Only a Kiss by Mary Balogh

3

“Ifelt the sheets with my own hands,” Aunt Lavinia said. “I am quite sure they were well aired. I do hope he will not get the ague from sleeping between them.”

“Of course he will not,” Imogen assured her. All the linens at Hardford were well aired, since they were stored in the airing cupboard when not in use.

“Unless he is an elderly man and already has it,” Aunt Lavinia added. “Or the rheumatics. Is he elderly, Imogen?”

“He is not,” Imogen told her.

“And is he married? Are there children? And will they and his wife be following him here? Oh, it is very sad indeed that we know so little about him. I do not hold with family quarrels. I never have. If there cannot be peace and harmony and love within families, then what are families for?”

“Show me a family that claims to live in peace, harmony, and love, Lavinia,” Cousin Adelaide said, “and I will lead the hunt for all the skeletons in the cupboards. Such a fuss over a man.”

“I cannot believe,” Aunt Lavinia said, “that I was so busy seeing that everything was ready for him that I did not hear him arrive. But we could not have known he would come so soon, could we? Whatever will he think of me?”

“You need to be more like me, Lavinia,” Cousin Adelaide said, “and not care what anyone thinks of you. Least of all a man.”

Aunt Lavinia had indeed been horrified to learn that she had missed the arrival of the earl and her duty to make her curtsy to him in the hall. She was seated now in the drawing room, looking a bit like a coiled spring, awaiting the appearance of his lordship for tea.

“I did not think to ask if he is married,” Imogen said. If he was, she pitied the countess from the bottom of her heart. She did not often take people in dislike, at least not on first acquaintance. But the Earl of Hardford was everything she most abhorred in a man. He was rude and arrogant and overbearing. And no doubt there had never been anyone to call him to account. He was the type who would be admired and followed slavishly by men and fawned upon and swooned over by women. She knew the type. The officers’ messes with which she had been acquainted had abounded with such. Fortunately—very fortunately—her husband had not been one of them. But then she would not have married him if he had been.

“You have not seen Prudence, by any chance, Imogen?” Aunt Lavinia asked. “All the others are accounted for and shut safely inside the second housekeeper’s room, even though Bruce did not like it one little bit. But Prudence was nowhere to be found. I do hope she is not hiding somewhere, waiting to put in an appearance at an awkward moment.”

“I have not,” Imogen said. “The Earl of Hardford was unaware of my existence, you know. And of yours. And of Cousin Adelaide’s.”

“Oh, dear,” Aunt Lavinia said. “That is awkward. But he really ought to have made inquiries. Or perhaps we ought to have sent a letter of congratulation when he succeeded to the title and then he would have known. But at the time I was just too upset over poor Brandon’s passing. Dicky’s papa,” she added, lest Imogen or her cousin not understand who Brandon was.

The drawing room door opened abruptly and without even a tap upon the outer panel or Mr. Crutchley to step ahead to announce the new arrival.

The Earl of Hardford had not changed his clothes. Imogen doubted his baggage had arrived yet, since he had come on horseback. There was no doubt a coach on its way. Or two. Or three, she thought nastily. His drab riding coat and hat had been discarded, but the riding clothes he still wore were very obviously expensive and well tailored. His coat and breeches molded his tall, powerful frame, in which there was no discernible imperfection. His linen was admirably white and crisp, considering the fact that he had traveled in it. He had found something with which to restore the shine to his boots. Either he was a very wealthy man, Imogen concluded—but the estate of Hardford was not particularly prosperous, was it?—or his unpaid bills with his tailor and boot maker were staggeringly high. Probably the latter, she thought purely because she wanted to think the worst of him. His hair had been combed. It was dark and thick and glossy and expertly styled.

He was smiling—and even his teeth were perfect and perfectly white.

He bowed with practiced elegance while Aunt Lavinia scrambled to her feet and dipped into her most formal curtsy. Cousin Adelaide stayed where she was. Imogen stood because she did not want his earlier rudeness to provoke her to retaliate with rudeness of her own.

“Ma’am,” he said, turning the full force of a devastating charm upon Aunt Lavinia. “Lady Lavinia Hayes, I presume? I am delighted to make your acquaintance at last and must apologize for descending upon you with so little notice. I must apologize too for riding so far ahead of my baggage and my valet that I am compelled to appear in the drawing room so inappropriately dressed. Hardford, ma’am, at your service.”

Well!

“You must never apologize for coming to your own home, cousin,” Aunt Lavinia assured him, her hands clasped to her bosom, two spots of color blossoming in her cheeks, “or for dressing informally when you are in it. And you must call me cousin, not Lady Lavinia as though we were strangers.”

