Lina couldn’t help but grin back, for all he was a vicar and she didn’t like the species. “I thought a man of God was above such feelings,” she said impudently. “Shouldn’t you be upstairs praying for your soul?”
“Who told you vicars had no feeling?” he said, looking distinctly amused. “And my soul suffers nothing from loving you, Lina. You are as beautiful a creature of God as I’ve ever seen.”
“Love?” she said, hooting. “Your tongue slipped there, Reverend!”
“No, it didn’t,” he said quietly. One touch of his hand on her cheek and she stopped her rather feverish laughter. He was looking at her that way again.
Lina felt a wash of nervous fear. “Did you hear the jest about the bishop who heard a noise in the night,” she said, “but when he got up to see—”
“Hush,” the vicar murmured, as he moved toward her, eyes intent on hers.
Lina knew why men had broad shoulders; it was so that one could clutch them when you couldn’t see. And you couldn’t see because the vicar—the vicar—had crushed his mouth against hers and he was kissing her in a way she’d never been kissed. Not by Hugh Sutherland, nor by Hervey Bittle, and never once by Rees Godwin.
“Are you”—she gasped some time later—“are you sure you’re a vicar, Tom?”
He looked at her, and his eyes were glowing with something she couldn’t quite recognize. “No question about it.”
Well, she could have answered that herself. Look at the way he never touched her below her shoulders, although his hands had made havoc of Meggin’s hairstyling. “You don’t kiss like a vicar,” she whispered. His lips were so beautifully shaped that she had to lean close again and taste him.
“And you don’t kiss like another man’s mistress. If I weren’t a vicar,” he said rather hoarsely, “you’d be in some danger, Lina.”
Lina didn’t see what she could possibly be in danger of. Sure, and she was a lost soul, they both knew that. The thought was a bit lowering. He seemed to read her thoughts.
A hand forced up her chin. “You’re no strumpet, Lina McKenna,” he told her.
“Just because you don’t like the truth does not mean that you can command it not to be so,” she said, managing a wry smile.
“I know it to be so,” he said.
She had to marvel at the confidence in his voice. Men were like that. Her father was like that. Undoubtedly, he would welcome her back as a lost sheep…forgiveness is the Lord’s, he would say.
“Doesn’t it get tiring to be so good all the time?” she said, and the edge in her voice was half for him and half for her absent father.
He was running his hands through her hair, straightening out the tangles that he had put there. “Yes,” he said frankly.
Her father never said such a thing. He was endlessly forgiving and loving, tiresomely understanding, tediously perfect. “Still, I suppose you have never broken one of your vows,” she said sharply. “Not one of the Ten Commandments and their permutations.”
Tom kept his hands sweeping through his Lina’s glorious hair. He was learning something very interesting. “I haven’t had much trouble with Thou shalt not commit adultery,” he said mildly. “It’s a good thing you’re not married. I think I prefer, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” He paused and dropped a kiss on her head. “I favor adhering to that commandment, Lina. You are, after all, my neighbor.”
She ignored his punning. “What about the question of fornication, Reverend? What of that?”
“Tom,” he reminded her. “Fornication is not a sin I worry about.”
“How can you say that?” she said sharply. “You, who wishes to unbutton my gown?”
He drew her close and said it in her ear. “Fornication is to couple with a woman whom one does not love. My temptation would be to make love before sanctifying our union. But it would be making love. Make no mistake about that, Lina.”
She shook her head. “You’re cracked, Reverend. It must go with the black frock.”
“So who was the vicar in your life?” he asked.
“He still is a vicar,” she corrected him. “My father. Reverend Gideon McKenna, County Dumfriesshire, Scotland.”
She couldn’t see him, so Tom let his grin spread across his face. She was a vicar’s daughter, his rebellious little Lina. No wonder she talked so fluently of Salome. No wonder she hadn’t succumbed to the greater sins of London, and fell only to the blandishments of his brother because she was in love with him. “What is your father like?” he asked, hardly daring to breathe in case she got up and ran from the room.
