And Then He Kissed Her (3 page)

Most important, she had that quality so often attributed to females and yet so often absent in their character: Miss Dove was compliant. Hers not to reason why. If Harry had ordered her to get on a ship, go to Kenya, and bring him back a one-pound sack of coffee beans, she would have glided out of his office and headed to Thomas Cook & Son to book passage.

While convenient for his own life, Miss Dove’s compliancy made her seem a bit unreal, not like any flesh-and-blood woman Harry had ever known. Having an interfering mother, an even more interfering grandmother, three interfering and woefully disobedient sisters, as well as a personal weakness for tempestuous lovers, including—alas—his former wife, Harry’s lifetime of experience with the fair sex told him that real women were anything but compliant.

It was Miss Dove’s lack of passion, he supposed, more than her unremarkable looks, which made employing her so uncomplicated. An enticing, defiant female secretary, now, that would have been an impossible situation, much more fun but very short-lived. No, as secretaries went, he preferred Miss Dove, and from the beginning he had vowed never to entertain am
orous notions about her. It was fortunate she’d always made that resolution so easy to keep.

“There,” she said and stepped back, bringing Harry’s observations about her to an end. She studied him for a moment, then gave a nod. “I hope you will find that satisfactory, sir.”

Harry didn’t bother to verify her handiwork in a mirror. He had no doubt whatsoever that his tie was now a perfect bow, and probably the one most fashionable for gentlemen at the moment.

“Miss Dove, you are a treasure.” He folded his collar down, picked up his hat, and once again started for the door. “I don’t know what I should do without you.”

“About my new book,” she began, her words impelling him to walk toward the door at an even faster pace. “Will you—”

“Have it delivered to my house before I leave tomorrow morning,” he said quickly, cutting her off before she could cite him any more statistics about girl-bachelors. “I’ll have a look at it while I’m in the country.”

“Thank you, my lord.”

Harry departed with profound relief. Too bad he couldn’t avoid the opera as easily as he avoided Miss Dove’s manuscripts.

“L
ord Dillmouth and his daughters have arrived in town. Their cousins, the Abernathy girls, came with them.”

With those words from his sister Diana, Harry knew what was coming next. He signaled to the waiter hovering nearby for more wine, knowing he would need it. “What a thrilling piece of news. Shall I print it in one of my papers?”

“Mama and I saw them at intermission tonight.” The eldest of his three sisters, six years
younger than himself, Diana was beautiful and clever. She was also amazingly single-minded. Undaunted by his lack of enthusiasm for the subject she had introduced, Diana ceased discussion of it only long enough to tuck a loose tendril of her dark brown hair behind her ear and take a sip of her wine, then she carried on. “They were looking so well. Lady Florence, especially. She is an acknowledged beauty.”

“I daresay she is,” he agreed at once. “Odd how her brains are less admired.”

“Juliette Bordeaux being a prime example of how much you value feminine intellect,” Diana shot back at once.

Harry decided not to mention he’d broken with Juliette. It would only encourage the hope he’d remarry. “She’s a keener mind than Lady Florence,” he said instead. “Although that’s not saying much, I grant you.”

His youngest sister spoke up. “Why do you associate with that woman?” Phoebe asked, her adorable cherub face scrunching up with genuine puzzlement.

Harry didn’t enlighten her, for the appeal of voluptuous cancan dancers was hardly a subject that a gentleman discussed with his sisters.

His mother seemed to share his opinion on the topic. “Phoebe, that will be enough,” Louisa said, trying to sound firm and authoritative, but his mother, alas, was as firm as a custard. Which was why, Harry felt sure, he had three impossible sisters.

“After all,” Louisa added obscurely, “we are dining at the Savoy.”

His middle sister, Vivian, began to laugh. “What does that have to do with it, Mama?” She glanced around the luxurious private dining room in which they were seated. “These red walls, crystal chandeliers, and gold brocade draperies seem lavish enough for a music hall dancer.”

“Vivian!” Antonia, his grandmother, cast a disapproving glance around the table. “We shall not discuss that Bordeaux woman any further,” she ordered, her ponderous voice far more impressive than his mother’s dithery accents. “It upsets my digestion.”

Because she was close on eighty, Grandmama’s commands and her digestion were both regarded with respect. The subject of Juliette was dropped, much to Harry’s satisfaction. Too bad they couldn’t also leave off speculations about his non ex is tent future wife, a subject of unceasing fascination for the women in his family, especially his sisters.

“Lady Florence is a bit thick, Di,” Vivian said, reverting to the subject Diana had introduced, agreeing with Harry’s assessment on the intelligence of the younger Dillmouth girl. “Surely we can do better.”

“My preferences mean nothing, I know,” he said, donning an air of humble deference to the wisdom of his sisters’ matchmaking abilities, “but the idea of marrying Florence Dillmouth makes me shudder.”

