Holy Scoundrel (20 page)

Had she protected him? On purpose? That was certainly something to think about. A puzzle beyond solving, however painful.

Gabe felt a sense of loss all over again. He’d already loved the babe she carried when she admitted i
t
wasn’
t
his and turned his heart to stone. He’d actually felt his chest tighten and grow cold. He’d lost two people that day. Aye, and a part of himself as well.

And still, look at him, sitting here worshiping her, stroking the hem of her gown. He should put a stopper in his foolish infatuation and let her do any feather-brained thing she dratted well pleased—as if he could.

He should find a woman who would marry him and give Bridget a proper mother, except that she wanted MyLacey. Who wouldn’t?

Gabe stretched out beside Lace and slipped his arm around her waist, inhaling her rich vanilla scent. She stirred and started. “Hush,” he said. “It’s only me. Let me hold you for a bit. Here in our special place. Then we’ll talk.”

She covered his hand with her own and held it against her heart, a splendid welcome—silent, but no less affirming.

Gabe kissed her nape.

She sighed and lowered her chin to give him better access.

His body reacted instantly. “Only holding,” he said, reminding them both.

But his body disagreed and made its eager need known.

Lace giggled.

Gabe huffed, annoyed she noticed that his nether regions had a will of their own. “I can’t help it,” he said. “You intoxicate me.”

“I do something else to you, too,” she said turning into his arms. “I didn’t realize I’d fallen asleep. I was on an errand and ended up here.”

“I came to stop you,” he admitted too soon.

“To stop me what?”

“MacKenzie said you were going to ask Nick to let you live with him. He’d be a fool to say no, and though the man is many things I don’t like, a fool is not one of them.”

“Mac said that? Are you certain?”

“It’s no use in getting angry with MacKenzie.”

“For trying to knock some sense into you? I’m not angry, though I think her phraseology could use some improvement. I’m as grateful as ever.”

“Grateful?” His brows furrowed, and Lace smoothed them.

He loved her hands on him, anywhere, everywhere. “Mac knows what’s best for you, Lace. I imagine that’s why she told me. Stay with us at the cottage.”

“You know I can’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

She slid her hand between them and ran her knuckles over his embarrassing erection. “This is why.”

Gabriel closed his eyes and allowed pleasure to wash over him. “God, Lace. I’ll probably ache for you on my deathbed. How wicked will that look?”

She opened her mouth to respond and he opened his over hers, his kiss desperate and needy. Lacey gave passion back; she always did. Her enthusiastic return of ardor had been his undoing too many times to count. Now was no exception.

She raised his temperature with her seductive ministrations including a nip at his earlobe. “Tell me why I shouldn’t move in with Nicholas,” she said, “I’d still be near Bridget.”

“You know exactly how to cool my fever, I’ll give you that.” And yet, he covered her hand to keep it there, where he wanted it most.

“I know how to do a lot of things where your fever is concerned.”

“Hmm.” Though annoyance fought pleasure, determination won the day. “Stay with us. It’s working fine.”

“When I’m not in your bed or within touching distance, it works fine.”

“Works better when we’re touching, an
d
i
n
bed, seems to me.”

“That’s why I can’t live there, and you know it.”

Gabe sighed. “Live near the cottage then, and Bridget can live with you. You’d both like that, and I could see you everyday. We could breakfast together.”

“We don’t like to eat as early as you do.”

Gabe chuckled despite himself, while he slipped a hand to below her breasts. “I’ll eat after I do church accounts and work on my sermons.”

She looked as if she were considering it. Feigned as her deliberation seemed, it gave Gabe hope.

“Better still,” he said. “Marry me and sleep in my bed every night.”

“We wouldn’t sleep.”

“We’d be happy, though.”

Lacey laughed. “And have six more children,” she said.

“More?”

Lacey lost her smile and rose to dust herself off. “I’m sorry, I forgot and counted Bridget as our first. It was silly of me to pretend that she was even partly mine.”

“Ah, Lace, I didn’t mean to hurt you. It just seemed that—I don’t know—that you meant something else, something I needed to….” He shrugged. “I’m being fanciful. Six more would be good. Let’s do it.”

Lace regarded him so long, Gabe became uncomfortable.

“You could forgive me for betraying you?”

He nodded, uncomfortable of a sudden.

“You could welcome Nicholas into our home as my friend and relative, as Bridget’s uncle?”

Gabe nodded, but he felt the telltale heat of anger rise up his neck.

“I thought so,” she said.

“No, you’re wrong. I forgive him. I forgive you both.”

At which point she turned and walked away so fast that she ended up running . . . all the way back to Rectory Cottage.

Gabe followed and wondered when he’d lost control of the conversation. He couldn’t, by thunder, let her go to Daventry. He couldn’t.

So why did forgiving her, forgiving them both, make her so blasted angry?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

How easy it would be to marry him as he wanted and become Bridget’s mother in truth. Easy but wrong for all of them, especially Bridget.

Marriage should be founded on truth, not face-saving falsehoods.

She should not have run back; she had a stitch in her side, and her stomach was doing flips. Lacey raised her hand when Mac started to speak. “Yes, the dolt found me. How thick can he be?”

“Verra thick, our vicar. Why don’t you just tell him the truth, that t’was his bairn you carried?”

“You know?”

“I was your nanny; I saw the eyes you had for him, the love shining in them. Nick, the scamp, no. Gabriel the new vicar, aye. He was yours; and after a time, verra much yours
.I
could have named the father of your wee one, but it was not up to me.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” and Lace had no sooner said it than she was, right over the back porch rail, wretchedly ill, just in time for Gabriel to round the corner.