“Perfect,” she said flippantly. “Absolutely perfect in every way.”
“An unusual trait,” Tom said, rather taken aback. “Do you find the rest of humanity sadly flawed in comparison?”
“Oh no,” she said, shaking her head rather violently. “There’s nothing more wearing than perfection. I hate it.”
“What do you mean?”
“No matter what I did as a child, no matter what the crime, he understood and forgave me.”
Tom was silent. Her experience was so very far from his own that he hardly knew what to say.
“I know,” she said crossly, “it sounds heavenly, to use the appropriate word.”
He pulled her onto his lap. Surely this didn’t count as over-intimate touching. A second later he changed his mind as he realized exactly where her sweetly rounded bottom was nestled.
“Those commandments…He never faltered in adhering to them,” she said.
Tom tried to take his mind off his body. Outside the window was a fat squirrel, his little paws holding up a nut like a communion wafer, his plump cheeks moving briskly as he peered in at them.
“The only problem with living with a saint,” Lina said, “is that he always loves God more than you.”
Tom tightened his arms. Surely it wouldn’t lead to sinful intimacies if he kissed her ear. It was so exquisitely delicate, peeping from her hair.
“One year I was chosen to sing the lead in the village Christmas pageant,” she said. “I was so proud of it. I was singing the role of the Angel Gabriel, you see, and had all the best solos. I practiced for weeks.”
“I expect you were marvelous,” Tom said, and was alarmed to hear the husky note in his own voice. He quit kissing her ear. Any moment now she would notice what she was sitting on.
“I might have been,” she said. “But the night before the pageant my father caught me kissing Hugh Sutherland behind the kitchen door. He was horrified, naturally.” She looked up at him with the most beautiful hazel eyes that Tom had ever seen. “He prayed for two hours and then told me that he had to take away the thing that I most wanted, because God had strictly forbidden lechery. So no Angel Gabriel.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, kissing her nose, and the corner of her eye, and the sweet bend of her cheek.
“But that wasn’t really the whole of it. He thought I took too much enjoyment in the song itself, you see, rather than in the content of the words. From the time I was a small girl, he tried to teach me not to love my own voice, but to love the words I spoke or sang.”
“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” Tom offered.
“Psalm sixty-six,” Lina said wearily. “That night he told me I couldn’t sing Gabriel, and that he didn’t want me to sing at all for six months. Not at all.”
Tom held her tight. It was as if someone had tried to silence a songbird.
“I was frantic. My mother begged him. I think in the end he regretted it. But he couldn’t admit to having made an error, because it was undertaken for godly reasons. He had made a vow to that effect, you see—that he wouldn’t allow me to sing for six months for the good of my soul—and he couldn’t break the vow, no matter the consequences, or the foolishness of it.” She hid her face against his shoulder.
“After midnight I sneaked out of the house and lost my virginity to Hugh in the cowshed.”
“Lucky Hugh,” Tom whispered.
??
?And the next day,” Lina continued, “I caught the mail-coach to London at five in the morning. I was determined to find a place where people would ask, nay, beg me to sing.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” he said, holding her even tighter.
“Kiss me again, Tom?”
“I don’t know,” he said, nipping her ear with his teeth. “I have this odd feeling that I ought to go upstairs and start making a series of wild vows so that I can break them all tomorrow.”
“Later,” she said, turning her face up to his. “I do like the way you kiss.”
“Am I more adroit than Hugh Sutherland?” he said, his lips hovering above hers.
“Kiss me again, and I’ll tell you,” she said, just before he stole her breath away.
Twenty-three
Talk of Marriage
Lady Griselda Willoughby’s residence
Number Fourteen, Chandois Street
Cavendish Square
“The point is, darling, you must get married. It’s your duty to the name, etc., etc. Surely you can imagine the rest of the lecture without my having to take the trouble to spell it out.” Lady Griselda Willoughby waved her hand languidly in the air.
