Page 40 of The Viscount and the Vicar’s Daughter

She waited for his mouth to find hers as it had last night. She waited for him to take her lips in a searing, soul-scorching kiss. But he didn’t kiss her. Perhaps he didn’t wish to. Perhaps…

“Tristan,” she murmured.

“Yes, sweet?”

“Have you had a great deal to drink this evening?”

He stilled. “Why do you ask?”

She felt his breath against her forehead. “Have you?”

“Not a great deal.” He drew back to look at her. “Why?”

“Yesterday…when you kissed me…”

His dark brows lifted in surprise. “You think that was because I was drunk?”

“You said you were a trifle disguised.”

“A few glasses of wine, nothing more. Liquid courage. It prompted me to follow you into the conservatory. But kissing you…” His expression warmed. “Valentine, I wanted to kiss you in the folly—when I was wet, irritable, and cold sober.” He paused. “I want to kiss you now.”

A flicker of anticipation awakened within her. It was followed swiftly by shyness and an all too familiar feeling of uncertainty. “Why don’t you?”

He brushed his lips across her forehead again in a brief, whispering caress. “Because the door to the billiards room is standing open. Because I can hear the sounds of the other guests emerging from their rooms for dinner. Because, my darling girl”—she felt him smile—“last night I may have compromised you, but, contrary to my father’s opinion, I have no wish to ruin you.”

There was no swooning this time. Her heart beat hard and strong. And it swelled with affection for him.

She brought her hand to lay alongside his face. “Because you’re going to do the honorable thing.”

“Yes,” he said. And then he turned his face into her hand and pressed a chaste kiss to her palm. “Because this time, for once in my benighted life, I’m going to do the honorable thing.”

Despite all his best intentions, when the morning came, Tristan didn’t return to London with Valentine and his father. He hadn’t been permitted to do so. It would worsen the scandal, his father had said. And it would do nothing for Valentine’s reputation to arrive in town on the arm of the city’s most notorious libertine. Instead, his father had left Fairford House at dawn with Valentine in tow. They’d driven to the railway station to catch the fast train to London.

As for himself, he settled in the back of his travelling coach—his coachman driving the horses, not toward London, but toward Northumberland.

He hadn’t told Valentine. There’d been no time. Hell, he hadn’t even seen her this morning. They’d parted last night in the billiards room after an hour spent sitting and talking. There’d been no love words. No flirtation. He’d merely held her hand like a lad courting his first young lady, his thumb moving tenderly over her delicate knuckles as she confided in him about her visit from that spiteful witch Felicity Brightwell.

Even now, his jaw clenched to think of it.

And then that damned Celia Ravenscroft had gone and compounded the problem with her ominous-sounding warnings about his unsteady character.

Was it any wonder Valentine had decided so suddenly to seek out a sympathetic Caddington relation? Since her father’s death, she’d had no one in the world of her own. No one on whom she could rely. During their trip to York he’d thought, foolishly, that she might come to rely on him, but his prim little vicar’s daughter was too sensible for that. And he couldn’t blame her. He’d given her precious little evidence that he possessed any steadiness of character.

And now she was going to London, the city which formed the primary backdrop for his more than a decade’s worth of depravity.

Tristan stared, unseeing, out the window of the rumbling carriage. The passing landscape was a blur of gray skies and stark, frostbitten hills.

Well, she would learn soon enough that the Viscount St. Ashton hadn’t once in his life proven himself capable of being faithful to a woman. There were dozens of ladies of Felicity Brightwell’s ilk in London. Dozens of ladies he’d either spurned outright, debauched and deserted, or dallied with for a month or two before severing the relationship with a vague note and a parting gift of jewelry from Rundell and Bridge. Any one of those ladies would be more than willing to inform Valentine what a selfish, heartless bastard he was.

“Which is precisely why you must stay away from London,” his father had said earlier that morning. “And away from Miss March.”

Tristan had been standing with his back to his father. He was still in his dressing gown. His travelling cases lay open on the bed. They were half-packed for the journey to London. “For how long?” he’d asked.

“A few months. Possibly longer.”

“In other words, you would have me stay away from Miss March for a year. Just as you originally planned.”

“The Caddingtons will be loath to accept her as it is. If they learn of her association with you—”