Only a Kiss (6 page)

“That is because you are usually in a different universe,” she said, “one that revolves about you. The Peninsula was full of rude, blustering officers who believed other people had been created to pay them homage. I always thought they were merely silly and best ignored.”

And she turned, the baggage, and began walking back the way they had come. She did not look behind her to see if he was following. He was not. He stood where he was, his arms folded over his chest, until she was out of earshot. Then he looked down at the dog.

“If there is a type of woman that grates upon my every nerve more than any other,” Percy said, “it is the type that always has to have the last word.
Rude
and
blustering
.
Silly.
SILLY!
‘
I always thought they were best ignored.’
For two pins I would go straight to the stables, mount my horse, and set its head for London. Forget about this ungodly place. Let you and all your playmates overrun the house until it is derelict. Let the earl’s apartments turn to mildew. Let that steward turn into a fossil in his dusty office. Leave Lady Lavinia Hayes alone with her cousin and her bleeding heart. Let that marble pillar beggar herself with the bill for her roof and all the other repairs that are bound to be needed. Let the tide ebb and flow against the cliffs until eternity wears them away and both houses fall off.”

Hector had no opinion to offer, and there was no point in Percy’s standing here, pointlessly venting his frustration as he watched the cause of it recede into the distance.

“At least then I would not find myself babbling nonsense to a
dog
,” he said
.
“I suppose you have exhausted yourself, though if you have it is entirely your own fault. You cannot say I did not warn you. And I suppose you are ready for your dinner so that you can build up some fat to hide those bones from sight. Come, then. What are you waiting for?”

He looked for a gap in the gorse bushes and found one that would leave only a few surface scratches on his boots as he pushed through it—Watkins would look tragically stoic. But as he stepped into the gap, he looked back at the dog, scowled at it, and stooped to lift it over the prickly barrier, hoping as he did so that no one could see him. He set off grimly across the lawn in the direction of the house.

At least, he thought—
at least
he was not feeling bored. Though it did occur to him that boredom was perhaps not such a sad state after all.

T
he afternoon brought visitors.

Somehow word had spread that the Earl of Hardford was in residence, and since the correct thing to do was to call upon him, people called. Besides, everyone was agog with curiosity to make his acquaintance at last.

Imogen had been planning to spend the afternoon at the dower house, although its roofless state made even the downstairs rooms almost unbearably chilly. She had missed luncheon because she could not bear the thought of making polite conversation with
that man,
who had provoked her to rudeness but who would no doubt be all smooth charm with the older ladies. She had also been feeling agitated after telling him her story, brief and undetailed though she had made it. She almost never spoke of the past or thought of it when she could help it. Even her dreams were only rarely nightmares now.

Before she could set out for her own home, however, the first of the visitors arrived, and it would have been ill-mannered to leave even though they had not come, strictly speaking, to see her. She just wished she did not have to be sociable on this particular afternoon, though. For everyone was enamored of the Earl of Hardford as soon as they met him. His very presence here was sufficient to please them, of course. But his youth and extraordinary good looks, coupled with the excellence of his tailoring, dazzled the ladies and impressed the gentlemen. His charm, his smile, and his ready conversation completed the process of bowling them over. He assured everyone that he was delighted to be here at last, that there was surely nowhere else on earth to compare with Hardford and its environs for beauty, natural and otherwise.

Those words
and otherwise
were spoken, as if by chance, while his eyes rested upon Mrs. Payne, wife of the retired Admiral Payne. Mrs. Payne, whose mood usually hovered on the edge of sourness, when it did not spill quite over into it, inclined her head in gracious acceptance of the implied compliment.

The Reverend Boodle, though, was the first to arrive with Mrs. Boodle and their elder two daughters. The admiral and his wife came next, and they were soon followed by the Misses Kramer, middle-aged daughters of a deceased former vicar, with their elderly mother. Those three ladies could not admit to the social faux pas of calling upon a single gentleman, of course. They had come, the elder Miss Kramer explained, to visit dear Lady Lavinia and Lady Barclay and Mrs. Ferby, and what a surprise it was to discover that his lordship was in residence. They could only hope he did not think them very forward indeed to have intruded all unwittingly thus upon him. His lordship, of course, responded with the predictable reassurances and soon had the three ladies quite forgetting that they had come to see Aunt Lavinia.

Imogen would undoubtedly have been amused by it all if she had not taken the man so much in dislike. Though actually, she thought, these visits were probably akin to excruciating torture for him and were therefore no less than he deserved. She met his glance as the malicious thought flashed through her mind and knew from the infinitesimal lift of his eyebrows that she was right.

As the Reverend Boodle and his female entourage were leaving after a correct half hour, Mr. Wenzel drove up in the gig with Tilly. Imogen greeted the latter with a brief hug and sat beside her in the drawing room. But even Tilly was not immune to the earl’s charm. She leaned toward Imogen after a few minutes and murmured beneath the sound of the general conversation.

