The Secret to Seduction (19 page)

And then Mary moved to Sabrina’s side and took her hand and squeezed it.

And then released it and then moved a few inches away from her.

Then scooted back over again and took her hand again and squeezed it.

Clearly Mary Capstraw wasn’t quite certain what to do with Sabrina now that she’d been ruined, as none of her friends had ever before done anything quite so interesting.

At last, they fell into a silence that began to feel permanent. And the fact Mary could find nothing else to say confirmed for Sabrina how very grave her circumstances truly were.

Leaving Wyndham, Rhys had immediately asked the inscrutable Mrs. Bailey to find and send Vicar Fairleigh to the yellow sitting room.

Now Rhys stood in the doorway of it, bracing himself for a conversation he’d never dreamed he’d need to have, and studied Sabrina’s father. The vicar looked the way vicars over England seemed to, face as furrowed as a winter road, skin reddened and wind-roughened. A peaceful face for all of that, despite the air of bewilderment. His shoulders were squared, as though he was braced for something. Looking at the vicar’s weathered, resigned face, Rhys had never felt more like a bounder in his entire life, and Lord knew he’d made something of an art of being a bounder.

Rhys’s catalog of experiences was extraordinarily diverse, but since he’d never before kissed a vicar’s daughter in a library before an audience of fascinated onlookers, he was at a loss as to how to begin this particular interview.

“Mr. Fairleigh,” he decided upon, first of all. He said it quietly.

The vicar stood quickly and turned to look up at Rhys, and dignity, worry, and indignation warred with guarded respect for Rhys’s station in his expression. He waited a distinct moment before he made his bow. A point made.

Rhys knew he deserved the small, dignified slight. He bowed, too, and gestured for the vicar to resume sitting.

There was a quiet, as the two men sat across from each other. Rhys knew he ought to speak, but the vicar began.

“I…didn’t know she was here, you see,” the vicar began, his voice strained, sounding faintly bewildered. “Not until Lady Mary told me, and then I . . .” He looked down, and clasped his hands tightly in his lap, overcome with some emotion. Anger? Shame? “She’s a good girl,” he said quietly, sounding puzzled.

And Rhys suddenly desperately wanted to spare this man shame. He didn’t know how he could possibly, with any sort of grace, raise the possibility of paying his daughter to go thousands of miles away. The vicar had raised a good quiet girl—a good quiet girl at least
outwardly
—who might even have remained that way if The Libertine hadn’t taken it upon himself to show Sabrina Fairleigh the truth of her nature, out of sheer boredom.

Bloody hell. Rhys felt the bottom officially dropping from beneath his feet. But he didn’t lack courage, and he was a man of words, was he not? He would find the right ones.

“Sir, I would like to apologize for what you witnessed a moment ago. I never meant to—”

The vicar looked up swiftly, eyes flaring with disbelief, and a hint of outrage. And Rhys knew an excellent and truthful way to end that sentence would be, “—be caught kissing your daughter,” but this was out of the question in the circumstances. He hurriedly continued. “That is, please let me assure you that I never intended to”—he cleared his throat delicately—“dishonor Sabrina. And I would like to assure you that your daughter and I have formed…an attachment.”

Well, that was one way to describe it.

The vicar’s taut expression began to gradually, warily give way to relief. And then he waited, and when Rhys said nothing more, the Vicar Fairleigh’s expression softened further and became almost…gently sympathetic. As though Rhys were a callow young man confessing to a first love.

Good God.
They were in the realm of the comical now. But he’d gone forward, and once he said the words officially, Rhys knew he wouldn’t be able to retract them.

He leaped.

“I do intend to do my duty by your daughter, sir. And I should be honored indeed if you would consent to”—Rhys paused, to savor one final moment of freedom—“consent to give me Sabrina’s hand in marriage.”

He said the words stiffly. He could scarcely believe they’d left his mouth. He was distantly aware that the sensation seemed to have left his limbs.

The vicar paused, tipping his head in thought, and fixed Rhys with a gently bemused gaze. “Though I’m sure we are agreed that the circumstances under which we have met are not ideal, sir, I should be pleased to give my consent to your marriage. I was young once, Lord Rawden. I am inclined to forgive young love—”

Good God.

“—since the outcome is now all we could have hoped for.”

There were a million things Rhys could have said in response. He was wise enough—and numb enough—to refrain from saying any of them.

Not knowing what else to do, Sabrina sat with Mary and watched the pendulum on the clock swing hypnotically to and fro, her stomach a cauldron of misery. She thought of Geoffrey, who could not possibly marry her now, and the odd expression on his face when he’d seen her leap away from Rhys: bitter triumph. Of her father, who looked both heartbroken and strangely not at all surprised. Perhaps this was the thing he’d been expecting Sabrina to do all along: kiss a notorious earl. Sabrina wished now that the vicar had warned her specifically about his suspicion, if this was indeed the case, so she might have avoided it. She wondered where her father was at this moment.

And she thought of all the other witnesses, who would be only too delighted to spread the word.

That clock pendulum had swung dozens and dozens of times before a butler appeared at the door and bowed low to the two of them.

“Miss Fairleigh, the earl would be pleased if you would join him at half past the hour in the window room.”

Sabrina’s heart immediately balled up like a hedgehog facing a predator. That was an hour from now. What was the earl doing
now
?

“Thank you,” she said faintly to the butler’s impassive face. He nodded and backed from the room. She didn’t wonder how she’d been found. She imagined the servants saw and knew everything, even in this maze of drawing and sitting rooms that was La Montagne. They were everywhere, and as indispensable as the wall sconces, as the walls themselves.

Lady Mary, on the other hand, looked quite cheerfully alert again.

“Talk to me of other things, Mary, for the next few minutes. Please. Of Lizzie’s new baby.”

