She’d been reaching for his jacket. But she froze at that, her hand held rigidly an inch away. Her eyes widened.
“No,” he continued, “the reason I offer is not because I want to avoid my sins, but rather that I must own up to them.”
“Sins?” she repeated.
“We’ve already discussed my sins, Mrs. Farleigh. I am greedy. I am covetous. I am selfish. And one other thing.” He leaned in. “I absolutely do not share.”
“I— But I haven’t— We—” Her eyes fell from his in discomfort.
“Just because I happen to be a virgin does not mean I am content to share my fantasies at night with other men.”
She exhaled slowly. “If you were any other man,” she said softly, “I would think that you had just threatened to seduce me.”
“Worse.” He leaned down, close enough to whisper. “I threatened to like you. I suspect seduction would be easier for you to understand.”
A small smile touched her lips. “Sir Mark, there’s no need to threaten me with anything so drastic as like. Mere acceptance would be sufficiently shocking.”
Mark straightened. “One last thing, Mrs. Farleigh.” He took a deep breath and waited for her to raise her eyes to him one last time. When she did, he gave her a wolfish grin. “Red suits you,” he said, and then left.
JESSICA PICKED UP the jacket Sir Mark had dropped next to her and shook it out. She watched his retreating back, trying to find firm footing in her mind.
She had thought it would be easy to guide a virgin’s first tentative foray into sensuality. But there was nothing tentative about him. He did not deny his lusts, his wants. She didn’t know how to seduce such unbending confidence.
Yes, I want you, he’d as good as told her, but I won’t act on that want.
There was a bigger problem.
He looked at her with an air of such quiet expectation. She remembered what he’d said with a laugh the other day. I rather like myself. She could feel that certainty, spreading from him like a contagion. And now he was threatening to like her, too.
Despite her better judgment, she respected him. It was impossible not to. He was so…so forthright, so straightforward. He didn’t hide behind rules, didn’t accuse others of his own shortcomings. He didn’t flinch from his own desires.
He simply…didn’t set a foot wrong.
And for the first time, Jessica wished this was real. That she was merely a widow with a slightly tarnished reputation. That she had been banished here.
She wished she was free to revel in the heady feel of flirtation without feeling the future press against her in suffocating reminder of the penury that waited.
Sir Mark’s long strides had brought him back to the protective crowd of women once again.
Everyone had been watching them. Jessica stood and brushed her skirts into place. Then she shook out the jacket he’d left behind. The fabric was warm with the heat of his body. It smelled of him—clean, fresh male, with a dab of sea spray. Slowly, she donned the garment. It was large on her, and overly warm. Still, it felt like a friendly embrace—comforting and casual, without importuning her for more. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a simple hug from a man.
He was surrounded by women again—a gaggle of concerned villagers, clucking over him. No doubt making sure that he’d not been tainted by her.
He laughed and then spoke, gesturing with his hands. And then, when he’d tamed their frightened outrage, he turned and glanced at her. A warm breeze swirled up. It lifted the collar of his jacket against her neck.
No. She had no notion how to seduce a man like this. He had no pampered vanity to flatter, no hidden desires to draw out in the open. He wanted her. He thought of her. And he admitted it so openly that she feared it would be impossible to lure him into dishonesty.
Worse; he was luring her into the truth. He gave her a private smile, one that made a hollow of her chest.
She had thought that when she felt again for the first time, it would be something gentle, something clean. Some small and silent pleasure, perhaps. But it was not some quiet return to feeling that came to her. It was the sharp, painful tingle of a limb being slapped from sleep.
She wanted to tell him the truth. She wanted to relinquish all hope of seduction, so that she could enjoy the company of a man who didn’t lie. She wanted him to like her with the same easy confidence with which he liked himself. The impossibility of it made her ache.
Jessica reached out and plucked a dandelion from the grass. It was a fragile, delicate shell of white spores; when she snapped its stem, a few seeds detached from the round head.
He was still smiling at her, a bright golden grin as blinding as the sun.
She raised the dandelion to her mouth and blew. White seeds scattered on the breeze, whirling in his direction. Maybe it was her imagination. The spores separated too quickly for her to follow their path, and it would have been a strange wind indeed that blew those tiny parachutes across twenty yards of picnic.
Still, after a few seconds he raised his hand, almost in greeting. And then he closed his fingers, as if snatching something invisible from the air.
CHAPTER SIX
“DID YOU NOT SEE me, Sir Mark?” James Tolliver demanded.
Mark pulled his gaze from Mrs. Farleigh’s form to contemplate the skinny child by his side.
