Holy Scoundrel Read Free Page B

cousin, kin by blood.”
    “Blood, as we know, doe s no t always tell.”
    Lacey stepped back beneath the pain of his verbal blow.
    As unexpected to him as to her, his barb had been born of instinct and self-preservation, but as always, her pain became his. He might just take to bleeding on her behalf, and then how foolish would he look?
    Frustrated over his callous behavior, over how brutish he must appear to her, he reclaimed the lamb with more force than he intended, yet he could not seem to compose himself. He wished to the devil he didn’t bloody well care how he appeared or how Lace felt. “I’ll show you to your room.”
    Preoccupied by his demons, Gabe made for the stairs, then he realized he’d committed the unforgivable and gone before her. He should have allowed a lady to precede him as he would the lowliest in rank . . . except that Lacey was no longer a lady, he hated to remember.
    Neither was he a gentleman, she had often reminded him.
    He stopped to let her pass.

 

     
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    Lacey closed the door to the bedroom she’d been given and collapsed against it, burying her face in her hands, until her fingertips came away wet. “No more tears,” she whispered, regarding them, repeating the admonition she’d been given upon leaving Peacehaven in a deluge of watery good-byes. “Look forward, not back,” she’d also been told.
    Squaring her shoulders, she gazed about her for her bags, caught sight of the silver jewelry casket on the walnut dressing table, and her heart tripped. Gabe had given her Clara’s room. Her cousin’s room. Her cousin’s husband.
    Lacey traced the engraved initials on the hairbrush twice before realization hit, heart-thrumming and hand-trembling. Like a cat scenting cream, she raised her head and found with her gaze the connecting door to Gabriel’s bedroom.
    Wild and traitorous, hope flared, but she squashed it like a stinging spider. Gabriel’s choice of accommodation for her meant nothing. This had been her late cousin’s room, after all. His dead wife’s room. Perfect for her cousin Lacey.
    Gabriel had been insulting and insinuating since she arrived, Lacey reminded herself as she battled the uncooperative buttons on her dress, proof he did not want her in his life. He’d also been unbending and unforgiving, exactly the way he acted the day she convinced him . . . that her child . . . the day she lost him forever.
    “Forever,” she said aloud to remind herself as she dropped into a chair to stare at a cold hearth. Gabriel, more devilishly handsome than any man of the cloth—any man at all—had a right to be. He who could never be hers because to save him, she had destroyed him.
    Tired of regrets, of battling an unalterable past, Lacey rose.
    Perched on the edge of the old four-poster, she ran her hand over the faded coverlet on which Gabriel’s mother had stitched primroses—a hundred years ago, it seemed—when Lace was about seven and wished the sweet woman was her mother, too.
    Her real mother, only society could claim. For hugs and proud smiles, Lacey came here to Rectory Cottage, always more a home and haven than Ashcroft Towers, that ancient stone fortress atop the hill.
    In those days, Gabriel was the boy she’d made bow and scrape whenever the fancy took her, and it took her often, horror that she’d been. Back then, he would have done anything she asked.
    Lacey wasn’t certain when her inbred disdain for the scabby-kneed peasant who adored her had turned to something more. She remembered only that it had happened in a bright starburst of joy. And for a span, after he’d come home, the new vicar, life was bliss. Then it was hell.
    Lacey rose and worked her stiff shoulders before putting on her night-rail, a fine fitted sleeping gown. Standing before the dressing table, she released the pins from her hair and began to plait it. She saw, in the same mirror her cousin had once regarded, that she had aged as well, though no hint of silver