And so Mary talked and talked, and Sabrina listened but didn’t hear, until the hands moved over to the hour designated for her to meet her fate.

Rhys paused in the doorway. Sabrina Fairleigh was sitting in the center of the settee looking very small in that enormous room, her head turned toward the window much as his had a moment before, as though she were getting her last glimpse of freedom.

He wondered if she saw the expanse of colorless snow as metaphorically as he did.

He closed the door quietly behind him and she gave a start. She was on her feet instantly, smoothing her palms against her skirt.

She curtsied, swiftly, and he offered her a bow.

Awkward as strangers, the two of them, suddenly. When their lips and arms and bodies had been touching a mere hour or so before. And then it had seemed a game.

Only a kiss.

The cool light illuminated her fair soft skin, those lovely clear eyes that were too observant, too direct, which no doubt meant she could also be too easily hurt. How very young she seemed, standing there in her best day dress, faded and poignantly outdated. And as Rhys stared at Miss Sabrina Fairleigh, soon to be Sabrina Gillray, the Countess Rawden, the woman who would bear his name and his sons, he realized, ironically, that she had been right. His own passions and inclinations toward indulgence had led the two of them to this moment.

He wasn’t about to confess this to
her,
however.

He wondered how on earth they could possibly go beyond this awkward moment, from this mistake, and proceed with the rest of their lives.

His cravat suddenly felt too tight, his lungs too shallow to take in a proper breath.

“Miss Fairleigh, I have spoken to your father,” he began without preamble. “I have made abject apologies to him”—he ground these words out with some difficulty, as it was not every day a proud earl was forced to make abject apologies to an impoverished vicar, nor to admit to it—“and have professed an attachment to you. I have assured him that I intend to do my duty by you. You may find some comfort in the fact that he is inclined to forgive”—he paused, and framed the next two words in fourteen-karat irony—“young love.”

She made a soft snorting sound. At least she appreciated irony.

During their excruciating interview, the vicar had in fact assured the earl that Sabrina could easily run a great house, as she ran the vicarage and half the town, and really, the vicar didn’t know how he would do without her.

Though of course the settlements would go a long way toward hiring help.

Why on
earth
did I decide to touch this unmarried girl?
Rhys wanted to throw something, or run.

Instead, he located his sense of honor. It was bred into his blood after all, even if he hadn’t exercised it a very good deal lately. He took a deep breath and said the words with the proper gravity, as he thought every young woman deserved a proper proposal.

“Therefore, Sabrina, I would be pleased if you would do me the honor of becoming my wife.”

She regarded him unblinkingly, those disconcertingly direct eyes studying his face. He thought he saw a glimmer of dark humor there.

If she made noises about doing her duty by
him,
he would quite simply go mad, he decided. He would go off to fight a foreign war.

“I thank you for your offer, sir, and in light of the circumstances, I am…just as pleased and honored…to accept your offer of marriage as you are to offer it.”

Perhaps the most ironic marriage proposal ever made and accepted. Not at all what the world at large would have expected from The Libertine, who could make words sing on a page and women swoon.

This one didn’t look inclined to swoon at the moment.

Their gazes held a moment longer. Well, they had that in common, at least: mutual disenchantment.

Sabrina’s cheeks burned pink as she gazed at him, but her spine was straight and her shoulders square. He’d recognized the pride in her from the very beginning, and he wondered if it was an inconvenient thing for her, the vicar’s daughter, with her plans of ministering to the poor alongside insufferable Geoffrey. He considered someone harboring the pride so evident in her stiffened spine might have very likely made an unsuitable wife for his cousin Geoffrey, too.

Or perhaps it was he who brought out the stiff spine, and perhaps Geoffrey would have had a perfectly amiable partner in her, if Geoffrey had ever really intended to wed her.

He wondered if she actually loved Geoffrey.

He wondered if her heart was breaking.

He wondered what that felt like, if so.

It was difficult to say. She just seemed…pale and proud and resolute. Trying, the same as he, to come to terms with how irrevocably and quickly her future had changed.

In other circumstances, this would have been a moment for a tender kiss. He didn’t feel inclined to touch her at all at the moment, when, funnily enough, he could scarcely take his hands from her a moment ago, let alone the other night. Moonlight, myths, and nearly transparent night rails could do that to a man.

“And so I believe you now know the price of succumbing to your animal nature.” She said it somewhat sardonically, as though concluding an argument.

Ah, Miss Fairleigh. She never could resist.

But nor could he. He rose to it. “Oddly enough, Miss Fairleigh, I have kissed dozens of women and managed not to enter into any engagements.”

“Dozens? Oh, my. I fall more in love with you by the minute.”

It was time to reveal his hand. “
I
believe
you
stood on tiptoe, Sabrina.”

Hot color crept into those pale cheeks. “I
beg
your pardon?” She sounded outraged.

Hmmm. A bit
too
outraged. Hadn’t the bard written something about protesting too much?

“What I mean to say, Sabrina,” he clarified relentlessly, on a drawl, “is that you met me halfway today in the library. You
wanted
a kiss.”

Her hands knotted against her skirt, but those green eyes flared hot, briefly, in anger, and something else: guilt. Ha! He thought it intemperate at the moment to point out that tempers were an untoward expression of passion, too. And granted, it had been ungentlemanly of him to point out that she had met his kiss, that she, in fact, shared the blame for their predicament. But then, being gentlemanly wasn’t how he’d managed to get himself engaged, and being gentlemanly now wasn’t going to undo it.

She protested no further, which in itself seemed a concession. If nothing else, he could count on Miss Fairleigh to be honest. It was a rare enough quality in any human.

“I will send for a Special License at once, of course,” he said, somewhat awkwardly, when she remained silent.