Free A Notorious Countess Confesses (PG7) by Julie Anne Long Page B

ancestors.
    How had she forgotten how tall he was?
    Or how tall he felt, more accurately.
    The very air in the room seemed to rearrange to accommodate him. She felt him as surely as if he’d disturbed a wave of it and it had rushed forward to splash her. She folded her hands against her thighs; her fingers laced together like creatures clinging to each other for comfort. She didn’t move to greet him; she couldn’t seem to speak. All of her faculties seemed preoccupied with just seeing him.
    They in fact eyed each other as if the carpet were a sea dividing two enemy territories.
    It was then she noticed he was holding a small bouquet of bright, mismatched flowers in one fist. It ought to have made him look beseeching. It didn’t. On him it might as well have been a scepter.
    From the distance of a few days, she realized she’d made a number of miscalculations when she’d anticipated winning him over. A few things had paled dangerously in her memory: the impact of his eyes, even from across the room. That long, elegant swoop of a bottom lip. That palpable confidence, as if he were a man who had nothing to prove because he’d already proved it.
    She wondered at the source of that. He was just a vicar. He wrote homilies about goats and read them to country people on Sundays. Likely a sheltered man, whose entire world was comprised of Sussex. While she had made the unimaginable ascent from peat bogs to Carleton House to countess. She knew what Prinny’s breath smelled like, for heaven’s sake, because he’d leaned over her more than once in an attempt to look down her bodice. If a way could be found past Adam Sylvaine’s reserve, she was the one who could forge it
    She glanced down at his boots, and the creased toes of them seemed to reassure her of this.
    Just as the reverend glanced down at her hands. And he looked up again, with the wry, challenging tilt of the corner of his mouth. Because there was no way the man didn’t understand his physical impact. He’d watched her hands lace, and she sensed he knew she was trying not to fidget.
    “Thank you for inviting me to your home, Lady Wareham.”
    And then there was his voice.
    Her heart was beating absurdly quickly.
    “Thank you for coming, Reverend Sylvaine.” Very elegantly, graciously said, she congratulated herself.
    And with that, it appeared they’d exhausted conversation.
    She cleared her throat. “Are vicars allowed to imbibe? May I offer you a sherry? Will that do for a demonstration of manners?” she said lightly.
    He smiled. The dimple made a brief appearance. She eyed it, as fascinated as if the moon had risen in the room. “I’ll allow it’s a start. But I’ll take port if you have it.”
    It was a contest to see who would speak most noncommittally, it seemed.
    He seemed to realize the absurdity of remaining rooted to the spot and moved into the room with a few long, graceful steps. She watched his eyes touch on things: the cognac-colored velvet-tufted settee, the spindly, satin-covered chairs, the portrait of God-only-knew-who above the hearth.
    What did he know about her? Did he imagine she ravished lovers on the settee? Was he smiling politely while the word “HARLOT” blazed in his mind like something fresh off a blacksmith’s forge?
    “Of course I have port. And, oh, look! You came bearing gifts. How … very kind of you.”
    She held out her arms, and he duly filled them with the flowers; and then, to her surprise, he fished a small jar from his coat pocket.
    “Since you’re new to Sussex—native wildflowers. And the honey is … made by the bees that drink from the flowers.”
    She eyed him cautiously. Flowers and what bees did to them—supped, flitted—were popular metaphors in the poems fevered young bloods had written to her. She wondered if this was an innuendo of some sort.
    Or perhaps everything would sound like an innuendo until she knew precisely what the vicar knew about her past.
    Once again, the footman appeared.