I try not to feel an inner glow at her praise, but I do. My cock is already throbbing, but these words please another part of me—somewhere deep in my chest.
“Thank you,” I say stiffly.
She gives that little, harsh laugh from our first meeting.
“You are welcome. Has any woman ever propositioned you? Or was I the first?”
“No,” I say. I have only talked over this history with Henry, who thinks I should have indulged one of the women who came to me unbidden. “On occasion, I have had women approach me. But I turned them away.”
“Tell me.”
“They are pathetic tales. Hardly worth mentioning.”
“I want to hear them anyway.”
I sigh. The stories give me no pleasure to tell. But I am at her mercy. And of all the things we will do, I suspect that this conversation will be the least sinful.
“The first was a whore. At Oxford. A woman many of the students knew. The other young men, friends of mine, used to visit her lateat night.”
“Ah,” Miss de Lacey says wryly. “Too young or too old?”
I swallow hard. “Too young.” I can still remember her pale face. She was younger than me by a few years, but she had been at her trade a long while. “She stopped me in the street. She assumed I was a student she had bedded before. She asked me to come back to her rooms. I refused.”
“And the second?”
“She was a serving girl. She offered herself to me.”
While the first time I was more shocked and saddened than anything, this second time I was tempted. Even though she was not particularly to my tastes.
Miss de Lacey nods.
“And the third?”
That last time, two years ago—thathad been the worst.
“A friend of my father’s. Fifteen years my senior. She came to my bedchamber.”
Her name was—still is—Mrs. Dalyrample. She was recently widowed and was visiting my father’s vicarage at Hamperton. It was humiliating to refuse her. For her and for myself.
The worst part was that I was so desperate, so deprived, that I wanted to say yes.
But my sense that Icouldn’t,that it would bewrong,stopped me.
“Only three women? You are sure?”
“Yes.”
“Hasn’t that been painful? To remain a virgin so long? Many would say it is not natural, Mr. Saintsbury, to have bedded no women. To have turned them away, in fact, at your age.”
My face is burning again. I blush easily, but my current state is beyond a blush. My skin is aflame.
And her questionbrings tears to my eyes. Ithasbeen painful. To deny myself not just release but the closeness, the intimacy, I desire. I was made for passion, I am convinced, but also for closeness. The lower orders marry much younger than we do in respectable society. And I understand why. It isn’t natural to live the way I do.
“Yes,” I manage.
“Now I am forcing you to abandon such nonsense.”
“It is wrong,” I say. I think of my parishioners, sitting right now in their pews without their leader. Sheep without a shepherd. Shame burns through me. My father would be horrified. He has seldom missed a Sunday in all his years. “I am losing my soul to you.”
