Holy Scoundrel by Annette Blair Page A

for life?“ He’d discovered over the past few days, as he endlessly pondered their relationship, that Lacey Ashton had not been expunged from his blood, despite the agony of the process. She dwelled in every drop that pumped through his body.
    So what if she’d had a dozen lovers, if she’d betrayed him with his former best friend, he wanted, needed—he must make a life together work for them.
    Bridget needed her. By God , h e needed her in the same way he needed his next breath. Even if it was only physical, or mostly physical, between them—No, they enjoyed each other a great deal, even out of the bedroom. He enjoyed her company more than anyone’s. And he could talk to Lace as he could to no other. Blast it, Lace could read him. Of course, that wasn’t always a good thing.
    Turn back? Keep going?
    The devil’s-talk dragons in his flock wanted more than ever to destroy her, and he was her only hope for survival. Why couldn’t she see that?
    Thunderation! He mus t mak e her see he was on her side or die trying.
    Fight had always been his only answer. For life. For love. For Lace.
     
    Lacey paced the wagon endlessly. They’d been driving for more than an hour. She tried to break the lock a dozen ways without success. Rain poured from the heavens from troughs now, not merely buckets.
    The idiot on the box must be soaked.
    For the second time since they set out, she threw open the casement behind him. “Mercy, Gabriel, get some sense into your thick head; stop the wagon and get the dratted devil out of the rain.”
    It annoyed her no end that he didn’t so much as turn his head or scold her for her wicked words.
    Wait. Were his shoulders shaking? “How can you laugh at this . . . entanglement you’ve gotten us into? So help me, when I get my hands on you, Gabriel Kendrick, I’m going to beat some sense into you.” She shut the casements as loudly as she could . . . without breaking Ivy’s windows.
    Who knew a vicar could be so much a nodcock as to steal a member of his flock beneath the judgmental gaze of its most outspoken members. Cackling hens the lot of them. No, worse, they reminded her of a literal murder of crows. Deadly.
    And Gabriel. “Of all the half-witted, impulsive….”
    Lacey stopped at the thought, her gaze fixed on one of Ivy’s favorite pieces of pottery, a wall-pocket of Chinese lanterns. Gabriel Kendrick had never been impulsive a day in his life . . . except for the day he came home from seminary for good.
    Lacey gave up pacing and lay on her side in the narrow cot tucked along the left of the puppet wagon, head on her arm, gazing toward the bunks opposite. She, Clara, Nick, and Gabriel used to do sleepouts sometimes beneath the stars—her personal favorite—or in this very wagon. Girls squeezed into the bottom bunk; boys on the top, “tight as piglets at the trough,” Ivy used to say.
    Boys, in Ivy’s opinion, could fall from a top bunk, crack their heads, and survive. Today, for the first time, Lacey understood that males had particularly hard heads.
    One certain male did, at any rate.
    Their favorite haunt, hers and Gabriel’s, besides this wagon, had been the old Ashcroft Abbey. The ancient cathedral, all broken stonewalls and no ceiling, stood now like the skeleton of a church overtaken by nature.
    When Gabe had been away at school, she went there when she missed him. That’s where he found her the day he returned. Had he suspected she would be there?
    He’d approached her, the single most important being in her universe, handsome, dashing, as dark and dangerous as he was smart and dear, his black suit and bright white collar proclaiming him a man of dignity. Finally.
    The fire that engulfed them in that sparkling moment had burned brighter than his collar, bright enough to create new life . . . a life snuffed, like the pyre of their love, leaving nothing but charred hearts and a cold headstone to mark its passing.
    Lacey remembered dreaming of the day Gabriel would come