Daniel's True Desire Read online

  A shadow crossed Mr. Banks’s features, bringing out the weariness a day of winter travel inevitably engendered.

  “You heard the lady,” he said, tweaking one big, equine ear. “Be a good lad, or I’ll deal with you severely.” He turned to go, and the horse made a halfhearted attempt to nip at his sleeve, which Mr. Banks ignored.

  “Biting is dangerous behavior,” Kirsten said as Mr. Banks left the stall and closed the door. “Why didn’t you reprimand him?”

  She’d wanted to smack the horse. How dare Beelzebub mistreat an owner who plainly loved him?

  Mr. Banks pulled his gloves out of his pocket and tugged them on. “He wants me to tarry in his stall, and if I turn ’round and spend another minute shaking my finger in his face, he’ll have succeeded, won’t he? You must be cold, my lady. May I escort you to the house?”

  He winged an arm. Bits of hay and straw stuck to his sleeve, as well as a quantity of dark horse hairs. Kirsten longed to tarry with him in the barn, to put off the moment when she had to share him with her family.

  She was not a mischievous horse, however, intent on pursuing selfish schemes that had no hope of bearing fruit. She took Mr. Banks’s arm and walked with him out into the gathering darkness.

  * * *

  “Where the hell could she be?” Nicholas Haddonfield, Earl of Bellefonte, muttered, though his countess knew better than to answer. “I’ve never seen it snow like this so late in the season. Why must Kirsten dash off, playing Marie Antoinette in the wilds of Kent during such rotten weather?”

  Outside the library windows, snow came down in pale torrents from the darkening sky. Leah, Countess of Bellefonte, brought her husband a glass of brandy. Nick accepted the glass, then held it to his wife’s lips.

  “To take the chill off,” he murmured, though Leah’s offering was doubtless intended to take the edge off his temper—and his worry. Leah obliged by sipping the drink—she was an obliging sort of woman, until she wasn’t—then held the glass for him.

  “The nice thing about late storms is they’re soon forgotten, Nicholas. This time next week we’ll be looking for crocuses and checking on the Holland bulbs. When is the new vicar supposed to arrive?”

  “I doubt he’ll be in evidence until the snow melts.” Nick set the drink aside. “Lovey, cuddle up. I need the fortification of your kisses.”

  How had he managed before his marriage? How had he managed without the constant, generous affection of his spouse? Her patient humoring of his moods? Her wise counsel regarding both family matters and the problems of the earldom?

  “I heard sleigh bells before I joined you here,” Leah said, tucking into her husband’s embrace. “Such a cheerful sound, and you can’t blame Kirsten if she wants a little privacy. Della makes her bow this year, and that has everybody rattled.”

  “Except Della. She has steadier nerves than the lot of us put together. I don’t want to go up to Town, though.” Nick loathed doing the pretty in Town, in fact.

  In this, Nick could understand Kirsten’s desire to hide away, to pretend the greater world had ceased to exist and the pages of a single book or the bounds of a single afternoon were all that remained.

  “Lady Warne will delight in shepherding Della about,” Leah said, kissing Nick’s chin.

  Leah would be able to reach his cheek if he reclined with her on the blue velvet sofa near the fire—a cheering thought for a beleaguered earl.

  “I’ll help with the socializing,” Leah went on, “and it’s only for a few weeks.”

  Lady Warne being Nick’s maternal grandmother, his conscience for much of his youth, and a true friend.

  “Lovey, I hate all that folderol—”

  Nick’s lament was interrupted by Kirsten barreling into the room. Sisters were constitutionally incapable of knocking, and thus deserved whatever awkwardness they stormed in upon. Nick kissed his wife on the mouth soundly to make that point.

  Again.

  “Bellefonte, Countess, we have a visitor.” Kirsten had no need for dramatics in her speech or actions, for tension hummed through her very body. Nick loved her, truly he did, but she was a nocked arrow of emotion and intellect, poised to let fly in unpredictable directions.

  “Kirsten, perhaps you’d be good enough to close the door, lest we lose all the heat,” Nick suggested, turning loose of his wife.

