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“Tom,” he reminded her. “Fornication is not a sin I worry about.”

“How can you say that?” she said sharply. “You, who wishes to unbutton my gown?”

He drew her close and said it in her ear. “Fornication is to couple with a woman whom one does not love. My temptation would be to make love before sanctifying our union. But it would be making love. Make no mistake about that, Lina.”

She shook her head. “You’re cracked, Reverend. It must go with the black frock.”

“So who was the vicar in your life?” he asked.

“He still is a vicar,” she corrected him. “My father. Reverend Gideon McKenna, County Dumfriesshire, Scotland.”

She couldn’t see him, so Tom let his grin spread across his face. She was a vicar’s daughter, his rebellious little Lina. No wonder she talked so fluently of Salome. No wonder she hadn’t succumbed to the greater sins of London, and fell only to the blandishments of his brother because she was in love with him. “What is your father like?” he asked, hardly daring to breathe in case she got up and ran from the room.

“Perfect,” she said flippantly. “Absolutely perfect in every way.”

“An unusual trait,” Tom said, rather taken aback. “Do you find the rest of humanity sadly flawed in comparison?”

“Oh no,” she said, shaking her head rather violently. “There’s nothing more wearing than perfection. I hate it.”

“What do you mean?”

“No matter what I did as a child, no matter what the crime, he understood and forgave me.”

Tom was silent. Her experience was so very far from his own that he hardly knew what to say.

“I know,” she said crossly, “it sounds heavenly, to use the appropriate word.”

He pulled her onto his lap. Surely this didn’t count as over-intimate touching. A second later he changed his mind as he realized exactly where her sweetly rounded bottom was nestled.

“Those commandments…He never faltered in adhering to them,” she said.

Tom tried to take his mind off his body. Outside the window was a fat squirrel, his little paws holding up a nut like a communion wafer, his plump cheeks moving briskly as he peered in at them.

“The only problem with living with a saint,” Lina said, “is that he always loves God more than you.”

Tom tightened his arms. Surely it wouldn’t lead to sinful intimacies if he kissed her ear. It was so exquisitely delicate, peeping from her hair.

“One year I was chosen to sing the lead in the village Christmas pageant,” she said. “I was so proud of it. I was singing the role of the Angel Gabriel, you see, and had all the best solos. I practiced for weeks.”

“I expect you were marvelous,” Tom said, and was alarmed to hear the husky note in his own voice. He quit kissing her ear. Any moment now she would notice what she was sitting on.

“I might have been,” she said. “But the night before the pageant my father caught me kissing Hugh Sutherland behind the kitchen door. He was horrified, naturally.” She looked up at him with the most beautiful hazel eyes that Tom had ever seen. “He prayed for two hours and then told me that he had to take away the thing that I most wanted, because God had strictly forbidden lechery. So no Angel Gabriel.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, kissing her nose, and the corner of her eye, and the sweet bend of her cheek.

“But that wasn’t really the whole of it. He thought I took too much enjoyment in the song itself, you see, rather than in the content of the words. From the time I was a small girl, he tried to teach me not to love my own voice, but to love the words I spoke or sang.”

“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” Tom offered.

“Psalm sixty-six,” Lina said wearily. “That night he told me I couldn’t sing Gabriel, and that he didn’t want me to sing at all for six months. Not at all.”

Tom held her tight. It was as if someone had tried to silence a songbird.

“I was frantic. My mother begged him. I think in the end he regretted it. But he couldn’t admit to having made an error, because it was undertaken for godly reasons. He had made a vow to that effect, you see—that he wouldn’t allow me to sing for six months for the good of my soul—and he couldn’t break the vow, no matter the consequences, or the foolishness of it.” She hid her face against his shoulder.

“After midnight I sneaked out of the house and lost my virginity to Hugh in the cowshed.”

“Lucky Hugh,” Tom whispered.