“I shall be honored, Cousin Lavinia,” he said. He turned his smile upon Imogen, and his very blue eyes became instantly mocking. “And, if I may make so free . . . Cousin Imogen? I must be Cousin Percy, then. We will be one happy family.”

He turned his charm upon Cousin Adelaide.

“And may I present Mrs. Ferby to you, Cousin Percy?” Aunt Lavinia said, sounding anxious. “She is a cousin on my mother’s side and therefore no relation to you. However—”

“Mrs. Ferby,” he said with a bow. “Perhaps we may consider ourselves honorary cousins.”

“You may consider whatever you wish, young man,” she told him.

But instead of throwing him off balance, her implication that she would consider no such thing merely turned his smile to one of genuine amusement, and he looked even more handsome.

“I thank you, ma’am,” he said.

Aunt Lavinia proceeded to fuss him into the large chair to the left of the fire that had always been her brother’s and in which no one else had ever been allowed to sit, even after his death. The tea tray arrived almost immediately with a large plate of scones and bowls of clotted cream and strawberry preserves.

Unfortunately, the maids left the drawing room door open behind them when they came in. Equally unfortunately, someone must have opened the door of the second housekeeper’s room—so called for no reason Imogen had ever been able to fathom, since there had never been any such person on the household staff. Almost before the tea tray had been set down and Imogen had seated herself behind it to pour the tea, the room was invaded. Dogs barked and yipped and panted and chased their tails and regarded the scones with covetous eyes. Cats mewed and scratched and growled—that was Prudence, who was apparently no longer lost—and leaped onto laps and furniture and eyed the milk jug.

There was not a truly pretty or handsome animal among the lot of them. Some were downright ugly.

Imogen closed her eyes briefly and then opened them in order to observe the earl’s reaction. This would wipe the smile from his face and put an end to the charm that oozed from his every pore. Blossom, the furriest of the cats and also the one that shed the most, had jumped onto his lap, glared balefully at him, and then curled up into a shaggy ball.

“Oh, dear,” Aunt Lavinia said, on her feet again and wringing her hands. “Someone must have opened the second housekeeper’s door. Out of here, all of you. Shoo! I am so sorry, Cousin Percy. There will be hair all over your . . . breeches.” Her cheeks flamed scarlet again. “Blossom, do get down. That is her favorite chair, you see, because it is close to the fire. Perhaps she did not notice . . . Oh, dear.”

Imogen picked up the teapot.

Bruce, the bulldog, had taken possession of the mat before the hearth with a great deal of noisy snuffling before addressing himself to sleep. Fluff, who was not fluffy, and Tiger, who was not fierce, settled on either side of him. They were cats. Benny and Biddy, both dogs, one of them tall and gangly with hangdog eyes and ears and jowls, the other short and long, almost like a sausage, with legs so short that they were invisible from above, circled about each other, sniffing rear ends—it was a considerable stretch for Biddy—until they were satisfied that they had met before, and then plopped down together over by the window. Prudence, the tabby, stood close to the tea tray, her back arched, growling at Hector. Hector, the newest addition to their household—if one discounted the earl—was a smallish dog of very mixed breed, his thin legs alarmingly spindly, his ribs clearly visible through his dull, patchy coat, his one and a half ears erect, his three-quarters of a tail slightly waving. He stood beside the earl’s chair and gazed up at him with eyes that bulged from a peaked, ugly face, begging silently for something. Mercy, perhaps? Love, maybe?

Aunt Lavinia was flapping her arms in a shooing gesture. None of the animals took the least notice.

“Pray be seated, Cousin Lavinia,” the earl said, a quizzing glass materializing in his right hand from somewhere about his person. “I suppose I was bound to encounter the menagerie sooner or later, and it might as well be sooner. Indeed, I believe I already have a passing acquaintance with the growling tabby. She—he?—ran through the hall while I was in it earlier and expressed displeasure at my arrival.”

“She does not know,” Imogen said, setting down his cup and saucer beside him, “that cats hiss and dogs growl.”

She looked into his face, a foot or so from her own. He was no longer smiling. But he had not, to give him credit, lost any of his poise. Neither had he raised his glass all the way to his eye. She reached down and scooped Blossom off his lap, inadvertently brushing his thigh with the backs of her fingers as she did so. He lofted one eyebrow and looked back at her. She stooped and deposited the cat on the floor.

“Perhaps,” the earl said with ominous civility while Imogen prepared to take him a scone, “someone would care to explain to me why my home appears to be overrun with what I would guess is a pack of strays.”

“No one, certainly,” Cousin Adelaide said, “would have chosen any one of them for a pet. They are a singularly unappealing lot.”

“There are always animals roaming the countryside without a home,” Aunt Lavinia said. “Most people shoo them away or go after them with sticks and brooms and even guns. They always seem to end up here.”

