The Secret to Seduction (18 page)

Sabrina’s father.

CHAPTER TWELVE

A
PART FROM WYNDHAM, all of the other witnesses had scattered like grouse when a shot is fired, including Miss Fairleigh, who had somehow burst out of the library door and vanished in the hubbub. Leaving Rhys and his friend alone to contemplate the aftermath of the disaster, and the consequences, and what he intended to do about it.

Wyndham settled himself on a fawn-colored velvet settee and gingerly lifted his heels up onto the eighteenth-century table with the bowed gilt legs. “I’m not quite certain what to say, Rhys. Congratulations? The vicar’s daughter is human, after all?”

Wyndham sounded amused, but the amusement had an edge. Apparently not even Wyndham took the public ruination of a vicar’s daughter lightly.

“What were you thinking? In the middle of the library? In the middle of the
day
?”

Rhys fixed him with a brief baleful glare before returning his attention to the landscape.

“Ah. I gather from that glower that you
weren’t
thinking. With your head, that is.”

“Careful, Wyndham,” Rhys said absently.

Wyndham quieted. He knew that tone. Rhys was teetering on the edge of fury.

“Does Sophia know yet, do you think?” Rhys wondered. Hers was the one face he hadn’t seen in the doorway.

“Oh, someone is bound to inform her. She’ll probably be amused.”

“No doubt.” Sophia was invariably amused, when he would have liked her to be jealous, or kind, or to cling, all of which would have been at least a change of pace. Ironically, it was her very changeability that had drawn him to her in the first place.

Rhys stared out the great arched window. The blue sky was gone; when had that happened? White now met white in sky and ground. Bare trees speared the snow, branches sharp and glittering against the sky. As stark as the decision that faced him.

Bloody hell. It had been just one little kiss.

Admittedly, one very badly
timed
little kiss.

Ironically, as he’d said to Miss Fairleigh: not every kiss was only a kiss. This one had the power to change futures.

How on earth had he managed to best himself at his own game?

He relived that moment now in his thoughts, the way he might relive a fencing match or a chess game to find the moment it had gone wrong. Soft lips against his, soft body against his, the beginning of that delicious slow heat—

Then the door swinging open, the cheerful announcement of Lady Mary cut sharply off by the shock of seeing the earl and Sabrina entwined. And then the row of expressions, each branded distinctly in his memory. Several horrified, one delightedly awed and scandalized—that would be Lady Mary Capstraw—and one saddened and strangely resigned. He supposed this was the Vicar Fairleigh. Mary had said they’d brought Sabrina’s father along.

His cousin Geoffrey’s expression had been altogether more difficult to discern. It had almost been…triumph.

Rhys’s mind circled and circled the problem, and the more he circled it the more he felt entangled in it. Sabrina Fairleigh was the adopted daughter of a poor vicar—nearly redundant, those two words side by side—and he’d all but robbed her of her prospects and future and the only thing a woman of her status had, really—her reputation—by indulging in that one little kiss. He supposed he should be amused that his game had turned on him like a domesticated wild beast might turn on its master.

For so long he’d done precisely as he pleased, as if to test the temper of the title he’d worked so hard to restore to glory. Duels and affairs and gaming hells and reprobate friends from all walks of life…he’d indulged in every imaginable pleasure and emerged relatively unscathed, even more glamorous if scandalous, as he was an earl, after all. But never before had he been foolish enough to compromise an
unmarried
girl.

His restlessness had driven him to the ultimate recklessness.

And quite simply—and this surprised him—he disliked himself for it. Profoundly.

“Well, Wynd?” he said quietly. He turned to his friend, then dropped his eyes and leveled a speaking glance at Wyndham’s feet.

His friend swung them from the antique and very valuable table. “I hate to say it…but I fear you may have to make this right, Rhys.”

This was what Rhys was beginning to fear as well. And he didn’t think he could pay Vicar Fairleigh to forget what he’d seen. There wasn’t enough money in the world to pay every witness to today’s events to forget what they’d seen. Sabrina was most definitely ruined.

His mouth tipped up in a humorless smile. Odd to think that he of all people would meet such a mundane fate. Trapped. He supposed there was a modicum of drama in doing the honorable thing, even if the remainder of his life he was tied to a woman who thought London the equivalent of Gomorrah.

He’d known he would wed in time, of course.

Of all the women in England, he’d somehow managed to compromise perhaps the only one who would
not
be pleased to marry an earl—let alone the infamously seductive Libertine. Some distant part of him was aware that this was also funny.

Though, when encouraged, this particular woman could kiss like sin. And it was his fault that she knew how to do that now.

Rhys shifted restlessly, inhaled a long breath, as if the room had suddenly become stifling.

“Well, you had to marry someday.” Wyndham was trying to find a silver lining.

“Yes.”

“You can’t have thought to marry
Sophia
?” Wyndham said suddenly.

“No. But I suppose I rather had an aristocratic wife in mind. Not a penniless . . .” He trailed off.

Though he doubted a marriage would deprive him of Sophia’s favors, should he choose to avail himself of them. Sophia. Now there was another awkward conversation he was going to need to have very soon.

He inhaled deeply, exhaled.

“Well, I suppose I have two choices. I can wed Miss Fairleigh to salvage her reputation. She can have the country life here at La Montagne, and I suppose I’ll live in London much the way I always have. We can live our lives separately, in the fine tradition of aristocracy, and famous poets. I believe Will Shakespeare kept his wife rather tucked away. Or . . .”

“Or?” Wyndham encouraged.

“Or I can pay her to go far away. On her mission. She might prefer it.”

And so, Rhys thought for a moment, might he.

Wyndham was silent. “And what of your cousin? Was he attached to Miss Fairleigh? Will you now be called out by a curate?”