“The idea of marrying anyone makes you shudder,” Diana said wryly. “That’s the problem.”

“That, Di, is not a problem. It’s a blessing. Phoebe, pass the ham.”

Phoebe complied with his request. “What about Florence’s sister, Melanie?” she suggested as Harry helped himself to ham. “Melanie’s all right. She’s nice without being humbug. I rather like her.”

“Excellent,” he said around a mouthful of ham. “Then why don’t you marry her?”

“Harrison, don’t talk with your mouth full,” Antonia ordered as if he were a boy of seven instead of a mature man of thirty-six. “And girls, stop trying to find your brother’s next wife. It only makes him more determined not to find her himself. It’s understandable, I suppose,” she added grudgingly, “that he would be chary of remarrying after that unspeakable American.”

That unspeakable American
was his grandmother’s only way of referring to his former wife. Not that he minded the phrase. He preferred not to speak of Consuelo, either.

“One bad experience shouldn’t deter you from marrying again,” Phoebe told him.

“The voice of knowledge,” he said, trying to deflect from the unpleasant subject at hand by teasing her.

“We just want you to be happy.”

“I know, Angelface, and I adore you for it.” He leaned over and bussed her cheek with an affectionate kiss. “But marrying again would never make me happy. Trust me on that.”

“How tactless of you to speak this way, Harry, with my wedding only ten months away.” Diana’s amused voice once again entered the conversation. “Unlike you, I am quite thrilled to be making a second venture into matrimony. Edmund is the most wonderful man I have ever known.”

Diana’s first marriage had been an unfortunate one, and though her husband had caused her terrible pain with his blatant infidelities, he’d had the good sense to die in a railway accident. Despite the misery she had endured, Diana had never lost her utter faith that love and marriage went hand in hand. Six years after her first husband’s death, she was about to make a second match. Perhaps this time her faith would be justified. For her sake, Harry hoped so, but that didn’t mean he intended to follow her example.

“You’re a romantic, Diana. Always were.”

“And my fiancé? Edmund’s past experience with marriage was just like yours, you know. He fell in love with one of those Americans, too, and married her. His divorce was every bit as difficult and painful, but unlike you, he wasn’t made cynical by it.”

Cynical? Pain shimmered through his chest, a faint echo of what he’d felt the night he’d finally accepted the truth about his wife and their future. The night she’d left him and he’d abandoned any notions of love everlasting that had managed to survive the four hellish years of their life together. “I am not cynical,” he said, lying through his teeth. “I simply see no reason to get married a second time.”

“No reason?” His grandmother looked up from her meal to stare at him in shocked disapproval. “What about an heir to the estate?”

“I have an heir. Cousin Gerald.”

Antonia made a sound of contempt.

“But Grandmama, he wants the job, anticipates it most eagerly, in fact. Every time he visits Marlowe Park, he counts the silver, asks about the drains, and spends hours interviewing my steward. I should hate to see such exemplary self-education go to waste.”

Antonia, a bit like the Queen in many ways, was not amused. “Stop talking nonsense, Harrison. You always do that when you wish to avoid an unpleasant subject. You are a viscount. It is your first and only duty to marry well and have sons.”

Grandmama was well behind the times. She simply could not accept that the landed aristocracy were a stone-broke lot nowadays. Harry had seen the way the wind was blowing years ago. The one thing he could thank Consuelo for was her father, and the valuable lesson old Mr. Estravados had taught him. It was captains of industry, he’d told Harry, not aristocrats, who would wield the money and power in the future. Harry had taken those words to heart, and it had paid off handsomely these past fourteen years. Having entailed estates and sons to inherit them wasn’t the crucial thing it used to be.

But his mother just had to offer her opinion on the matter. “Harry, you must marry and have sons. Of course you must. Time is going by. Why,
you’re thirty-six now, and in a few more years, it’ll be too late. You’ll be forty, and we all know what happens to men around that time, poor dears.”

Harry choked on his wine.

Louisa didn’t seem to notice. “You must find a wife immediately.”

He told himself his mother didn’t know what she was talking about. “Why should I go to the trouble of finding a wife, Mama, when my sisters are exerting such strenuous efforts to find one on my behalf?”

“What happens to men at forty?” Phoebe wanted to know.

“Never mind,” Diana told her, and before Phoebe could ask any more questions, she once again returned the conversation to the Dillmouth girls. “You know, Phoebe, I believe you’re right. Lady Melanie would be a better choice. Some would say she’s on the shelf a bit at twenty-eight, and she isn’t as pretty as Florence, but she does have black hair, and Harry has such a decided preference for women with hair of that particular shade. Melanie is also the more intelligent of the two sisters.”

“Intelligent?” Harry gave a long-suffering sigh. “Melanie Dillmouth can’t carry on a conversation. She’s so tongue-tied, I wonder how any of you can form an opinion of her intelligence.”