  Kirsten moved aside, and the fellow behind her came more fully into view.

  Beside Nick, Leah drew in her breath and shifted closer, as if she needed support to absorb the appearance of their guest. Nick had met Daniel Banks on several occasions, but for the first time, he viewed Mr. Banks from a woman’s perspective.

  Bloody goddamned good-looking was Vicar Banks. Arrestingly so, with dark eyes that promised understanding of all a lady’s woes, affectionate tolerance of her flights and fancies, and tender passion should propriety turn its head for even an instant.

  The hell of it was—the confounding, almost humorous hell of it was—Banks had no idea of the impression he made.

  “Mr. Banks, greetings,” Nick said, extending a hand. “I had thought the storm might delay you.”

  “My steed is intrepid,” Banks said, bowing, then accepting Nick’s hand. “I was told the manse in Haddondale was empty.”

  “You might have delayed while the weather sorted itself out. It’s not like we’ve been having orgies in the absence of a parson.” Nick’s observation prompted a snicker from Kirsten. “It’s not like we’d know how to have orgies, rather. Shall you have a drink, Banks?”

  Nick knew all about orgies, simply as part of an Oxford education in this enlightened age. Kirsten extended him a bit of sororal mercy and didn’t add that fact to the discussion.

  “My feet will not thaw out until Beltane,” Banks said. “A drink would be much appreciated.”

  Without asking, Nick poured Kirsten a small portion of brandy. She wasn’t a schoolgirl, she’d been out in the god-awful weather, and small indulgences might bribe her to behave.

  Leah would have something to say about serving Kirsten spirits before a guest, but the countess would save her comments for a private moment, thank heavens.

  “Lovey, a sip or two for you?”

  “No, thank you, Nicholas. I’ll let Cook know we have one more for dinner. Welcome, Mr. Banks, and you will not think of biding anywhere except with us for tonight.”

  Another perfect bow. “You have my thanks, my lady.”

  Banks had Leah’s attention too, something Nick noted with more curiosity than jealousy.

  Now would be a fine time for Kirsten to announce that she had to change for dinner or must discuss the latest recipe for syllabub with her sisters, but of course, Kirsten took a seat on the very sofa where Nick might have cuddled with his countess.

  “Was the journey down from Oxfordshire trying?” Nick asked, passing Banks a healthy tot and topping up his own.

  “The weather didn’t help, but traveling always gives a man time to think. Has the former pastor been absent long?”

  Not long enough. “Less than a month,” Nick said, and because the Earls of Bellefonte had held the Haddondale living for centuries, Nick blathered on.

  While Kirsten sat like a cat on the sofa and lapped up every word.

  “Our previous vicar was old-fashioned,” Nick said. “Full of damnation and judgment and the fires of hell, though we grew used to his style.” Hard to cadge a Sunday morning nap when somebody insisted on yelling for much of the service, though.

  “He was also old,” Kirsten volunteered. “He didn’t listen well, and his gout plagued him without mercy.”

  Banks managed to look elegant, even in stained riding boots, a wrinkled cravat, and a coat that needed taking in at the seams. His cheekbones conveyed derring-do, his long-fingered hands, sensitivity. What a damned silly waste on a country vicar.

  “My prede
cessor suffered hearing problems?” Banks asked.

  “He didn’t listen well,” Kirsten clarified, while Nick felt the tension of a conversational bow being drawn back right to the archer’s chin.

  When Banks ought to have complimented Nick on the library’s appointments, or the brandy, or the fine collection of books the old earl had gone into debt amassing, Banks instead turned those dark eyes on Kirsten.

  “Might you give me an example, Lady Kirsten? One doesn’t want unfortunate history to repeat itself.”

  A miracle occurred in the Belle Maison library, while Nick looked on and sipped his brandy. Kirsten Haddonfield, Witch without Broomstick, engaged a guest in civil conversation. No hidden meanings, no veiled barbs, no slightly outrageous testing of the boundaries of propriety.

  “Mr. Clackengeld suffers gout the same as Vicar did,” Kirsten said, “though Mr. Clackengeld works in the livery, so he’s out in all weather. When he asked Vicar how the knee was, he got a lecture about suffering giving us an opportunity for humility.”

