Only a Kiss

by Mary Balogh

  That took the wind out of her sails. His too, actually. He was never rude to women. Well, almost never. Only to this one woman, it seemed.

  “You are no gentleman, Lord Hardford,” she said.

  He might not have proved her right if she had not been close—entirely her own doing, since he had not moved an inch away from the sideboard. But she was close, and he did not even have to stretch his arm to the full in order to curl his hand about the nape of her neck. He did not have to bend very far forward in order to set his mouth to hers.

  He kissed her.

  And he did not need even the fraction of one second to know that he had made a big mistake.

  From her point of view it was certainly that. She broke off the kiss after perhaps two seconds and cracked him across one cheek with an open palm.

  And from his point of view—he wanted her. But she was the most inappropriate woman to want he could possibly have chosen—except that he had not chosen. That would be preposterous. She was the marble lady.

  His cheek stung and his eye watered. It was a new experience. He had never before been slapped across the face.

  “How dare you.”

  He owed her a groveling apology—at the very least.

  “It was only a kiss,” he said instead.

  “Only—” Her eyes widened. “That was no kiss, Lord Hardford. That was an insult. It was insufferable. You are insufferable. And I suppose you paid Mr. Tidmouth for half of my roof?”

  “In my experience,” he said, “half a roof is more or less useless.”

  “I can well afford the whole thing,” she told him.

  “So can I,” he assured her. “You will note, ma’am, that I pandered to your pride sufficiently to leave half the bill unpaid.”

  She stared at him. She was probably admiring her handiwork. He did not doubt that his cheek bore the scarlet imprint of her palm and all five fingers. It was still stinging like the devil. He would be wise not to provoke her in the future.

  “Shall we agree to the compromise?” he asked her.

  “It will be the greatest of pleasures,” she said, “to move back into my own house. For me as well as for you.”

  “You see?” he said. “When we try hard enough, we can come to mutual agreement on more than one theme. How bad is smuggling in this part of the world? Would you like some wine?”

  “Yes,” she said after a small hesitation.

  She took her glass from him after he had poured the wine, but she did not move away toward a chair.

  “My father-in-law liked his brandy,” she told him, “as do most of the gentlemen in this part of the world. He saw no wrong in defrauding the government of some taxes and tariffs. He saw customs officials and riding officers as the natural enemy of freedom and luxury, while the smugglers were heroes upholding the right of a gentleman to the best brandy his money could buy.”

  “This house is close to the sea,” he said. “Its cellars were used to store smuggled goods, I suppose?”

  “Close, but not close enough,” she said, swirling the wine in her glass for a moment before lifting it to her lips.

  “The dower house?”

  She raised her eyes to his. “You may have noticed,” she said, “that it is not far from that precipitous path to the beach. There are steps and a doorway on the side of the house facing the sea that lead directly to the cellar. I insisted upon having every item of contraband removed and the door blocked up from inside and out before I went to live there. Father-in-Law saw to it. He was fond enough of me to want me to be safe and not endangered in any way by all that viciousness. And he knew that Dicky had always been vehemently opposed to allowing smuggling on Hardford land and the products of smuggling in the dower house.”

  Well. Interesting.

  “Viciousness?”

  “It is not a romantic business,” she said, “despite all the stories to the contrary that you parodied on the way home.” She drained her glass and set it down on the sideboard. “Good night, Lord Hardford. And if you ever try to kiss me again, I will reply with my fist rather than my open hand.”

  He grinned at her. “A tactical error, Lady Barclay,” he said. “One never forewarns an adversary. To forewarn is to forearm.”

  She turned and left him. She closed the door quietly behind her. Not for Lady Barclay any unbridled passion or slammed doors.

  His cheek was still stinging.

  What the devil had possessed him? But if that kiss had lasted for two seconds, and he believed it had, then for at least one of those seconds she had kissed him back. It was like that laugh at the Kramer ladies’ house—blink and you missed it.

  He had not blinked on either occasion.

  When was marble not marble? And why was marble marble? Especially when it was not actual marble but a woman. Why was she marble? There must be thousands of women who had been widowed by the Napoleonic Wars. If they had all turned to marble forever after, England would be a marble nation, or half marble anyway. There would still be human men, he supposed. Pretty frustrated human men.

  He considered his book. Perhaps poetry—blank verse, no less—was just what his mind needed to compose itself for sleep.

  He strode back into the hall instead and donned his greatcoat and hat and gloves. He ought to go upstairs to change his footwear, but evening shoes would have to do. He let himself out through the front doors and strode directly across the lawn toward the cliffs. The clouds had moved off sufficiently to allow some moonlight and starlight through to light his way and ensure that he did not stride right off the edge. An alarming thought—but he would be pricked to death first by the gorse bushes.

  Hector, he noticed suddenly, was at his heels. Lord, that dog would be sleeping at the end of his bed next.

