“Please,” he said, and his voice sounded thick. Mrs. Lockhart continued shrieking and he lifted a hand. “Madam,please. Lower your voice. We don’t need the whole party to be aware of this, it will only cause more trouble and a scandal I would hope you wish to avoid for your daughter’s sake, if nothing else.”
Both the Lockharts appeared confused by that notion, for clearly neither were thinking of their daughter now. Had they ever? By this behavior, he had to guess no.
“Clarissa,” he said gently. “Please sit before you fall over.”
She swallowed hard, her gaze flitting to his, holding there. She was seeking, searching him. What did she find, he wondered. At last, though, she extracted herself from her mother’s grip, one that had left red finger marks on her upper arm, and staggered to a chair before the fire where she took a place and then covered her face with her hands.
Her father, who hadn’t even looked toward his daughter, folded his arms. “My lord, you have disgraced my daughter with the shocking display that we have all intruded upon.”
Roderick ran a hand through his hair. “I agree, to kiss her was imprudent.”
Clarissa didn’t look up from her hands, but her shoulders shuddered a little. In agreement?
“Imprudent?” Mrs. Lockhart repeated, and then snorted. “Why, I believe if we had intruded even a few moments later, we would have found her with her innocence taken!”
“Mama!” Clarissa gasped, and now she did look up from her hands. Where before her expression had been pale, her cheeks were now dark red with humiliation.
The vicar stepped forward, holding up his hands as if to calm thesituation. “Now, now. We needn’t get into detail about all this. We all know what we saw. And perhaps if this had been a simple kiss on a terrace it might be something ignorable. And yet you two were in a chamber alone, and the kiss was quite…quite…”
“Filthy is what it was,” Mr. Lockhart provided, and shook his head not at Roderick but at Clarissa. “I am entirely disappointed.”
“Are you?” Clarissa said softly, and glanced up again, this time at her father. “Because your eyes say otherwise. How could you do this? How could you?”
Roderick bit back a gasp. It seemed she believed the same intentions from this intrusion as he did.
“There is only one solution now,” her mother said, stepping forward with her hands fluttering. She was smiling again. Roderick didn’t think she even knew she was doing it. “You must marry.”
And there it was. Roderick’s stomach turned and Clarissa let out a low, pained moan, like an animal who had been injured.
“Quite right,” Mr. Lockhart blustered. “If you two were doing such a thing in the library with the door not even fully closed, what else might you have already done? Compromised, that’s what you are, Clarissa.Compromised, and there is a toll to be paid for such a thing. I demand it, my lord.”
Clarissa turned her gaze to Roderick and slightly shook her head. She might as well have screamednoat him. Grabbed his legs and begged him to set her free.
He feared he couldn’t. No, the trap had been sprung on both of them.
“How could you do this?” Clarissa whispered. “How could you two do this to this man? Tome?”
“You did it to yourself,” Mr. Lockhart said with a sniff. “All that expense and work to make you a proper lady and instead you act like a common?—”
Roderick stepped forward then and put himself in front of Clarissa, as if he could stop the sling of an arrow he feared would pierce her heart.
“Enough,” he said. “Enough.” He drew a shaky breath. “You will not blame her for something that is my fault. I found her in the library, I…” He thought briefly of the sight of her, leaning against the library shelves, sobbing. All he’d wanted to do was comfort her. “Ilost control. And yes, given the reaction, I understand perfectly what needs to be done.”
She rose behind him and clasped his arm with both her hands, tugging him so that he faced her. “Oh, no! Kirkwood, no!”
He stared down into her face. It was streaked with tears, pink with continued humiliation, her eyes were wide with fear and horror. She was lovely somehow, in the midst of it all. He had kissed her because she was lovely. And yet neither of them wanted this. All his dreams were about to die.
“We must marry, Clarissa,” he said, as gently as he could manage when his heart felt like it was being torn in two. “I’ve created a situation where there is no choice but to marry.”
Once when she was five, Clarissa had fallen from a boat into the lake. Under the water, she had heard her mother screaming, heard the men shouting, and then she had been hauled back to the surface. In that moment, it was the same. The sounds were hitting her ears. Words she couldn’t fully understand because they felt like they were coming from outside the bubble where she was waiting to be saved.
Then her mother grabbed her arm and shook her back to reality. “Oh, congratulations, my love!”
Clarissa stared at her. Mrs. Lockhart looked so thrilled. Like this was the happiest of occasions, not something to be mourned. Worse, it made her family’s machinations all the clearer and from Kirkwood’s narrowed gaze, he knew that as well as she did.
How much he despised Clarissa for it remained to be seen.
He shook off her father’s attempt at congratulations and said, “I would like to speak to my future bride. Alone.”
