“Don’t what? Admit to feeling a sense of familiarity? You know I can’t deny it. Or do you mean I shouldn’t want more? I’ve tried. I can’t help it.”
“Sir Mark, perhaps I did not make myself clear last night. I’ve been intimate with men who were not my husband. Don’t trust me.”
Just as he had last night, he didn’t flinch at her words. “Yes,” he allowed, “but still, you have this odd sort of integrity to you.”
He might as well have punched her in the stomach. Weston’s letter, crumpled in her hand, burned. She needed to hurt him. How was she to do that, when he made her want to weep?
“That’s lust talking, not discernment.” Her words were sharp. “You?
??re supposed to have written a practical guide to chastity. Be practical now. My integrity is not odd—it is nonexistent. You can’t like me.”
“Would it be better if I pawed over your body, rather than feel an ounce of honest affection?”
“Yes,” she spat out. “Yes. It would be a great deal easier.”
“Come, Jessica. One mistake doesn’t damn you to unhappiness forever.” His eyes softened. “And I know that you must be upset about your friend.” One mistake. One mistake. Oh, that she could count her mistakes. Instead, they filled her to the brim with choking bitterness.
“Don’t make a romance of me, Sir Mark.”
“No?” He shook his head, mystified. “What do you want, then?”
She stared at his lapels, as if all the answers she sought might be contained in the brown wool. He waited.
Finally, she lifted her chin and looked him in the eye. “I want to feel alive again.” She kept her voice calm as the sea between tides—but, oh, the undercurrent pulling at her. “I want never to have to tell a lie again.” She stopped at that and shook her head. “Sir Mark. Mark. Please don’t make me have to do this.”
She had made mistakes, yes. But he was right. Even while she’d lived in the utmost sin, she’d tried to hold on to the last vestiges of her integrity. She’d sold some of her morals to survive. This was the first time she’d sacrifice her honesty. If Mark succumbed, she’d lose everything.
He couldn’t understand what she was begging him to do, and she had just enough sense of self-preservation not to tell him. Still, she wanted him to hate her, to resist the threat she posed.
“You know,” he said softly, “it’s not a romance I want to make of you.”
“What do you want?”
His gaze slipped down her form. She could feel where he’d touched her last night. More, she could feel where he hadn’t—the untouched skin of her belly, the nakedness of her inner thighs. But he didn’t move. “For now?” His tone was nonchalant, so at odds with the heat of his gaze. “For now, I’ll be satisfied if you call me Mark. And I wanted to ask if you’d…if you’d heard about the address I agreed to give tonight. I’m talking to the MCB.”
“About chastity.”
He nodded. “These days, I think I should deserve a medal for my restraint.” He shook his head. “Come. Let me see you home afterward. I thought…I thought you might want the company.”
She’d warned him. She’d told him to take himself away. If he insisted on throwing himself, mothlike, into her flame, who was she to tell him no? It must have been her fate to ruin him, her destiny to lead him astray as surely as Guinevere had ever seduced Sir Lancelot.
“Yes,” Jessica said softly. “I’ll be there.” The words sounded like blasphemy on her lips.
THAT EVENING, Mark noted, the church was filled well before the appointed time. There was nothing quite like the hum of whispers before one addressed a crowd. Before he started to speak, he could imagine anything happening. Riots could break out. Or, more likely, he might put everyone to sleep.
The rector had ceded the church this evening for the use of the MCB, the town hall being insufficient for the size of the crowd. The pews had filled up. It seemed as if everyone in the parish—in fact, everyone in every neighboring parish—had found their way here to attend the lecture that Tolliver had arranged, even on so short a notice.
Jessica sat near the front. They were beginning to accept her now. He liked that. No longer ostracized, she was seated next to Mrs. Metcalf. But Mark still could not help but noticing that the nearest man to her was three feet away. The nearest man, that was, excepting Mr. Lewis, who sat next to her. Jessica looked straight ahead, her face blank, as the rector spoke to her. He couldn’t hear a word, but he seemed to be lecturing her. Jessica was accepted but not trusted. It made him ache inside. He wanted her to have more than that.