“Perhaps, ma’am,” he said, his voice silky, “that is because you take pity on them.”

He seemed to have forgotten that she was Cousin Lavinia and that they were one happy family.

“I always wanted a pet when I was a child,” she explained with a sigh. “My papa would never allow it. I still wanted one after I grew up and Papa died, but Brandon would not hear of it either. Brandon was my brother, the late earl, your predecessor.”

“Indeed,” he said as he bit into his scone without loading it down with cream and preserves.

“He scolded me when he caught me feeding a stray cat one day,” she said. “Poor little thing. The leftover food would just have gone into the bin. After Brandon died, another cat came. Blossom. She was terribly thin and weak and had almost no coat. I fed her and took her in and gave her a bit of love, and look at her now. And then there was another one—Tiger. And then Benny came—the tall dog—looking as if he was one day away from dying of starvation. What was I to do?”

The earl set his empty plate aside, propped his elbows on the arms of the chair, and steepled his fingers.

“Four cats and four dogs,” he said. “These are all, ma’am?”

“Yes,” she said. “Eight since Hector came last week. He is the dog standing beside you. He is still dreadfully thin and timid. He must have suffered abuse and rejection all his life.”

The earl looked down at the dog, and the dog looked up at him. Disdain—or what Imogen imagined was disdain—gazed steadily back at wavering hope. Hector’s tail flicked once and then again.

The earl’s eyes narrowed.

“I have no love whatsoever for cats,” he said, “unless they earn their living as mousers and stay in parts of houses where they belong. And dogs are to be tolerated if they are good hunters.” He raised his eyes to direct a hard look at Imogen. “It is to be expected, I suppose, that women left to themselves would wax sentimental and quite impractical. What is to be the upper limit of . . . strays allowed to overrun my home?”

Cousin Adelaide snorted.

Imogen sipped her tea. He was behaving quite true to the character she had assigned him. Women needed men to keep them in line. She did not answer him. Neither did Aunt Lavinia.

“As I thought,” he said curtly. “No upper limit has been set. No plan has been made. And so I must learn to share my drawing room and perhaps my dining room and library and private apartments with a growing number of unappealing felines and canines, mustn’t I?”

“The second housekeeper’s room has been set up for them, Cousin Percy,” Aunt Lavinia said.

“With bars on the windows and doors?” he asked. “And are they always kept there? When they do not escape in a body, that is, and find more comfortable accommodation here? And how does the second housekeeper like sharing her room with them?”

“There is no second housekeeper,” she said. “I am not sure there ever has been. I certainly do not remember any such person. There are no bars on the windows. And they cannot stay there all the time. They need exercise. And affection.”

He looked back down at Hector.

“Affection,” he said, disgust clear in his tone. But the dog took one step forward and rested his chin on the earl’s thigh. It was the first time to Imogen’s knowledge that Hector had voluntarily touched any human. He obviously was not a very discerning dog. The earl addressed him sternly. “You are not planning to become attached to me, are you? You may forget it without further ado if you are. You would get nothing whatsoever in return. Pleading looks do nothing for me. I do not have a soft female heart.”

“Now there is a surprise,” Cousin Adelaide rumbled into her teacup.

The earl removed Hector’s chin from his leg after rubbing his fingers over the dog’s one whole ear for a few moments, and got to his feet.

“We will discuss the matter further, ma’am,” he said, looking down upon Aunt Lavinia. “I will not have Hardford Hall turned into an animal refuge, even in my absence. And if there is some other chair lurking in a little-used room or tucked away somewhere in an attic that is more comfortable than the one on which I have been sitting, almost any other chair, in fact, I would be much obliged to you if it could be fetched to replace this one before I am required to sit here again. Perhaps you would pass on my compliments to the cook on the superior quality of the scones. I shall see you all again at dinner. Cousin Lavinia? Cousin Imogen? Mrs. Ferby?”

He bowed to each of them and left the room.

Hector whined once and lay down close to the vacated chair.

“God’s gift to the female half of the species,” Cousin Adelaide said.

“I suppose he is right, though,” Aunt Lavinia said with a heavy sigh. “We women are impractical because we have hearts. Not that men do not, but they feel things differently. They do not feel the suffering around them, or, if they do, they know how to harden their hearts when it has nothing to do with them.”

“The Earl of Hardford,” Imogen said, “is definitely a man without a heart, Aunt Lavinia. I would be willing to take an oath on it. He is an ill-humored man who thinks no one will notice his nastiness if he turns on a bit of charm when it suits him.”

She hated to find herself in agreement with Cousin Adelaide, but that man had severely ruffled her feathers. His charm was skin-deep at best, and it was a thin skin.

“Oh, dear,” Aunt Lavinia said, taking another scone. “I would not say that, Imogen.”

“I would,” her cousin said.