Oh, God. He doubted Geoffrey would have the nerve or even the inclination. Geoffrey valued his own hide a little too highly. Nor did Geoffrey possess the passion for it.

“I’ll offer Geoffrey a living at Buckstead Heath, as the vicar. He’s not all bad, I suppose. And God knows I seldom intend to be in this part of the country.”

He didn’t turn to look at Wyndham, half suspecting, for some reason, he’d find a censorious look.

“Do you know what I find rather funny, Rhys?”

“Very nearly everything?”

Wyndham’s eyebrows pitched upward. “
Today,
what I find rather funny, is that when we all came upon you in the midst of your . . .” He paused to search for just the right descriptive word. The word, in other words, that would annoy Rhys the most.

Rhys spared him the trouble. “Yes?” he snapped.

“Well…I could swear she was standing on her toes.”

Rhys went still. “Her toes?”

“Oh, yes. Quite as though she were…well, let us say, saving you the trouble of bending all the way down to her face to get a kiss. As though she was getting a kiss of her own.”

Another way of saying she was a willing participant in the fiasco.

He supposed he had himself to blame for that, too. Miss Fairleigh now knew what it was like to be properly kissed, and she also knew she had enough pride to rise up to whatever challenges he threw down.

Bloody hell.

“
And
. . .” Wyndham wasn’t through.

“And what?”

“Your hands were on her arse.”

Rhys shot him a filthy look. “That’s where hands inevitably go in the midst of a kiss.”

“The funny thing is…,” Wyndham continued as though Rhys hadn’t said a thing. “They looked right at home there, your hands. Rather as though they’d been there before.”

Rhys gave Wyndham his best enigmatic expression, while Wyndham gave him his best wickedly knowing expression. And then Rhys turned his face back toward the window. He realized, suddenly, that they might be talking about his future countess, and regardless of how reluctant he was to marry her, he also wasn’t eager to hear another man discuss her arse, and he wasn’t about to discuss the evening in the sculpture gallery, because he wouldn’t quite know how to put it into words. Somehow he suspected Wyndham wouldn’t approve, and it would sound ingenuous to say, “In the moment, it seemed I had no other choice but to kiss her.”

Rhys finally turned from the window. “Well, Wyndham. Wish me luck.”

Sabrina had managed to bolt from the library, and Lady Mary Capstraw detached herself from the crowd of shocked watchers to follow her, her slippers echoing on the marble behind Sabrina.

Sabrina turned blindly into one of the seemingly dozens of drawing rooms at La Montagne. This one was predominantly green. An enormous portrait of a woman wearing a tall complicated white wig and a tiny satisfied smile took up nearly the entire wall over a fireplace. Sabrina flung herself onto a settee before the fireplace. A fire was leaping, full and bright, even though the room was unoccupied. Such untold extravagance. It reminded her once again of whom she’d actually been kissing. Someone who could afford to burn wood profligately to keep a portrait of some unknown ancestor warm and maids employed to keep the pointless fire burning.

Sabrina sat, silent and motionless apart from her fingers, which anxiously wove in and out of one another. And for nearly five minutes, Mary, who could outchatter a chickadee, did nothing but stare at Sabrina, eyes enormous. Her face was brilliant with awe.

“I do wish you would say something, Mary,” Sabrina said finally, irritably.

“Cor!” Mary blurted finally.

“Oh, thank you, Mary. Very helpful.”

But the dam had apparently broken.

“There you were, Sabrina…you were”—Mary paused, and issued the next word in a dumbstruck whisper—“
kissing
…The Libertine!”

“Yes.” Through gritted teeth. Though it hadn’t been much of a kiss, in truth. They’d been interrupted before it could become one. And Sabrina had the earl to thank for the fact that she knew there was more to kissing than that.

“Kissing him!” Mary reiterated.

“I believe we’ve established that, Mary.”

And then silence again. Dozens of questions were clearly clamoring for Mary’s attention, and she was having difficulty choosing one out of the crowd.

“Are you in love?” she ventured dreamily, finally.

“Oh, for
heaven’s
sake, Mary.”

“Were you…were you”—Mary lowered her voice—“overcome with passion?”

Sabrina whipped her head around and glared at her friend ferociously.

Mary was undaunted. “Did he”—a delicious little pause—“
ravish
you?”

“
Mary.
Please! Don’t you see? It’s too terrible for words.”

Silence. For a moment Mary looked sympathetic and troubled, but it wasn’t an expression she could hold for long. Sabrina could practically
see
the next question as it bubbled up out of her.

“What precisely happens when you’re ravished? You see, I’m married, but I don’t believe I’ve ever been properly
ravished,
as it were.”

Sabrina moaned and dropped her face into her hands.

Mercifully Mary ceased asking questions for the moment.

Suddenly Sabrina looked up again and parted her hands like shutters.

“Mary, what about Geoffrey?”

Mary’s jaw dropped. “Oh, poor Geoffrey!” she said, aghast, as though it had just occurred to her.

It was a very good thing Lady Mary Capstraw had no intention of ministering to the poor, Sabrina thought. She had no instinct for comforting.

“And why on earth was my
father
with you, Mary?” she groaned.

“Oh! Lizzie’s mother sent for him. He was summoned by the Colberts some days ago to speak to her father, who is very ill, and possibly dying, you see, but they could not be sure. And there isn’t a vicar nearby, and Mr. Colbert is acquainted with your father. They didn’t know Geoffrey would be visiting La Montagne.”

Another silence.

And then Mary said, quietly, as though it had all at last solidified into a single realization: “Good heavens, you are right. Sabrina, you are quite ruined.”

“Are you only now realizing this, Mary?”

Mary was silent then, questions spent, the magnitude of Sabrina’s predicament thumping down over her like a great net.

She and Sabrina stared at each other helplessly.