Only a Kiss (10 page)

“What part are you playing now?” she asked him.

“Part? As in a play?” He raised his eyebrows. “Now? As opposed to . . . when?”

“You are neither smiling nor oozing charm,” she said, “as you have been with your other partners.”

Oh, dear, she was never rude to people.

“But if I were doing either, Cousin,” he said, “you would quite surely accuse me of playing a, er, part. Would you not? It appears I cannot win your approbation no matter what I do. Perhaps it would help if I knew what game it was we played.”

Why did the music not begin? It appeared that the violinist had broken one of his strings and was still tuning the new one with the help of the pianist.

“I thought to appear sober and serious in your eyes,” he said. “Even brooding. I thought to
impress
you.”

“Shall we forget my rudeness?” she suggested. “I apologize for it.”

“And you have been watching me, have you?” he asked her.

She frowned her incomprehension.

“You noticed that I have been smiling and oozing charm for the benefit of my other partners,” he explained.

“How could I
help
but notice?” she asked curtly.

“Quite so.” His head had dipped slightly closer to hers, and he . . . smiled. Oh, not the smile of practiced charm he had used upon everyone else this evening, but one that crinkled his eyes at the corners and looked warm and genuine and . . . affectionate?

The way one would smile at a valued cousin?

Imogen pressed her lips hard together and tried to curb her indignation. She was very aware that they were standing in the middle of the large assembly room, surrounded by empty space, the eyes of a largish gathering of people upon them.

The orchestra came to her rescue with a decisive chord before she could make any other sharp retort.

He set his right hand against the back of her waist and took her right hand in his left as she placed her hand on his shoulder. And . . . Oh, and he was
very
different from Mr. Alton. He was taller for one thing. His hands were firm and long-fingered and warm. His shoulder was solid muscle and broad. And he had . . . an aura? There was body heat, certainly, accentuated by a faint, enticing cologne. But it was more than body heat and more than cologne. Whatever it was, it wrapped about her even though he stood a very correct distance away. It was more than an aura too. An aura was sexless, or at least she thought it was. This was raw masculinity.

Could it be deliberate? Or was it a part of him, just as the blue eyes were and the dark hair and the handsome face?

The music began.

Imogen’s first thought was that he certainly knew how to waltz. Her second thought was that he had a feel for the soul of the dance to a degree that he did not need to show off with fancy steps and exaggerated twirls. Her third thought was that dancing had never ever been so exhilarating. And then all thought ceased. She was too caught up in the moment, in pure
feeling
. And feeling involved all five senses as she saw colors and light swirl about them and heard the melody and the rhythm and smelled cologne and somehow tasted the wine she had drunk at supper and felt the warmth of hands touching her and leading her and making her feel cherished and exhilarated and happier than she had felt since . . . Well,
since
.

But inevitably thought intruded at last, just before the music ended, and with it came a tidal wave of resentment. Against him, for it was all deliberate with him, all artifice. And against herself. Oh, overwhelmingly against herself. For she had allowed herself to be beguiled, to be swept beyond simple enjoyment into mindless euphoria. She could not even blame him entirely or perhaps at all. She had acquiesced without a struggle.

“Thank you,” she said when the dance ended and everyone applauded, as they always did after the waltz.

She dropped her hand from his shoulder, but his arm was still about her waist, and his clasp on her other hand was still firm. His eyes, she saw when she looked into them, were regarding her keenly. And then he stepped back, bowed, and smiled.

“Ah, no,” he said. “Thank
you,
Cousin Imogen.”

He was using his polished, charming manner again. His shield of unknowing.

He took her hand once more and set it on his sleeve before leading her off the floor to join Elizabeth and Sir Matthew. He stayed to converse for a few minutes before strolling off to solicit the hand of Louise Soames, who looked in danger of being a wallflower for the final set of the evening. Mr. Wenzel claimed Imogen for the second time that evening.

She wished—oh, she wished, wished,
wished
—she had gone home with Aunt Lavinia.

And she had to share a carriage with him on the way back. Just the two of them.