“One has to admit, Imogen,” she said, “that he is a perfectly gorgeous specimen of manhood.”

But her eyes were twinkling as she said it, and the two of them exchanged a brief smirk.

Mr. Soames, the elderly physician, came with his much younger second wife and his three daughters and one son of that second marriage. Mr. Alton arrived last with his son, a gangly youth who had been wrestling with facial pimples for the last year or so, poor boy. He was soon in the throes of a serious case of hero worship, having been complimented by his lordship on the knot of his cravat, which looked like a perfectly ordinary knot to Imogen.

She gave the earl a penetrating look. She really did not want to believe that he was
kind
. He had not paid any compliment to Mr. Edward Soames, a good-looking young man who had been affecting the appearance and manners of a dandy since making a brief visit to London last spring to stay with one of his older half sisters.

By the time the last of the visitors had taken their leave, the four residents were left in possession of a number of invitations—to a dinner party, to an evening of cards, to an informal musical evening, to a picnic on the beach, weather permitting, of course, for the eighteenth birthday of Miss Ruth Boodle, though that would not be until the end of May. They had also been informed by each wave of callers that the next dance in the assembly rooms above the village inn was to be held five evenings hence, and it was to be hoped the Earl of Hardford would condescend to grace it with his presence—as well as the ladies, of course.

Wild horses could not keep him away, the earl had assured everyone. He had solicited a set with the eldest Boodle daughter, the eldest Miss Soames, and Mrs. Payne. The elder Miss Kramer meanwhile had promised herself a comfortable coze with Aunt Lavinia and Cousin Adelaide while the young people danced. And Mr. Wenzel and Mr. Alton had each reserved a set of dances with Imogen.

“Well,” Aunt Lavinia said when everyone had left, “that was all very gratifying, was it not? As you have seen, Cousin Percy, we are not without genteel neighbors and genteel entertainments in the country here. There is little chance you will find time hanging heavily on your hands.”

“That Kramer woman who does all the talking for her mother and sister is a bore,” Cousin Adelaide remarked. “
You
may have a comfortable coze with her during the assembly, Lavinia.
I
shall choose more congenial company.”

“It would seem,” Imogen said, “that you are doomed to remain here for at least the next two weeks,
Cousin
Percy, since you have accepted invitations extending that far into the future. Not to mention Ruth Boodle’s birthday party more than three months from now.”

“Doomed?”
He smiled with what she recognized as his most practiced, most devastatingly charming smile at her. “But what a happy doom it is sure to be, Cousin Imogen.”

God’s gift to womankind, Cousin Adelaide had said. And to mankind too. That was what he thought he was, and it seemed that everyone who had called here today was only too eager to confirm him in that opinion. He was in reality an empty shell of vanity and artificiality and arrogance and peevish temper when he was thwarted. He was in sore need of a good setdown.

But it really would not do to allow herself to continue being ruffled by someone who had done nothing more lethal to harm her than to demand of her
and who the devil might you be
? She was not usually one to bear a grudge.

His smile had become more genuinely amused, and she realized that she had been holding his gaze. She got to her feet and pulled on the bell rope to summon a maid to remove the tea tray.

Had he been right earlier when he had suggested that she resented him because he was in the place Dicky should have been? She hated to think it might be so.

Her eyes rested fondly on Aunt Lavinia for a moment. Imogen’s mother and Aunt Lavinia had been at a girls’ school together in Bath for several years and had remained fast friends afterward. Imogen had come here often as a girl, sometimes with her mother, sometimes alone for extended periods. Aunt Lavinia had always declared that Imogen was the daughter she had never had. Being rather on the tomboyish side, Imogen had played with the son of the house from the start. They had become fast friends and comrades. They had never really fallen in love. The very idea seemed a little absurd. But at some point after they grew up they had made the mutual decision to continue their friendship into marriage so that they could remain together. Imogen could not even remember if there had been a marriage proposal and, if so, which of them had made it. Everything had always been mutual with them.

She had loved him dearly. There had, of course, been the sexual component too after they married. That had always been vigorous and satisfying, though it had never been central to their relationship. Perhaps she was incapable of that emotional condition people called “being in love.” Which was just as well under the circumstances.

“Who, with the name of Alton,” the earl asked of no one in particular, “would name his son Alden?”

It was clearly a rhetorical question.

He shook his head as though to clear it and fixed his gaze upon Aunt Lavinia.

“About the strays,” he said.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “But they have remained in the second housekeeper’s room all afternoon, Cousin Percy. Please do not make me send them away. It would be worse than ever for them to become strays again now that they have experienced a roof over their heads and regular feedings. And a little love.
Please
do not make me send them away.”

