So many women who needed help. So many women played false by a man who had made sweet promises. Perhaps he’d vowed he loved them, would do anything to make them happy. And here they were, the day after Christmas, coming to St. George’s for a coin or two so they might give their children a hot meal for a New Year’s feast.
“A penitent Magdalen doling out alms,” said that deep voice she knew in her bones. The voice that haunted her dreams. “What a touching, sentimental scene.”
“You are suggesting I require reform?” The Magdalen, everyone knew, was a prostitute who had repented and turned to Christ. Because she had kissed him last night, did he now think her free with her favors? “I rather thought you, Lord Warin, are the one in need of repentance.”
She raised her chin and looked into his eyes, which was her first mistake. She couldn’t pin one thought to another when she looked at him, and it was worse when he stared back like this. His eyes were bottomless wells and she was falling, falling. She’d be falling forever for this man.
“I always expected living an upright life would be dull,” Garrick said softly. He held her gaze, something dark and sultry kindling deep in his eyes. That flame that had always burned in him—the longing for adventure, for challenge, for the unknown.
“But now,” he said, “I have found reason to believe otherwise. The fruits of a moral life might very well be worth the sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice,” she said, feeling hollow. To her, a hearth of her own, her own kitchen and table and carriage to order, children to look after—these were the dearest hope of her life, and dreams that might never materialize. To a man who craved adventure and variety, they meant settling for less.
“Mr. Lockram.” Mrs. Warters fluttered her lashes as she surveyed Garrick head to toe. “Or the new Lord Warin, I should say. How do you know Miss Moisenay?”
“She is to be my bride,” Garrick said.
Madelina couldn’t bear the sudden exclamations that followed this announcement. The line of alms givers and takers halted, and every face turned to hers in shock, surprise, or suspicion. On some faces, outright jealousy.
Not one person looked overjoyed for Madelina at the announcement.
She turned and walked away.
“Your seat, miss?”
Through blurred eyes she perceived the pew opener, key in hand, holding open the door that led to the closed pew the Moisenays rented for the weeks each year they were in town. It was a place no one would follow or observe her. A moment of privacy to collect herself. Madelina nodded and ducked inside.
She’d no sooner located her handkerchief than the old woman’s voice floated out again. “Oh, thank’ee, yer lordship. Much obliged.” And the door opened to admit Garrick.
He met her disbelieving stare with a smile and a careless shrug. “Did you forget this is my pew too?”
Of course. The Lockrams and Millfords had for decades shared a pew at St. George’s, as they shared everything else. “I’ve never seen you use it,” Madelina pointed out.
“Mad.” He slid to the wooden bench beside her. Too close. The skirts of his embroidered coat brushed her hip. “What happened?”
“I was caught with a rake with not even a kissing bough to excuse me, and now everyone thinks I must marry him.”
His eyes flared before he evened his expression into the smooth, confident charm he’d perfected when he was seventeen and first learned how to destroy a woman’s heart. Madelina had seen it happen. Cassandra Beane, daughter of the rector at St. Mary on the Green, had thrown her lures hard and often at Garrick the summer he came down from his public school. Mad, as hopelessly smitten but with no lures of her own, had to her everlasting shame snuck around following them and more than once saw them embracing behind the blacksmith’s shop, beneath the pear tree at the bridge, even once behind the rood screen in the nave.
At the end of summer Garrick went up to university with a spring in his step and a whistle on his lips, and Cassandra Beane hastily married the strapping blond man who ran the Old Swan and found herself co-proprietor of a public house. Whenever Garrick returned to visit, Cassandra cast him looks of such obvious longing and torment that even Madelina cringed. Garrick’s blithe avoidance of her every effort to engage his attention confirmed his reputation as a rake, while the tousle of dark hair on Cassandra Deane’s first child made every matron in town shake her head when the boy passed.
Twelve-year-old Madelina had decided that summer she would never lose her heart to a rake. Never.
And then thirteen-year-old Madelina had thrown that resolution straight out the door the moment Garrick Lockram, home from university, came down to the River Ouzel with his fishing gear and a bucket, growing into his shoulders and a devil-may-care way with the world. She knew his cocky, careless easehid the hurt from his father’s relentless disapproval and threw her heart after him all the harder, wanting to be his rescue, his shield. His one soft place to land in a world full of hard edges.
“I thought you wished to marry the rake. You propositioned him yourself, years ago.” Garrick pushed away a lock of her hair that had freed itself from a pin and hung beneath the lace of her cap. His fingertips laid a trail of fire across her skin.
Oh, he must persist in bringing up that embarrassment. “I repent now the foolishness of my youth.” Madelina folded her hands in her lap as if in prayer. “I will only marry where my affections are reciprocated.”
“My partridge.” He tugged off her glove and slid his fingers over her knuckles, his flesh bare against hers. “Didn’t I capture your heart long ago?”
She whipped her head around. “Why, you arrogantcad—”
His mouth swooped down over hers, cutting off protest.
The world broke apart. The sky crashed down. She had no way to explain why or how he made the gentle globe of her world careen off its axis, but the sensation slammed her off course, sending her into wild loops. The heat of his demand. The tender press of his mouth, then the tease of his tongue, and the sweetest, softest bite of his teeth on her lip. Her stomach burst into flames like spirits lit with a match.
She broke away, gasping for air. “Garrick, stop! We’ll be seen.”
