Unclaimed (Turner, #2)

Mark wanted to bury his head in his hands. Magnificent? Inestimable? He’d have preferred less effusive praise—“decent” was all he strove for, and considering how close matters had come with Jessica over the past week, he didn’t even merit that any longer. The thought should have made him feel guilty.

“Sir Mark, as you all know, is the author of that famous tome, A Gentleman’s Practical Guide toChastity. We here in Shepton Mallet are familiar with every sentence in that holy book.”

Holy? Mark imagined hitting Tolliver with the oversize prayer book that lay open on the podium before him.

“We have memorized its every commandment,” Tolliver intoned. “We have committed its advice to memory.”

They had made membership cards distorting said advice. It was a book, a human-written one, not deified advice engraved on stone tablets.

Tolliver continued, solemnly. “We have adopted its creed as our own—as members of the Male Chastity Brigade—and, having solemnly sworn ourselves to righteousness, we have learned to cast out temptation. Wherever we may find it.”

Mark thought of Jessica, and the way they’d cast her out at first. His fists curled.

“Tonight,” Tolliver said, “Sir Mark will address us, and tell us how best to keep to chastity. I, for one, plan to listen.”

Applause rang out, accompanied by cheers. Mark’s thoughts churned.

He couldn’t count the people who had turned out to see him. Several hundred, at least. If it was the entire parish, it might have been thousands. Mark had delivered lectures before. He never enjoyed the prospect. The only thing worse than being forced to make idle conversation with one person was to have to address hundreds. The crowd’s expectant stares stabbed into him like a hundred tiny knives.

They always expected him to be some kind of extraordinary orator. In truth, he usually managed to be an indifferent one. He’d prepared his usual remarks for tonight, a summary of a few important points he’d made in his book, followed by a plea to remember that he was just a regular man and not some kind of a saint.

The first few times he’d mouthed the latter sentiments, he had waited for the disappointed buzz. Perhaps he’d secretly hoped that someone would stand up and say, “He’s right! Did you hear what he just said? Sir Mark is a horrible fraud—why on earth have we been listening to him?”

There would be riots. The papers would turn on him as quickly as they’d taken his side, and in a few months, everyone would have forgotten him and turned their inexplicable zeal toward some more worthy object.

But the more he protested his ordinary nature, the greater the adulation. They acted as if he spoke out of some misguided, foolish humility, instead of simply giving him credit for speaking the truth. He could have announced that he had formed a financial partnership with Lucifer himself, and they would have crowded about him afterward, praising him for his business acumen. They’d have patted him on the shoulder and, when told that he had an interest in their souls, would have swooned because the great Sir Mark had taken notice.

His gaze drifted to Jessica again. He could do no wrong. Up until he’d interceded on her behalf, they’d thought she could do no right. They both commanded attention—one for praise, the other for censure. And yet Mark was certain that he had been the one who had cupped his hand around her breast when last he saw her. He had been the one to take her mouth in a kiss. And he was the one standing before a crowd now to talk about chastity when his thoughts over the past week had been increasingly obscene.

It seemed an unbridgeable gap between them, that disparity. And then he saw the rector beside her. She was wearing an evening gown, perfectly respectable for a lecture given at night. Respectable…but creamy curves peeped from behind the lacy décolletage. The rector turned his head so he could look down her bodice ever so discreetly. And like that, Mark’s carefully planned, dull speech disappeared from his mind.

“Good evening.” His voice carried. The murmurs ceased instantly, and the crowd leaned forward. “Normally,” he heard himself say, “I would tell you all that I am just a man—not anyone special, not anyone to listen to. Normally, I’d admit to my fair share of hypocrisy. And have no doubt about it. I am a hypocrite. But for now, I’d like to set that aside. There are worse hypocrites in the room.

“For instance,” Mark said, sweeping his gaze over the blue-arm-banded boys who sat in self-satisfied honor in the front of the room, “the members of the MCB are the biggest lot of liars I have ever met.”

There was a pained silence at that—as if several hundred people had suddenly forgotten how to breathe.