*   *   *

He had been here exactly a week, Percy thought, and it seemed like a year. It amazed him that he was still here, when it would be the easiest thing in the world to leave. Hardford was not the epitome of comfort—he had found when he went to bed last night that the window curtains, a tasteful match for his bedcover, had been replaced by draperies of a heavy dark brocade, and they were somehow stuck on their rod and would not open unless held back by hand. They had been put there to hold out some of the draft, Crutchley had explained when summoned. His lordship had been fortunate so far that there had not been much wind. When there was, he would soon discover that it blew through his bedchamber window almost as though it was not there. He would be far more comfortable in the guest room at the back.

Percy was beginning to wonder half seriously if someone was deliberately trying to nudge him out of his own room—and perhaps out of his own house?

He should not need nudging. There was almost nothing here with which to alleviate his boredom. And no one with whom to strike up a close friendship. No one like his usual friends, anyway, though he found himself feeling kindly disposed toward Sir Matthew Quentin and even Wenzel when the man was not foisting his attentions upon Lady Barclay. He was forced to share his home with three women and a menagerie of animals, one of which stuck to him like glue. It was a wonder Hector had not turned up at the assembly rooms tonight. There were the other strays too, the ones of the human variety. And there was a steward who appeared to be gathering dust along with the estate books and must somehow be persuaded to retire. There was an estate going to ruin. There was . . .

Well, there was the woman beside him in the carriage, silent, stiff, as cold as marble again. He had no idea what he had done to offend her this time. If they had quarreled, she had started it—
What part are you playing now? . . . You are neither smiling nor oozing charm.
She had seemed to thaw a bit after that, though. She had even apologized for her rudeness. But now . . .

He had
no idea
why she was so prickly. What was more, he did not care—or should not care. She irritated him beyond endurance. She alone was enough to drive him back to his own world, except that he had discovered a stubborn streak in himself this week. Had it always been there? He was almost sure he did not like her. And there was nothing particularly attractive about her. Or beautiful—despite an earlier thought to the contrary.

There was that curled lip, though.

A curled upper lip did not an attractive woman make.

He kept to his own side of the carriage seat and looked out onto darkness.
She
kept to
her
side and did the same. Not that it was possible to put much distance between oneself and another on a carriage seat or prevent the occasional touch when the carriage turned the slightest of bends or hit a rut, which was a lamentably frequent occurrence on English roads. The air was cold. They could have seen their breath if there had been any light to see by.

Percy had always enjoyed waltzing, provided he could choose his own partner. For some totally unfathomable reason, considering the surroundings and the quality of the music, he had found this evening’s waltz more than usually enchanting. And
so had she,
by thunder. That was the most irritatingly annoying thing about Lady Barclay. It was as if she had set herself quite deliberately never to be finished with her mourning, never to allow herself a fleeting moment of happiness, even on the dance floor.

Let her wallow in her own self-pity, then. It did not matter to him. He would remain silent in her presence forever after. Lips locked shut. Throw away the key.

“I suppose,” he said, “you were raped.”

Good God! Oh, devil take it and a thousand thunderbolts fall on his head. Good Lord! Had he spoken those words aloud? But of course he had. He could hear the echo of them, almost as if they were rattling about the interior of the carriage like bullets from a gun and could find no escape. And if there was any vestige of doubt to be clung to, there was the fact that she had swung about to face him and drawn in a sharp, very audible breath.

“Wh-a-a-t?”

“I suppose you were,” he said more softly, closing his eyes and willing himself to be anywhere else but where he was. Preferably tucked up in his own bed coming to the end of a nightmare.

“In
Portugal,
do you mean?” she said. “In
captivity
?”

He kept his eyes and his mouth shut, a bit too late.
Please don’t answer. Please don’t.
For someone who had become a great expert at avoiding all that was unpleasant in life, he had developed a huge capacity during the past week to invite calamity.

He
did not want to know
.

“You suppose wrongly,” she said, her voice quiet and flat. He would have been far happier if she had raged at him, even come at him with her fists.

He ought not to believe her. What could she be expected to do, after all, but deny it? What woman would wish to admit to having been raped while held captive? Especially to a near stranger.

But he did believe her. Or perhaps he just wanted to. Desperately.

“You suppose wrongly,” she said again and even more quietly.

He turned his head. He could not see her clearly in the darkness, but of course they were very close to each other, and his mouth did not need eyes. It found hers very accurately without their aid.

