the living, breathing woman herself.
He was walking down the corridor toward his bedchamber when she opened her door and slammed right into him. He drew in a deep breath. Her curvy, fragrant body seemed to leave an imprint on his skin.
“God’s bodkins!” she said, pulling back. “How you startled me!”
He stared at her, and the desire in his heart must have been written on his face, because she turned a delicate rose pink.
“Lina,” he said and his voice came out with a harshness that not one of his parishioners had ever heard. “If you don’t want to be kissed, you should run back into that room of yours.”
Instead, Lina raised her fingers to his cheek. “Kiss me, then,” she said in a voice like velvet.
But he didn’t, holding back due to a grain of wisdom, some shred of sanity.
“Tom,” she added, using his Christian name rather than the be
vy of labels she gave him. Not John the Baptist, not Reverend, not Mr. Holland.
Tom.
His lips came to hers with the hot, insistent hunger of a starving man. And she succumbed to him with the same fervor, the silky touch of an arm around his neck setting his skin on fire. Even that fugitive touch made him understand for the first time in his life what a blessing it is for a man and a woman to be unclothed together. But he didn’t—couldn’t—think of that or he might sweep her straight to his chamber.
So he contented himself instead with a rough, demanding kiss. This wasn’t the kiss of a timid vicar, the succor of the poor and the rescuer of wounded animals. This was the action of a licentious rakehell, a man driven by lust, a man who took no prisoners. His mouth scorched across hers, a merciless barbarian with his wild-eyed queen, a man who invaded first, and asked questions afterward.
Still, he was a barbarian in control of himself. He didn’t let his hands roam. Instead he told her with every stroke of his tongue just what he’d like to be doing to the tender undercurve of her breast, to that sweet spot at the inside of her elbow, to the curve of her hips.
It was an endless kiss, because Tom knew under it all, that when the kiss was over, he would go to his chamber by himself. So the barbarian fought with himself, keeping his hand on the Barbarian Queen’s back, never allowing himself even to pull her luscious body against his.
Lina had twined her arms around his neck, and her fingers were compulsively clutching his curls. Through the hot waves of desire that kept breaking over him and threatening to make him buckle at the knees, he realized that her breathing was quick and rapid. Her hands began to wander down his back, a path that threatened to erase Tom’s control.
“Lina,” he said in a hoarse groan, tearing his mouth from hers.
She didn’t open her eyes. He wanted to see languorous pleasure there, so he dropped kisses on her eyes, trying to calm the pounding of his heart, giving her space to recover.
“Reverend,” she finally said, her voice just a wisp of sound.