Raw Silk

‘That’s the house where you live, next door,’ he remarked, and Fliss was so relieved he hadn’t said anything controversial that she nodded.

‘The vicarage,’ she agreed, smoothing her damp palms over the seams of her trousers. ‘It’s old, too; though not as old as the church,’ she conceded.

‘And your father’s the vicar of Sutton Magna?’

‘Of Sutton Magna, Sherborne and Eryholme, actually,’ Fliss said, with an involuntary smile. ‘It sounds grand, but it isn’t really. Sutton Magna has the largest population.’

Oliver smiled, too, his thin lips parting over teeth as attractive as the rest of him. The smile—a genuine one this time—gave his lean features an irresistible charm and personality, and Fliss’s stomach quivered in involuntary response.

‘I suppose you spend a lot of time here,’ he said, and for a moment she was too dazed to understand what he meant. ‘In the church,’ he prompted, by way of an explanation. ‘I gather you act as your father’s deputy, as well as his secretary.’

Fliss wondered where he’d gathered that. Not from Robert, she was sure. Her fiancé hadn’t exchanged a civil word with the American, and she doubted she was a topic of conversation when Oliver and his mistress spoke together. If they did any speaking, she appended cattily …

‘Well, my mother’s dead,’ she told him reluctantly, bending to pluck a wilting bloom from the display of chrysanthemums that stood at the foot of the pulpit steps. ‘She died while I was at university.’

‘So you came home to look after your father,’ said Oliver, making no attempt to get out of her way. If she wanted to move into the body of the church, she would have to get past him. And with one foot propped on the step he was a formidable obstruction.

‘Er—well, he took my mother’s death rather badly,’ Fliss continued now, as much to keep their conversation on a fairly impersonal footing as to satisfy his curiosity. ‘She—she was quite young, you see, and a clergyman needs a wife.’

Oliver frowned, his dark brows drawing together above those pale, penetrating eyes. ‘So what will he do when you marry Hastings?’ he asked, and Fliss’s hopes of avoiding talking about her fiancé died a sudden death.

‘As Robert and I will be living in the village after we’re married, it shouldn’t be a problem,’ she declared, refusing to be any more specific than that. The fact that the Reverend Matthew Hayton had any number of village women all eager to assist him was not Oliver Lynch’s business. Nor that a certain widow from Eryholme was only waiting to be asked.