  Banks considered his drink, then turned such a smile on Kirsten as would have felled Byron and all his lovelies at once.

  “You didn’t allow it to end there, did you, my lady?”

  That smile was sweet and invited confidences—not a scintilla of flirtation about it.

  “I commented more loudly than I should have that humility is a virtue best learned by example,” Kirsten replied.

  Some fairy prince had snatched Kirsten Haddonfield away and, in her place, left a pretty, smiling, shy young woman. The shy part, Nick had long suspected. Kirsten lobbed Latin phrases into her speech, marched about with unladylike purpose, and dispatched her opinions like a gunnery sergeant aiming shot into the enemy’s cavalry charge.

  In short, she repelled boarders with the few effective weapons at a lady’s disposal.

  Banks had needed nothing more than a smile and a certain relaxed, conspiratorial air to win a morsel of Kirsten’s trust.

  “Interesting approach, Lady Kirsten. What about you, my lord?” Banks asked. “Have you guidance to render as I approach this post? I’ve spent my life in Little Weldon, but for my years at Oxford, and my flock and I were familiar from long acquaintance. What of the people here?”

  One could not lie to this fellow, not when that smile still beamed forth unchecked.

  “We’re the usual sort,” Nick said. “Mostly hardworking, a few slackers; mostly kind, a few grouches. We aren’t given to frivolity, but neither are we a flock of Presbyterians crows, poking our beaks into our neighbor’s business. You should get on well with us if you’re halfway decent regarding matters of faith and can dance a Sir Roger de Coverly with the occasional spinster.”

  “Sir Roger and I are well acquainted.” Banks wasn’t even looking at Kirsten, and Nick knew his sister was already mentally parading about the spring assembly beside a man who had no grasp of flirtation.

  Nick went on to describe the various illuminati of the community, such as a rural village had illuminati, and all the while he mentally wrestled with a question.

  Why was it the first fellow to cut through the thicket of Kirsten Haddonfield’s social thorns was a poor, tired, nearly haggard man of the cloth, and a married man of the cloth at that?

  And was this a positive development—Nick had begun to despair of Kirsten’s prospects, to dread even sharing meals with her—or was it a harbinger of disaster?

  Two

  Olivia would have hated the Haddondale manse, and for that reason, Daniel viewed it charitably, despite the stench of mildew pervading every room.

  “You cannot stay here,” Fairly said, his boot heels ringing against the empty parlor’s floor. “The place reeks of creeping damp, the roof leaks in two of the bedrooms, and the old bastard didn’t leave you a single lump of coal.”

  An angry viscount could refer to the former vicar as an old bastard. Daniel envied his brother-in-law the casual contempt of the epithet—among other things.

  “I’ll sleep in the study,” Daniel said. “Or in the kitchen if there’s no help living in. The earl can send over some wood until the coal man happens by.”

  “Banks, this place will not serve,” Fairly snapped. Daniel’s sister had married a beautiful man: tall, blond, with a demon genius for trade and the honed facial topography of an ascetic. Daniel did not pretend to understand his brother-in-law in the general case, or in this specific instance.

  “Vicars reside in vicarages,” Daniel explained. “I’ll have a roof over my head, I’ll be close to the church, and the village folk will know where to find me. I fail to see a problem.”

  Daniel’s single trunk occupied the middle of the parlor, like a sarcophagus in some musty museum’s back room.

  Fairly planted his aristocratic arse on the sum of Daniel’s worldly goods, which consisted mostly of much-mended clothing and a number of diaries written by Daniel’s own father.

  “You’re to be vicar of Haddondale,” Fairly said. “A vicar is the spiritual compass of the community. His surrounds must indicate the respect due his position. Your predecessor clearly was not respected nor was he apparently worthy of respect.”

  Elsewhere in the house, the women were banging open doors and cupboards, making the sort of racket women made when they invaded unconquered territory.

  A headache at the base of Daniel’s skull throbbed along in counterpoint to the noise from above stairs.