“You are a lazy creature, Gressie,” the Earl of Mayne told his sister, not without affection. “But you’ll have no success bringing me to that point, even if you exerted all your energies.”
“Well, I don’t see why not. I quite enjoyed being married to poor Willoughby.”
“I doubt you can even remember what he looked like.”
“Nonsense,” Griselda said, quite stung by the sardonic look in her brother’s eyes. “It’s only been ten years, you know, and I do declare that the very mention of his name makes me feel quite, quite triste.” She caught sight of herself in the mirror that hung over the mantelpiece and arranged her face into a charmingly tragic expression. She was an enchantingly lovely woman of thirty years, who prided herself on looking at least eight years younger, and perhaps all of ten, by candlelight.
“You must have indigestion,” her brother said rudely. “Willoughby was all right in his own way, but you were only married for a year or two before he popped off. And since you haven’t shown any signs of fixing yourself in another marriage, I don’t know why you’d wish the fate on me.”
“I am not the question,” Griselda said majestically. Then she rather ruined the effect by rummaging through her reticule and pulling out a screw of paper. “Although I might marry Cornelius. Do look at this, Garret! He has written me the most delicious poem.”
“Cornelius Bamber is a fop,” her brother said. “But if you can stomach the man’s manner, I’ve got no objection to your marrying him.”
“My love is like to ice,” Griselda said dreamily.
“And I to fire,” her brother put in.
“How did you know that?” Surprise actually brought Griselda to a sitting position, a rare event given as she thought her figure showed to its best advantage at a slight decline.
“On second thought, don’t marry Bamber. A man paltry enough to borrow poetry from Spenser doesn’t deserve your esteem.”
“Piffle!” she said. “I never thought to marry Bamber. Is Spenser alive, a friend of Byron’s, perhaps? It is the most delicious poem. I would like to meet him.”
“Dead. Very dead. It’s Edmund Spenser, and he was a contemporary of Shakespeare’s.”
Griselda pouted and threw the sheet of paper to the side. “To return to the point,” she said, eyeing her brother. “You need to marry. You’re getting doddering for the marriage market.”
“I haven’t seen any revulsion amongst my female acquaintances.”
“That’s because you don’t know any marriage-minded mamas,” she said.
He shrugged. “Why should I? A woman with a daughter to put on the market has no time for games.”
“You need to think of something other than games as well,” she said with asperity. “I’m the last to read you a lecture, Garret, but I haven’t any children, and if you are uncivil enough to die and leave papa’s estate and the title to those rubbishing offspring of Cousin Hugo, I shall never forgive you.”
“I don’t mean to,” Mayne said. The profusion of rosebuds sprinkled around his sister’s drawing room was starting to make his teeth clench. “I’ll marry in my own good time.”
“And how old will you be by then?” she said, giving him a clear, direct look that he tolerated only from her. For all their teasing, neither of them had ever been as close to another person as they were to each other. “I’d like you to have a babe while you’re still able to throw the lad up on a horse yourself.”
“I’m not that old!” Mayne said.
“You’re thirty-four. You’re been caterwauling around town for years now. You’re dangerously close to turning into a joke.”
His customary sardonic gleam was replaced by a flare of real anger. “Careful. You’re getting dangerously close to insulting.”
She took out a fan and waved it before her face. “I mean to be. You need a shake-up, Garret. At this rate, there won’t be a matron in London whom you haven’t slept with.”
He had turned toward the fireplace and was scowling down into the unlit logs. Griselda bit her lip and wondered whether to keep talking at him. But he straightened and turned around.
“I suppose I could consider matrimony,” he drawled.
“Good,” she said with some relief.
“But not at the moment. I’ve something in train, and I’ve a mind to finish it.”
Griselda knew well enough when there was no moving him. “Countess Godwin?” she said, with a raised eyebrow.
“Precisely.”