“I will not,” he assured her. “Those that are here now may remain, though I will doubtless live to regret that decision. But there must be no more.”

“It is so hard to turn any away,” she said, clasping her hands to her bosom, “when they are starving and look at one with such hopeless pleading in their eyes.”

“Might I make a suggestion?” Imogen said.

Those blue eyes turned on her, dark eyebrows arched above them.

“Please do.”

“The strays always look far more attractive,” she said, “after they have been tended and fed for a while. They gain weight, and their coats become thicker and shinier. There are surely a number of people who would be more willing to take in an attractive pet that needs a home than a mere stray which has never had one.”

“Oh, dear Imogen,” Aunt Lavinia said, “I am sure you must be right. All little girls want a cat or a dog.
I
did. Little boys too, I daresay. And perhaps the Misses Kramer or . . .”

“
I
never wanted an animal,” Cousin Adelaide said, winning for herself a look of acute distress from Aunt Lavinia and one of fleeting amusement from the earl.

He had stepped away from the door to allow two maids to enter and pick up the trays. Imogen noticed that his eyes rested thoughtfully upon one of them, a thin girl with stooped shoulders who was a deaf-mute, though he had no way of knowing that yet since he had not spoken to her. Mr. Soames, the physician, had been in the process of finding an insane asylum for her after her father, a farm laborer, died. But Aunt Lavinia had stepped in with a solution of her own.

“You are suggesting, Cousin Imogen,” the earl said when the trays had been borne away, “that we run a sort of pet-grooming business here, free of charge, to supply our neighbors with pretty cats and handsome dogs over which their children and womenfolk may coo with tenderness?”

Aunt Lavinia looked as if she was holding her breath.

“In a word, yes,” Imogen said. “Though I believe you used the wrong pronoun. I do not suppose for a moment that
we
would do any such thing. I cannot imagine you feeding or petting stray animals, Cousin Percy, especially ugly ones. Or loving them.”

“Oh, Imogen, dear,” Aunt Lavinia said reproachfully.

The earl pursed his lips. “My contribution would be the house and the food, I suppose,” he said.

“Yes,” she told him, “though I do think perhaps a corner of the stables could be prepared for Fluff, who will be birthing her kittens soon.”

“What?”
His eyebrows snapped together.

“Oh, the whole world loves a kitten,” Imogen said. “They will be easy to place once they are ready to leave their mother.”

He gazed at her narrow-eyed and then transferred his attention to Aunt Lavinia.

“No more strays in the house, ma’am,” he said gently enough. “Besides, it is to be hoped that you have denuded the neighborhood of the lot of them by now. I will give directions for a nest to be prepared in the stables. Perhaps . . .
Fluff
will prove to be a decent mouser and can earn her living out there after delivering herself of her kittens. I shall talk to you some other time about the human strays. I believe I have just seen one of them in the guise of a maid.”

“Annie Prewett?” Aunt Lavinia said. “She is a good girl. She does exactly as she is told once she understands what that is. Provided she can see your lips as you speak and you speak slowly, she understands.”

He continued gazing at her for a few moments before looking back at Imogen.

“Has the waltz penetrated this far into the wilderness?” he asked her. “If so, you will reserve the first of them for me at the village assembly.
If you please.
I will not hoof it around the floor with someone who does not know how it is done, and I daresay you do.”

It sounded like a command to Imogen, though he had added the words
if you please
.

Mr. Alton was the one who usually waltzed with her, his plump, always somewhat moist hands at her waist and clasped about her own. Waltzing with the Earl of Hardford would surely be an improvement upon that severe trial. She felt an unexpected frisson of pleasurable anticipation.

“Thank you,” she said. “I shall consult my dancing card.”

He grinned at her suddenly, and that frisson leaped up into something that quite unsettled her stomach. For that grin was not his usual smile of practiced charm, but seemed to be one of genuine appreciation.

“I shall challenge to pistols at dawn any man other than myself who dares write his name next to the first waltz in your card,” he said, making her a slight bow.

Good heavens, was he flirting with her? Was his arrogance such that he thought he could draw even her within the orbit of his charm?

She raised her eyebrows and looked coolly back at him while Aunt Lavinia laughed and Cousin Adelaide snorted.

*   *   *

There was an image of the country gentleman that had always been singularly unappealing to Percy. It was that of the landowner who tramped about his land in ill-fitting coat and breeches and shapeless boots, sturdy staff in hand, faithful dog at heel, discussing crops and livestock and the weather with his foremen and laborers, and crop rotations and markets and the weather with his steward, horseflesh and bonnets and the weather with his neighbors, and the weather and the Lord knew what else with all and sundry while kicking up his heels at their various entertainments and admiring their hopeful, fresh-faced daughters.