  “My predecessor was not young,” Daniel said. “His missus was not young either, and I daresay their staff was either poorly supervised or also suffering impaired faculties. Some soap and water, a good airing, proper fires in the—”

  A shriek filled the empty dwelling, and Fairly was off the trunk like a boy leaving catechism class on a pretty spring morning.

  “Nothing’s amiss,” Lady Kirsten yelled down the stairs. “Her ladyship took a fright, is all.”

  Fairly was halfway up the steps, while Daniel, who’d occupied a country vicarage for most of his life, followed more slowly. Mouse droppings produced that sort of shriek, or the actual sight of a mouse could do it. Rats, perhaps because they were larger, produced fury and loathing in women instead of that startled, frightened response.

  “I am losing my mind,” Daniel muttered to the empty house.

  The Countess of Bellefonte stormed out of the bedroom at the top of the stairs. She was a tall brunette with a pretty smile and an unfashionably affectionate regard for her earl, but at present, she was apparently in the grip of a pressing desire to quit the premises.

  Fairly steadied her with a hand on each arm. “Calm breaths, my lady. You’re not in danger.”

  “I am in danger of burning down this house,” she shot back. “Nicholas will hear about this, and, Mr. Banks, you most assuredly cannot bide here.”

  Lady Kirsten closed the bedroom door and edged into the corridor. “We found a bat, Mr. Banks. Her ladyship thought it was dead, but was in error.”

  “They hibernate,” Daniel said. “They live largely by eating insects, and in winter they’d starve without proper sustenance, so a good long rest is just the—”

  Lady Kirsten examined her gloves. Lady Bellefonte peered at Daniel as if he’d spoken in Mandarin, while Fairly…

  Fairly’s gaze was pitying.

  A man who’d parented a small boy for five years naturally fell into the habit of tucking biology lessons here and there throughout the day. Thus, Daniel had shared a child’s innocent delight in life’s wondrous designs, and kept a part of his own heart and mind young while doing so.

  Daniel would have no need for such biology lessons here at Haddondale.

  He endured an abrupt sympathy for the little bat, who’d likely woken in a daze, famished, lonely, disoriented, women shrieking at him, and spring nowhere to be found.

  “You will stay with us until Bellefonte can set this place to rights,�
� Lady Bellefonte said, wrenching herself from Fairly’s grasp. “Lady Kirsten, come along this instant.”

  Lady Kirsten brushed between the menfolk, a hint of meadow grass and mint gracing the chilly air. She shot Daniel a look that might well have cindered the entire vicarage.

  Lady Bellefonte had been upset, frightened, and indignant, while Lady Kirsten had been plainly furious.

  Daniel was at a loss to fathom why. Surely not on his behalf?

  “As I was saying,” Fairly began. “A vicar’s habiliment, his dwelling, his horse, his speech, his everything must reinforce the gravity of his station. Your horse fails that test miserably, your clothes are ready to fall off of you, and this vicarage is a disgrace. Your speech alone preserves your dignity, Banks. What say you?”

  Habiliment, from the French habit. Danny had an excellent ear for languages. Did Fairly know that?

  The vicarage had been neglected. Cobwebs festooned the corners of the ceiling, and the window at the end of the corridor was dimmed by copious flyspecking. Enough light came through to illuminate a spider, busy at her morning meal.

  “I would have managed well enough here,” Daniel said.

  The front door slammed, ensuring that Daniel and his brother-in-law had privacy, but for the sleeping bats and the busy spider.

  Fairly was a physician by training, though he’d long abandoned that calling for the pleasures of trade and viscount-ing—also marriage to Daniel’s sister.

  “You think you’ve entered some twilight status,” Fairly said, “where the privileges of bachelorhood are restored to you without fear the mamas will match you to their daughters. You can eat at odd hours, wear the same neckcloth for three straight days, and neglect to clean your teeth if you’ve stayed too late at your reading. Don’t do it, Banks.”

  A true physician probably never lost the tendency to prescribe and diagnose.

  “I change my neckcloth regularly and take excellent care of my teeth,” Daniel replied. “The ladies are doubtless expecting us to join them in the sleigh. Shall we remove my trunk to the porch?”