He drew back after no more than a few seconds and waited for the sting of her slap on his cheek—or a punch to the chin. Neither one came. Instead she sighed, a mere breath of sound, and when his arms went about her to draw her closer,
hers
wrapped about
him,
and her lips parted when his own touched them again, and she made no protest when his tongue pressed into her mouth.

It was a good thing he was sitting. When she sucked inward on his tongue, he felt his knees going, and in sheer self-defense he curled the tip of his tongue to draw along the ridge of bone at the roof of her mouth until she moaned softly and he realized what he was up to.

Willing, warm widow.

Whom he wanted with a fierceness that seemed to go beyond the mere lust for sex.

Who could turn to marble at the mere drop of his hat.

Whom he did not very much like.

Who was going to hate him more than she already did when she remembered her dead husband once more.

A thousand damnations, and another one thrown in for good measure!

It was he who moved back, releasing her and folding his arms over his chest as he settled his shoulders across the corner of the seat. Was this February or July?

“This time, Lady Barclay,” he said ungallantly, “a slap across the face would be hardly justified. For all of two minutes you were a willing participant.”

“You are no gentleman,” she said.

Whatever
that
meant. It was not the first time she had said it either.

She had not been raped. Then
what
?

He reminded himself of a schoolboy worrying a scab on his knee instead of leaving it alone to heal, knowing that he would only make it bleed again.

I
mogen moved back to the dower house the following morning. The work on the roof was not quite finished and the upper floor was a mess—the furniture that had been left up there was draped with Holland covers and coated with dust and debris. The lower floor was crowded with much of the upstairs furniture. The house had not been heated or cleaned for two months. There was no food in the larders or coal in the coal bin.

She did not care. She moved back anyway.

An army of servants arrived within an hour of her return, though
not
by her instructions. They brought her personal belongings, all neatly packed, and food and candles and coal, as well as pails and mops and brooms and other cleaning paraphernalia—as though she had none of her own. They did not look to her for instructions, but set about lighting fires in all the downstairs rooms and cleaning everywhere and getting the kitchen orderly and functional and doing a hundred and one other tasks. They were supervised everywhere by a ferociously energetic Mrs. Primrose, Imogen’s housekeeper and cook, who had been staying with her sister in the lower part of the village during the latter’s confinement, but had come almost at a run when a footman from the hall brought her the news that my lady was back in residence.

She soon had a cup of tea to set at Imogen’s elbow in the sitting room and some raisin scones fresh out of the oven, and professed herself to be in her seventh heaven at being back working where she belonged. Those last words were said with a note of reproach. Imogen had chosen to live alone when she first came here, much to the consternation of her father-in-law and the disappointment of Mrs. Primrose—it was a courtesy title since she had never been married—who had been promoted from senior chambermaid at the hall and still lived there in her room in the attic.

Blossom had been brought to the dower house in a housemaid’s basket. She had expressed no particular objection, having never quite recovered from having had her chair by the drawing room fire taken away and replaced with one she did not find nearly as comfortable, and one she was moreover expected to relinquish every time a certain man was in the room to claim it for himself. She prowled about the new environment, upstairs and down, before selecting a chair on one side of the fireplace in the sitting room. No one ordered her to get down. She was fed tasty victuals in the kitchen and assigned a comfortable bed for the nights in one corner beside the oven. She promptly forgot the old home and adopted the new.

The sound of hammers from the direction of the roof was close to being deafening all day, but Imogen did not mind. At least the noise gave indication that the job was being done. And living in a noisy, chilly, slightly damp, very dusty house—at least for the first hour or two—was certainly preferable to the alternative.

She did not set foot outside the house for the entire first day, even to check her garden to see if an early snowdrop had made its appearance yet. She had hardly left the sitting room since it had been cleaned and all was bustle and activity elsewhere. She even ate there, as Mrs. Primrose declared the dining room still unfit for her ladyship.

Imogen felt she was in heaven. She sat during the evening, as she had all afternoon, with her workbag beside her and a book open on her lap. Mostly, though, she enjoyed the silence and solitude. Her housekeeper and the roof workers were gone for the day, and all the extra servants had returned to the hall.