The very front rows were taken up by young, male faces—eager, eyes shining, intent on hearing Mark’s words. They sported the blue armbands that designated them members of the MCB. The armbands, he’d once been told, were for indoor use, when hats—and their cockades—were not allowed. James Tolliver stood to Mark’s immediate right, and as the crowd finally found their places, he motioned for silence. It took very little time.
“Our guest tonight needs no introduction,”
Tolliver began. “We are all familiar with the great, the magnificent, the inestimable Sir Mark.”
Mark wanted to bury his head in his hands. Magnificent? Inestimable? He’d have preferred less effusive praise—“decent” was all he strove for, and considering how close matters had come with Jessica over the past week, he didn’t even merit that any longer. The thought should have made him feel guilty.
“Sir Mark, as you all know, is the author of that famous tome, A Gentleman’s Practical Guide toChastity. We here in Shepton Mallet are familiar with every sentence in that holy book.”
Holy? Mark imagined hitting Tolliver with the oversize prayer book that lay open on the podium before him.
“We have memorized its every commandment,” Tolliver intoned. “We have committed its advice to memory.”
They had made membership cards distorting said advice. It was a book, a human-written one, not deified advice engraved on stone tablets.
Tolliver continued, solemnly. “We have adopted its creed as our own—as members of the Male Chastity Brigade—and, having solemnly sworn ourselves to righteousness, we have learned to cast out temptation. Wherever we may find it.”
Mark thought of Jessica, and the way they’d cast her out at first. His fists curled.
“Tonight,” Tolliver said, “Sir Mark will address us, and tell us how best to keep to chastity. I, for one, plan to listen.”
Applause rang out, accompanied by cheers. Mark’s thoughts churned.
He couldn’t count the people who had turned out to see him. Several hundred, at least. If it was the entire parish, it might have been thousands. Mark had delivered lectures before. He never enjoyed the prospect. The only thing worse than being forced to make idle conversation with one person was to have to address hundreds. The crowd’s expectant stares stabbed into him like a hundred tiny knives.
They always expected him to be some kind of extraordinary orator. In truth, he usually managed to be an indifferent one. He’d prepared his usual remarks for tonight, a summary of a few important points he’d made in his book, followed by a plea to remember that he was just a regular man and not some kind of a saint.
The first few times he’d mouthed the latter sentiments, he had waited for the disappointed buzz. Perhaps he’d secretly hoped that someone would stand up and say, “He’s right! Did you hear what he just said? Sir Mark is a horrible fraud—why on earth have we been listening to him?”
There would be riots. The papers would turn on him as quickly as they’d taken his side, and in a few months, everyone would have forgotten him and turned their inexplicable zeal toward some more worthy object.
But the more he protested his ordinary nature, the greater the adulation. They acted as if he spoke out of some misguided, foolish humility, instead of simply giving him credit for speaking the truth. He could have announced that he had formed a financial partnership with Lucifer himself, and they would have crowded about him afterward, praising him for his business acumen. They’d have patted him on the shoulder and, when told that he had an interest in their souls, would have swooned because the great Sir Mark had taken notice.
His gaze drifted to Jessica again. He could do no wrong. Up until he’d interceded on her behalf, they’d thought she could do no right. They both commanded attention—one for praise, the other for censure. And yet Mark was certain that he had been the one who had cupped his hand around her breast when last he saw her. He had been the one to take her mouth in a kiss. And he was the one standing before a crowd now to talk about chastity when his thoughts over the past week had been increasingly obscene.
It se
emed an unbridgeable gap between them, that disparity. And then he saw the rector beside her. She was wearing an evening gown, perfectly respectable for a lecture given at night. Respectable…but creamy curves peeped from behind the lacy décolletage. The rector turned his head so he could look down her bodice ever so discreetly. And like that, Mark’s carefully planned, dull speech disappeared from his mind.
“Good evening.” His voice carried. The murmurs ceased instantly, and the crowd leaned forward. “Normally,” he heard himself say, “I would tell you all that I am just a man—not anyone special, not anyone to listen to. Normally, I’d admit to my fair share of hypocrisy. And have no doubt about it. I am a hypocrite. But for now, I’d like to set that aside. There are worse hypocrites in the room.