“Your pardon, Tolliver. Were you trying to catch my attention? My mind is…” He trailed off, thinking of the red silk of Mrs. Farleigh’s skirts, spread on the blanket she’d set out. The carmine of her gown had been in perfect contrast to the pale perfection of her skin. But it wasn’t the cold marble of her complexion that drew him. It was the hint of fire that he’d sensed beneath. As if she were unstable, dangerous and all too enticing. The buzz of insects swirled around him, loud in his ears. “My mind is elsewhere.” Mark turned his head to focus on the young man. “My thoughts have all gone awandering.”
“I didn’t mean just now. I meant before you left to speak with Mrs. Farleigh. I made the signal.” Tolliver held up his hand, his thumb curled to meet his two middle fingers. He twisted it at an angle.
“A signal?”
“The signal,” Tolliver corrected.
Mark stared at the boy’s hand in puzzlement. With his little finger peeled back that way, his hand looked like a small dog, ear cocked, looking on quizzically.
Tolliver tapped the blue rose on his hat, glanced at the women around them with a glare that bespoke a world of suspicion and dropped his voice. “You know. The signal.”
“I’m not familiar with that.” Mark didn’t lower his voice.
Tolliver blushed and looked about furtively. “Shh! Do you want them to hear?”
“I hadn’t realized we were in enemy territory. Who is this them that we fear?”
Tolliver made the signal once again and pointed to his hand. “Didn’t I do it right? It’s supposed to be the signal for ‘Watch out—Dangerous Woman Ahead.’”
Mark counted slowly. One. Two. Three…
“Tolliver,” he finally said, “where did you learn that signal?”
“It was in the introductory pamphlet. A Youth’s Guide to the MCB, by Jedidiah Pruwett, which I—”
“There’s a pamphlet?”
“Yes, advertised in the paper! Send one shilling to…” Tolliver trailed off, glancing at Mark. Maybe it was the curled fists, or the clenched teeth, that gave away Mark’s anger. “That…that wasn’t your pamphlet?”
“No.”
When Mark had sold the rights to his book to a publisher, he’d not given a thought to any potential profit. Philosophical volumes—even ones written for the common man—rarely sold well. And besides, he didn’t need the money. His publisher had paid twenty pounds for exclusive and unlimited rights to the work; Mark had been convinced they’d only given so much because his brother was a duke. Said brother had tried to convince him to hold out for royalties, but Mark only cared to see t
he volume in print. He’d donated his twenty pounds to charity and thought nothing more of it.
He’d not minded when he heard that the book was in its third printing—or even its twelfth. But then had come the Illustrated Edition. Followed shortly by the Royal Edition—printed particularly for Queen Victoria, bound in leather dyed to match her favorite color. The Floral Edition. The Edition with Local Commentary—that one had included little woodcuts of Parford Manor, Mark’s room at Oxford and his brother’s home in London. Not to mention the infamous Pocket Edition.
He suspected his publisher had a Woodlands Edition ready for production, complete with illustrations of adorable talking deer. Somehow, they would find a way to make the creatures look like him.
No. It wasn’t the money Mark regretted relinquishing. It was the control. And even without a Woodlands Edition, he’d lost it completely. Between the newspapers that tracked his every move and Jedidiah Pruwett, who’d founded the Male Chastity Brigade, he’d had no peace at all.
“Don’t tell me where you sent your money.” Mark drummed his fingers against the seam of his trousers. “I’d really rather not know.”
Tolliver shook his head in confusion. “In any event, that’s where I learned that signal. And I used it today because she’s a danger, she is.”
“That’s what the MCB is teaching? To avoid dangers like that?”
Tolliver swallowed, looking around. Mark’s outburst had drawn the attention of everyone around him. Miss Lewis, the rector’s daughter, had frozen midconversation with her mother and a few others. They turned to Mark as one.
He hated being the center of attention. Especially here in Shepton Mallet, with the green, familiar silhouette of the hills framing the gathering. It reminded him of his childhood, of those months when everybody would pay attention to his mother, watching her as if she were some crazed beast about to spring. As if they might goad her into doing so.
Nobody was thinking of that now—nobody but Mark. His own personal preferences counted not one whit when it came to a matter of right and wrong. He took a deep breath. Unlike his mother, he didn’t need to gibber. He didn’t need to scream. He didn’t need to threaten. People liked him, and that gave him a responsibility.
“I assure you,” Mark said, more quietly, “I have never endorsed such unkind behavior.”
“But, Sir Mark! She’s wearing scarlet. She made you give up your coat. You can’t really believe she’s an innocent. She…she could be a fallen woman!”
“There is no such thing as a fallen woman—you just need to look for the man who pushed her.” He shouldn’t say that, not here. So many people might recognize its source. But no one cringed from his mother’s aphorism. Instead, the rector’s wife gave a thoughtful shake of her head, looking back to Mrs. Farleigh.
“Tolliver,” Mark said, “I adhere to the law of chastity because I don’t believe in pushing women. That’s what it means to be a man. I don’t hurt others simply to make myself feel superior. Gossip can ruin a woman as surely as unchaste behavior. True men don’t indulge in either. We don’t need to.”