He read Alexander Pope, she thought as she turned a page of her own book. At least, that was the volume that had been on the table beside his chair in the library when she had looked one morning. Perhaps he had taken one glance inside it and closed it and neglected to return it to the shelf. Perhaps he had not even taken a glance.

And perhaps he had read it.

Why did she always want to believe the worst of him?

She set a hand flat on her book to hold it open, closed her eyes, and rested her head against the back of her chair. If only last night could be erased from memory. No, not just from memory—from fact. If only none of it had happened. If only she had returned home with Aunt Lavinia and Cousin Adelaide.

But
if only
s were pointless. She had spent three years learning that lesson.

Could she not simply have enjoyed that waltz without . . . Well, she could not even complete the thought. She did not know what else she had felt
but
enjoyment. Enchantment, perhaps?

He had asked
the question
on the way home. Very few people ever had, even her own family, though she suspected many had wondered. Only her fellow Survivors and the physician at Penderris knew the truth—the
full
truth, and she had volunteered the information to them.

How had he dared to ask? He was a near stranger.
I suppose you were raped.
But she guessed he was the sort of man who dared ask anything, who believed it was his God-given right to pry into other people’s secrets.

She hated him with a passion.

She wondered if he had believed her answer.

She had hated him for asking. Yet she had kissed him immediately after. Oh, yes, she had. There was no denying it this time.
He
had kissed
her
for a few seconds, it was true. But after that she had kissed with as much passionate abandon as he had kissed her. Probably more, for she doubted his passion had been anything more than lust, while hers . . . She did not know what hers had been. And if it had been pure lust on his part, why had he put such an abrupt end to their embrace? Why had he not taken more liberties while he could? It must have been obvious that she was not resisting him, and there had been several minutes left of the journey and its enforced closeness and privacy.

She did not understand him or know him. She liked to believe she did both. She disliked him and wanted to despise him. And he made it easy for her to believe that he was empty of everything but arrogance and conceit—and charm.

She liked to
believe
she disliked him. Yet down on the beach she had said he was almost likable. Oh, this was all very confusing and very upsetting.

He
was the one who had sent the army of servants after her to the dower house this morning. One of them had admitted it when she was still hoping it had been Aunt Lavinia. He might have done it, of course, out of sheer delight to be rid of her and determination to give her no possible excuse to return. But it would be spiteful to believe that.

She really did not know him at all. And sometimes, she thought, extraordinary beauty, even male beauty, must be a disadvantage to the person who possessed it, for it was easy to look only at the outer package and assume that there was nothing of any corresponding worth within.

When confronted, he had assured her that there was nothing inside him but charm. Despite herself, Imogen smiled at the memory. He had a gift for absurdity—a fact that suggested a certain wit, a certain intelligence, even a certain attractive willingness to laugh at himself. She did not want to believe it of him.

She went to bed early after an exhausting day of doing nothing and lay awake until sometime after four o’clock.

*   *   *

The first thing Percy did when he got out of bed the morning following the assembly was tear down the offending curtains at his window, rods and all. They had made his room so dark through the night that when he awoke at some unknown hour he had been unable to see so much as his hand before his face. If he had got out of his bed and taken a few steps away from it, it might have taken him an hour to find it again. Had Lady Barclay told him that one of her Survivor friends was blind? It did not bear thinking of. Neither did she. Last night . . . Well,
that
did not bear thinking of either.

A whole lot of things in the past week did not bear thinking of.

He instructed Crutchley to have the old curtains restored to his bedchamber, winds and gales be damned, and to see to it that there were no more uncomfortable surprises awaiting him when he went to bed at night. His heart might well not stand the strain. And he intended to stay in the earl’s chambers, he added, even if he found eels or frogs or both in his bed tonight.

He steeled himself for the ordeal of stepping into the dining room for breakfast. He was still not sure if he owed Lady Barclay an apology, though he was rather inclined to believe he did not. If she did not like being kissed, then she could jolly well keep herself out of his reach. Which was, as it quickly became apparent, exactly what she had decided to do. Lady Lavinia almost fell over her tongue in her eagerness to impart the dreadful tidings that dear Imogen was
gone
. But before Percy could conceive more than a flashing image of her fleeing up over the bleak moors in the general direction of the even bleaker Dartmoor, he was informed that she had returned to the dower house to stay even though all those
men
were still swarming all over the roof. Lady Lavinia made it sound as though each of them had a peephole up there and had nothing better to do with his time than peep through it.