“I heard all about it, naturally. I’d keep an eye out for Godwin, though. The man’s not fully tamed, you know.”
“He was civil enough when he found us in the music room together,” Mayne said indifferently. “The problem is that the lady has disappeared. No one has seen her in days.”
“Perhaps she’s retired to the country, worn out by chopping off all her hair,” Griselda suggested, giving her own blond tresses a loving pat. She shivered with fear when her ringlets had to be trimmed.
“Her household claims that she is taking the waters. But I went to Bath and there’s no sign of her. Nor in her country house either.”
“Goodness, you are all het up over this one,” Griselda said, rather entertained. “Traveling all the way to Bath. Well, I can tell you precisely where she is!”
He swung around. “Where?”
“Hiding until her hair grows back. I didn’t see the effect myself, but I am told that she made a Statement. And you know, Garret, one does rather regret a Statement the next morning. I certainly did, after I wore that Prussian gown with the blue ostrich feathers to the Queen’s Birthday.”
“Hiding where?” Mayne demanded. “I don’t want her to hide. I thought her hair was delightful.”
“You’ll find her,” Griselda replied, giving him a narrow-eyed glance over the pocket mirror she had taken out of her reticule. “Just get the whole business out of your way before the end of the season, will you not? I’d like to see you tie the knot this summer, and you’ll need at least two weeks to choose a bride and ask for her hand.”
Mayne suppressed a shudder. “I can’t imagine I’ll find a woman whom I’d wish to see every morning for breakfast.”
Griselda was painting her mouth with a small brush. “Don’t bother,” she suggested. “After I learned that Willoughby was fond of eating calves’ head pie for his first meal, we never ate together again. And our marriage was perfectly amiable, I promise you.”
“I’ll let myself out,” Mayne said, bending down and dropping a kiss on his sister’s cheek. “Prettying yourself up for Bamber, soi-disant Edmund Spenser, are you?”
“Naturally,” she said, patting her cherry-red lips delicately with a handkerchief. “I am most looking forward to exposing his little scheme. You are such a useful brother, dearest. And you have such unusual talen
ts! There’s not another man in London who could identify that Spenser poem, I warrant you.”
But the Earl of Mayne paid her compliment little heed. He had no interest in his own ability to remember poetry (he’d always found a love poem or two to be the greatest help in fixing a reluctant matron’s affections, although he scrupulously granted the poems their proper authorship). He just wished he were cleverer at finding errant countesses.
It was positively infuriating. He couldn’t get her out of his mind: that slender, fawnlike grace, the tender curve of her slim shoulder, the way her eyes seemed to take up half her face, the way her eyebrows arched high at the corners of her eyes, the way her hair—damn, but he hoped she wasn’t growing her hair. A woman that beautiful had no reason to doll up her hair with fussy little ringlets, the way his sister did. Helene’s hair had felt as sleek and slippery as water, gliding through his fingers. He wanted more.
Outside his sister’s townhouse, the earl paused and adjusted the shoulder capes on his greatcoat before springing into the seat of his high-perch phaeton. If Helene were indeed hiding until her hair grew back, he thought with a grin, there was no reason not to afford her some amusement while in retirement. His smile grew as he considered the possibility. He never believed that story of Helene taking the waters, for all her household and friends had insisted on it. She wasn’t the type of woman to sit around docilely sipping cups of water that smelled of rotten eggs. No, his sister was likely right. She regretted her hair, and she’d gone to ground like a partridge during a hunt.
With a flip of the reins, the earl started off decisively down Chandois Street. He could guess who might tell him where Helene was.
And he was a master at the hunt.
Twenty-four
Come, Come, Come to the Ball!
She and Rees had worked on the score until morning light started to creep into the music room; by then her headache was already in full force. At some point Saunders had crept into the bedroom and enquired whether she wished to rise, but Helene had waved her off with a groan. “Not until this evening,” she’d said, wondering whether she would ever rise from the bed again without feeling the ground lurch under her feet.