He went inside and returned with a cool towel for her neck, a chair for her to sit, and a cup of weak tea for her to sip. He stooped down before her to watch the color return to her face.

He was handsome and robust with dark curly hair and shoulders as wide as the double gothic doors of his church. And if she’d have him, pitfalls and all, he could be hers for life.

He might mistake her returning color as a sign of physical wellness. But it was her embarrassment at this public humiliation of hers riding her.

“I think you should lie down,” Gabriel said.

“I agree.” Mac ushered her past him and up the stairs, removed her dress, and covered her with a quilt Gabriel’s mother had stitched. “You gonna tell himself this time?”

“I don’t have anything to tell.”

Mac scoffed. “He doesn’t think he’s half good enough for you, my girl. That’s why he believed your story about Nick. Nick has a title, so Nick is good enough to have fathered you child. Do you not see? It has nothing to do with trust on Gabriel’s part, but his unworthiness.”

“He should have known that my love for him was so great that I could never have— Oh, bother. Your logic is giving me the headache to go with my stomachache.

“That’s no stomach ache and we both know it.” Mac’s chuckle as she left the room carried a hint of delight.

Soon enough Gabe paced next door, and that’s the sound that nearly lulled Lacey to sleep. He was worried about her, but he would let nothing happen to her . . . unless the choice was taken from him. Like with—

“Oh!” She sat up. Could he fear her as ill as Clara had been?

Well, they would know soon enough, one way or the other.

This would be so simple if he would stop forgiving her for Nick and realize that there was nothing to forgive.

To the sound of his pacing she finally slept, until she woke in time for church the next morning.

Gabriel seemed prickly because they had not had a chance to talk before they walked to church.

As he stepped up to the pulpit and began, he stopped speaking, because three new churchgoers had arrived. Oh, not just any churchgoers. One had a cleric’s collar, and he was accompanied by Prout and daughter, all three claiming the front pew, squishing her, Mac, and Bridget.

Lace took Bridget on her lap to give them room.

Without ceremony, to Gabe’s surprise, the bishop interrupted Gabriel’s talk by taking the pulpit to the left of the altar.

The battle of the pulpits?

The bishop said the first prayer, led the first hymn, and gave the first blessing
as if he were taking over. “My dear Vicar Kendrick.”

Oh, no, not a public chastisement, not because of her?

“One of your parishioners has offered you twenty-thousand pounds if you will build a church?”

And marry her daughter.

“I will not be bought, your excellency.”

“Commendable but proud,” the bishop said. “Are we not all called upon to make choices for the greater good? Now, which will it be? A known sinner? Or a pillar of the church for wife? The answer seems clear.”

Lace’s heart raced when Gabriel made eye contact with her for the briefest of moments. “I love this woman you dare call sinner—forgiveness being our stock and trade, judgment being His.” Gabe pointed upward. “I would not take the pillar for a pot of gold, never mind her mother’s bribe.”

The congregation shifted, uncomfortably, as one, the rustle of crinolines all whispers of unease.

The bishop cleared his throat. “I cannot say I approve your choice.”

“The
n
yo
u
take Prout’s twenty-thousand pounds and Olivia to wife. Become Prout’s son-in-law, dance at the end of her strings. See how you like it. But heed me on this; we need a school for the crofters’ children more than we need a church.”

A rousing cheer stopped as fast as it began
when the bishop’s caterpillar brows furrowed the congregation’s way with a promise of reprisal. He descended the steps from the left pulpit and nodded for Gabriel to do the same from the right.

Gabe did so, passed his bishop by, sat beside Lace, and took her hand.

“I see you know your place,” the bishop said. “You are hereby stripped of the parish your ancestors served before you.”

“The parish his ancestors destroyed,” an elder shouted. “Which our vicar rebuilt.”

The bishop chose to ignore that truth. “You may stay Vicar Kendrick, in Rectory Cottage, for one more week.”

“Or not,” Gabriel said, standing, lifting Bridget and taking Lacey by the hand to leave.

“Be glad I do not begin proceedings to have you defrocked,” the bishop called as Gabe’s household followed him out, Mac and Ivy, with the sneaked-in Tweenie clicking down a silent aisle that seemed to grow in length.

As the bishop began his sermon, a goodly number of parishioners followed them out, offering their hands, their thanks, condolences on the loss of his parish, and their congratulations on his upcoming marriage.

Except that the firm-lipped Lacey beside him, Gabriel noticed—looking grateful for their good intentions—had no
t
agree
d
to marry him. Yet.

“Where will we go?” Cricket wailed, voicing all their worries, Gabe was sure, when they reached the safety of Rectory Cottage? “Will my new Uncle Nick let us live with him at the Towers where you grew up, MyLacey?” Her little eyes were big and round.

Gabriel barked a laugh, but beneath Bridget’s innocence, he found the smallest seed of hope when in his heart he worried. Some provider he had turned out to be. No hearth or home for his family. And yet, he wanted so badly to enlarge it.

He must be a daft as his sire and grandsire after all.

“I have to see Nick,” he said, and off he went, leaving Mac, Lacey, and Cricket stunned and silent.

Daventry, Gabe thought, would probably expect to be leveled in one punch, and so said his cautious welcome as he stepped into his drawing room to greet the man he’d betrayed. But Gabe didn’t feel betrayed today, just hopeful. Daventry owed him.

Gabe offered his hand, and the two shook, tentative at first, then strong, with an extra shake that called for a silent peace. “I’ve come for your help, Nick. I want to marry Lacey.”

“Then it seems that I’m finally out of it. Finally came clean did she?”