Lady Barclay had taken nothing with her, of course, impractical woman as she was. Presumably she would prefer to freeze and starve and live forever in the same clothes and be deafened by hammer blows rather than spend another day beneath a roof with him.

Well, he preferred it too—that last part, anyway.

He left the dining room without further ado and gave orders to pack up her clothes and other personal belongings and send them after her, together with any and all supplies she would need, including her own housekeeper. He gave instructions that the servants who conveyed everything remain to make the house fully habitable even if it took all day, as it probably would. The roof, he believed, would not let any of the elements in, even if it was not quite finished. When he stepped into the drawing room for a moment, the cat that always kept his chair warm for him glared balefully at him and dared him to banish her, and he gave the order to send her over to the dower house to glare at Lady Barclay and perhaps give her some company. That would get rid of
one
stray.

She was
not
going to make a martyr of herself for the pleasure of sitting heavily on his conscience. It would be just like her—a conclusion that was without any solid evidence and doubtless unworthy of him.

He needed to get away from the hall and the park. He needed to blow away some cobwebs.

He spent much of the day in Porthmare, therefore, though not the part of it in which most of his new acquaintances had their homes, the genteel part in the river valley, sheltered from the sea and the rawest of the elements, their houses arrayed on the slopes to either side of the river with pleasant views over it and the picturesque pair of arched stone bridges that spanned it. He decided instead to see the fishing village below, its whitewashed cottages built about the broad estuary that connected river and sea and was fully exposed to the latter. The people down there, mostly fisherfolk, did not belong to him and did not work for him, except perhaps at some seasonal jobs when extra hands were needed. But they were a part of the neighborhood in which he had his principal seat, and while he was here he might as well acquaint himself with some of them if he could. He might even be able to think of some intelligent questions to ask.

He left his horse at the inn where the assembly had been held the night before and walked down to the lower village. There was much open space here, he found, the steep cliffs at some distance on either side of the wide estuary. Fishing boats bobbed on its sheltered channels. Gulls wheeled and cried overhead. It seemed a little warmer down here than it did up on Hardford land. The scenery was definitely more stark, though. The air was saltier. The tide was out.

He spent several idle hours simply wandering about and exchanging greetings with villagers who happened to be outdoors, working on an upturned boat or a net, or standing in groups gossiping while children darted about in exuberant pursuit of one another. He ended up in the taproom of an inn less grand in appearance than the one in the upper village, but reasonably clean and serviceable nonetheless. There were several men there, hunched over their ale, and Percy drew a few of them into conversation

He did not have a perfectly easy time of it, of course. It was impossible to blend into near invisibility among these villagers, who probably all knew one another anyway. They tended to be either awed speechless by the sight of him or clearly suspicious, even resentful, of his appearance thus among them in their own domain instead of remaining in his own, where he belonged. Well, he could not blame them, he supposed. He might resent it too if they took to wandering uninvited about his park and expected him not only to bob his head and pull on his forelock at the sight of them but also to exchange respectful greetings. And when a few men at the inn did respond to his conversational overtures, it seemed at first almost as if they were speaking a foreign language, so thick was their Cornish accent. He had to listen carefully just to get the gist of what they were saying.

He did not begin the conversation with any agenda in mind beyond getting better acquainted with this particular remote corner of England. But after a while he found himself tilting his apparently aimless chatter in a certain direction and gathering a few snippets of interesting information, even if doing so involved sifting through the barefaced lies he was told to get at the truth.

Smuggling in this area?
This
area? Puzzled looks and slowly shaking heads. Scratched heads. No, never. Not in a hundred years or more, anyway. Not like in the days of their long-ago forebears. The old-timers, now, would be able to tell him a tale or two, but even they could only tell the tales
they
had been told around a winter fire when they were nippers. Smuggling wouldn’t pay these days, even supposing anyone was interested in starting it up. Not with the revenue men breathing down their necks and the riding officers wasting their time out and about on the headlands looking for what was just not there. The government was wasting its money on their wages, it was. There was nothing for them to find hereabouts. Why should they use their boats for smuggling, anyway, when they could get a good catch of fish far more easily and make a lawful and decent living that way?