“She’s tongue-tied around
you
,” Diana told him. “It’s understandable, I suppose, given her feelings, though I’m not sure those feelings make her a good wife for you or not.”

“What are you talking about?”

His eldest sister groaned. “Oh, Harry! Sometimes you are the densest of creatures.”

“No doubt,” he agreed at once. “I am a man, after all. But what is it about me that causes Melanie Dillmouth’s tongue to cease functioning?”

“She’s in love with you, of course!”

“What?” Harry was astonished. “Don’t be silly.”

“She is,” Diana insisted. “She always has been. Ever since you saved her cat.”

He paused in his supper to take a glance around the table, and his lack of memory about the event in question must have shown in his face. His inquiring glance was answered with four sighs of exasperation and one aggravated elderly harrumph, all of which slid off his back like water off a duck. Surrounded as he was by females, with his father dead nearly twenty years now, and without a single brother to help even the odds, he had learned long ago it was impossible to live up to feminine expectations. “You’re mad, Di,” he said and resumed eating. “I’d never save a cat. I loathe cats.”

“I can’t believe you don’t remember,” Diana chided him. “That summer when the Dillmouth girls stayed with us at Marlowe Park. You were just out of Cambridge. Melanie’s cat got caught in a rat trap and you got it out.”

A vague memory surfaced. “For heaven’s sake, that was ages ago. Fifteen years, at least.”

“She’s never forgotten it,” Diana told him. “She cried when you married Consuelo.”

“If I’d known what I was in for, I’d have cried, too.”

None of them seemed to find that amusing. Harry wondered how his family could ever think the image of Melanie Dillmouth crying over him would spark any romantic interest on his part. The only desire that pity for a woman inspired in a man was the desire to run away.

“What about Elizabeth Darbury?” Phoebe suggested. “She’s got black hair.”

“Good breeders in that family.” Antonia gave a nod of approval. “The Darburys always have at least two sons in every generation.”

“Lizzie Darbury won’t do,” Vivian said. “She never understands Harry’s jokes. She just stares at him as if he’s a bit touched in the head and doesn’t laugh.”

“And that’s important,” Louisa said. “Men do hate it when we don’t find them amusing. Especially Harry. It quite upsets him.”

“It does not upset me. And I don’t know why my sisters are so determined to choose a wife for me.”

“Because you are so bad at it,” Vivian said at once, eliciting a round of nods from the other women at the table.

Unable to refute that very valid point, and too kindhearted to remind them that Diana’s first marriage choice hadn’t been any better than his own had been, Harry decided silence might discourage his sisters. Three seconds told him that strategy was seriously flawed.

“There’s Mary Netherfield,” Vivian said. “She’s a stylish way about her. Always so perfectly turned out.”

From Vivian, who adored clothes and paid attention to every feminine fashion, that was the highest of compliments.

Phoebe negated Lady Mary with a shake of her head. “She hasn’t a prayer. She’s blond and blue-eyed. And she’s the steady, sensible kind.”

“Yes, but that’s just the sort of wife he needs.” Vivian made a vague gesture in his direction. “He’s so erratic, he needs a steady, sensible girl.”

“But Harry hates that type.”

What Harry hated was how they discussed him if he weren’t even in the room. “This is a pointless conversation,” he told them, becoming irritated. “I am never getting married again. How many times do I have to say it?”

“Oh, Harry,” his mother wailed, looking at him with profound disappointment, “you are so hopeless when it comes to anything important.”

As if the money he earned, money that kept all of them clothed in Worth gowns, entertained at the opera, and dining in a private dining room at the Savoy, wasn’t important. But he knew it would have been futile to point out to Louisa where the money came from. With his mother, logic was useless, especially about money matters. He’d tried to explain stock shares to her once. It had given them both a headache.

“You must get married and have sons,” she went on. “Decent cottages are so difficult to find nowadays.”

What cottages had to do with having a son was beyond him, but there, that was Louisa all over. Saying things he couldn’t follow was second nature to her.

It was Phoebe who correctly interpreted his puzzled look. “Gerald would never let us live at Marlowe Park if you died and he became the viscount,” she explained. “Since it’s entailed, we’d have to go let a house somewhere.”

“Ah.” Enlightened, Harry did not point out that the million or so pounds sitting in Lloyd’s earning interest was more than enough security for his family’s future. Instead, he pretended to think the matter over. “I suppose you could always move to America after I’m gone. They’ve plenty of cottages there. Village called Newport has some nice little places.”

His mother never knew when he was teasing. “Well, this is a fine state of things,” she said, her voice quavering. “What ever shall we do if you die without an heir?”

Somehow, Harry found his own demise a far more distressing thing to contemplate than his lack of a son, but obviously he was the only one who saw the matter in that light.

Diana gave a little cough. “As I mentioned before, the Dillmouths brought their Abernathy cousins with them, Nan and Felicity. And I thought—”