Tolliver raised stricken eyes to Mark. “I—I didn’t think of that.”
Most people didn’t.
Mrs. Farleigh had donned his coat. Even that unrelieved, ill-fitting navy could not dim her beauty.
“When someone falls,” Mark said, “you don’t throw her back down in the dirt. You offer her a hand up. It’s the Christian thing to do.” But the thought of taking her hand didn’t make him feel Christian at all. His mind kept slipping back to that evening. Not to her form, dripping wet, but to the wild light that had come into her eyes the moment when she’d told him she hated him. The memory still sent a queer little thrill through him. He didn’t understand it at all.
To his credit, Tolliver didn’t flinch. “What…what do I do?” he asked.
Miss Lewis stood and said, “We go and escort her over here.” She cast her mother a defiant glance. Mark held his breath as the two started across the field. But nobody stopped them.
JESSICA WASN’T SURE what Sir Mark intended when he came up to her an hour later. The picnic was breaking up. Blankets were being folded, and the remains of the repast tucked away for future consumption.
He’d not talked to her in all that intervening time, but she was sure he’d said something about her. The rector’s daughter had come up to her and had admired her gown and hair. The girl had even walked with her, introducing her to women who’d not so much as turned in her direction a week ago at service. She’d promenaded beside Miss Lewis in a growing muddle of confusion, and the passage of time had only served to strengthen it.
Sir Mark stood before her now, and she wasn’t sure if she should be grateful to him. She had been practically an outcast before this afternoon. He’d diverted the flow of gossip, as if he were Hercules and shifting a river on its course was no hardship.
It wasn’t merely that the people had heeded his sterling reputation. Another man might have been diffident and uncomfortable, standing before everyone in his shirtsleeves. Sir Mark, though, acted as if his dishabille were normal. He managed to look fully attired—so much so that she would have felt awkward and ungainly had she pointed out that he lacked a coat.
He didn’t say anything. He simply watched her from a few feet distant. She snapped the blanket she had brought in the air. He snagged one corner as it floated past him and helped her fold it once, then twice, before he passed his gathered ends to her.
He did it so carefully that their hands did not touch. Still he didn’t speak.
Jessica broke the silence. “Thank you for your assistance. You must be…here for your garment.”
One of her hands had already gone to the cuff when he shook his head.
“You’re wrong about that. I’m here to walk you home,” Sir Mark said. “You live up the road beyond the old sawmill, do you not?”
Jessica placed the blanket in her basket. “What do you mean, walk me home?”
“Walk.” He held up two fingers and mimed. “Most people learn how to do it at a young age. I’ve observed that you’re reasonably proficient in the activity.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Jessica sputtered.
“Then perhaps you are unsure as to the meaning of the word home? Although—fair warning—I do mean to take you a roundabout way, if you can bear my company for a full half-hour. I thought we’d go along the Doulting Water, and then up the hedgerow.”
“But—”
“Ah, it’s the middle word you’re objecting to, then.”
“Middle word?”
His eyes met hers, intensely blue. She swallowed hard, her stomach clenching. “You.” He said the word as if no other person existed, as if the dissipating crowd stood at a distance of many miles.
She couldn’t say anything. She carefully set her basket on her arm and looked away. She glanced about helplessly, but for once, nobody was hurrying over to separate them, to save Sir Mark from conversing with a woman like her. What had he said to them? And why was he doing this to her?
She straightened, not wanting him to see her confusion. “Surely you plan on defining that term as well?”
“Even if I had the temerity to explain you to yourself, I lack the ability. I don’t know you well enough. That is, after all, the purpose of the endeavor in the first place.” He held out his arm for her. As if she could take it. As if they were just two friends walking together.
Sir Mark did not make any sense at all.
“But—but— This can hardly be—”
“Proper?” He shrugged. “I have been assured it is. Country rules, after all—I have it on the best of authority that a demure little walk is perfectly acceptable, so long as we stick to the lanes and the hedgerows.” He reached out and took her hand, just long enough to guide it to his elbow in unthinking assurance. Even through her gloves, she felt the warmth of his arm through the linen of his shirt. And it was just his shirt that lay bet
ween his flesh and her hand. He wasn’t wearing his coat—she was. But he took no notice of it, while she was painfully aware of the lack.
“The best of authority! I should like to see that etiquette book.”
“I didn’t consult a book.” He gave an unconcerned wave to the rector’s wife as he walked her out toward the gate, as if the woman’s suspiciously narrowed gaze were nothing to worry about. “I wrote to the Duchess of Parford and asked.”
She bit her lip, her hands clenching. It took her a moment to identify the emotion that fluttered in her stomach: dazed bewilderment. “The Duchess of Parford. You wrote to the Duchess of Parford about me?”