Page 5 of Lady Willa's Divinely Wicked Vicar
“Oh? Do you kill just any man who escorts you on a walk?”
She could play at flirting, too, although heaven knew, she shouldn’t. “Heretofore, only those who have asked for my hand and been accepted.”
“I see. So there have been many then?”
“Four asking. Two having been accepted. Those two dying.”
“Terrible for them. A burden for you.”
“Especially because I liked them!”And I do like you, but then you wouldn’t want a woman who killed others. No, no.She wished to stand here and admire him, but she minded her manners and resumed her walk.
“Did you love them?”
Persistent cuss, wasn’t he? A true cleric, then. “No. What is love? That kind of love. I’ve no knowledge of it and if I had—”
“You would have known it was worthy of marriage.”
“That,” she said with precision, “is what I think.”
He clasped his hands behind his back as they strode the path toward the Courtlands’ expansive Palladian manse. The wind tossing his hair. The spring sunshine accenting the swarthy rose of his cheeks and the way his dark frock coat hugged marvelously sculpted shoulders. “I gather then that you do not wish to marry at all?”
“Not any longer, no.”
“What then will you do?”
“With my life?” She tipped her head and considered the broad green lawn and the yawn of her future before her, quiet—and lonely.
“Exactly.”
If she told him, he would argue with her as her friends did. Or to be exact, the two friends she had told of her plans. “I shall engage in worthwhile charities. Train my two dogs to be obedient servants. Grow roses.”
“And what will you tell your family?” For marriage was the practical means for a woman to live out her life. Without a husband, she would have no status, no income, no property, never anything of her own. Not even daughters of earls could avoid the call of the altar, upon which many claimed they were sacrificed to an economic order as well as a society that did not recognize their service.
And she took umbrage at his question. “You are rather intrusive, sir.”
“I am. But you see I have the right. I am to negotiate with…” He pointed to the sky. “Him.For you. I need to know the particulars.”
“I will tell them that I am grateful for the gifts they’ve given me. Health. Education. A fine living. Books and dogs.”
“And yet?”
Damn, this vicar was nosey.“Yet the one thing they cannot grant me by largesse is a loving husband. A fine marriage. And now it seems to me that…” She pointed to the sky. “Hewill not allow it.”
“Many women take what their family gives them and go on to build a new life with those tools.”
She sighed. Why was she surprised that he advocated for the status quo? “Yes. But I cannot. Or will not marry a man I do not love, just to ensure that he lives and I live not so well beside him. And there is the matter of God’s change in plans for me.” She paused, pensive on that point.
“Go on.”
She mused a moment on this, her most important reason for not marrying just anyone. “How am I to know that the man I could love madly might not appear when I am thirty or forty or sixty-two?”
“You would wait for a love for that long?”
She stopped, her brows high, her expression shocked. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Frankly, I had not considered that issue. I simply thought He would present me with the right woman, if there is a right woman.”
She walked on. He must be terribly busy, busier than she by far, not to have considered such an occurrence. “But if you knew—knew in your heart, in your soul—that someday love would come to you, would you not wait for the right person? Would you not argue with Him? Would you not barter? Or trade anything you had to meet that person with a full heart?”