  “Protecting me from ghosts and smugglers and other assorted villains, are you?” Percy asked him. “That’s my boy.”

  7

  Imogen’s palm was still stinging. It was still red too, she saw in the light of the candle on her dressing table.

  She hated him. Worse, she hated herself. Hated herself.

  She could have avoided that kiss. She could have kept her distance from him. But even apart from that, there had been time to realize his intent and turn away. There had been a look in his eyes to warn her, the lifting of his hand to set at the back of her neck, the bending of his head toward hers. Oh, yes, there had been time.

  She had not turned away.

  And though for the first moment after his mouth touched hers—mouth, not just lips—her mind had been blank with shock, there had also been that next moment when her mind had not been blank at all, when she had wanted him with a fierce longing and had kissed him back. Just the merest moment.

  But how long was a moment? Had anyone ever defined it? Set time limits upon it? Was a moment one second long? Half a second? Ten minutes? She had no idea how long her moment of weakness had lasted. It did not matter, though. It had happened, and she would never forgive herself.

  Only a kiss, indeed.

  Only a kiss!

  He had no idea. But could she expect him to? He was a mere man—a handsome, virile, arrogant man who had probably always had just what he wanted of life, including any woman he desired. She had seen the way all the women, regardless of age and marital status, had looked at him tonight. Oh, no, he certainly could have had no idea. They had been alone together in the library late at night, they had been standing close to each other, and they had been quarreling. Of course his thoughts had turned to lust. It would have been surprising if they had not.

  Imogen sat on the stool before the dressing table, her back to the mirror. Her life was suddenly in tatters again, and there were still several weeks to go before the annual gathering of the Survivors’ Club at Penderris Hall. Her longing for the company and comfort of those six men was suddenly so acute that it bent her in two from t
he waist until her forehead almost touched her knees. George, Duke of Stanbrook, was probably at home. If she went early . . .

  If she went early, he would welcome her warmly and without question. She would find herself enveloped in peace and safety and . . .

  But she had to learn to cope alone with her living. That was what she thought she had done by the end of those three years at Penderris. She had made a pact with life. She would go through the motions of living it, return to Hardford, be an attentive daughter-in-law and niece, a cheerful and sociable neighbor, a fond daughter and sister and aunt. She would live alone without allowing herself to become a recluse. She would be kind—above all else she would be kind. And she would breathe one breath after another until there were no more, until her heart stopped and brought her final, blessed oblivion.

  She would go on, she had decided, but she would not live. She was not entitled to do that. The physician at Penderris had tried to lead her out of it, but she had remained adamant. Her six friends had offered comfort and encouragement and love, abundant and unconditional. They would have offered advice too if she had solicited it, but she had never asked them to talk her out of the future she had set herself.

  She spread her hands over her face and ached with longing to see them all again, to hear their voices, to know herself accepted for who she was, known for who she was and loved anyway. Ah, yes, for three weeks out of each year she allowed herself to be loved.

  Now her fragile peace had been shattered—by one moment and what the Earl of Hardford had carelessly dubbed only a kiss.

  Imogen undressed for bed though she had no expectation that she would sleep.

  * * *

  Percy absented himself from home for most of the next day. Assaulting a lady who was living under the protection of his own roof was decidedly not the thing, and he certainly owed her an apology, which he would get to in good time. First, though, he needed to take himself off and out of her sight for a while.

  He checked that the roofers were working at the dower house again—they were, all six of them, as well as Tidmouth, who was inside the garden gate, leaning back against it, arms folded, looking masterful. Percy did not linger in case Lady Barclay should come on the same errand.

  He paid calls upon Alton and Sir Matthew Quentin, both of whom owned land and farmed it even if they had never actually wielded a hoe or sheared a sheep. He felt woefully ignorant. No, he was woefully ignorant, and he needed to do something about it. He found himself tramping about the land of each in turn for the whole day and talking about virtually nothing other than farming—even with Lady Quentin at luncheon, since she set the topics of conversation. Alarmingly, he realized as he rode homeward in the late afternoon, he had enjoyed himself enormously and had felt not one jot of boredom. He had begun to conceive ideas for his own land. He was even excited at the prospect of conferring with his new steward when that as-yet-unknown individual arrived.

  Excited?

  He was going to be a candidate for Bedlam if he did not leave Cornwall soon and return to civilization and his familiar idle existence.

  He spent the evening in the library reading Pope, while the ladies presumably conversed and drank tea and busied themselves with whatever worthy and productive projects ladies did busy themselves with in the drawing room above. Lady Barclay had been almost silent during dinner and more like granite than marble. He obviously owed her a serious apology.

  He took the path toward the dower house again the following morning, Hector trotting inevitably in his wake, though it was not his intended destination. That was something altogether different, something for which he had steeled his nerve last night after Pope had lost his appeal—twenty pages of blank verse could do that.

  She was at her house before him today. She was standing at the gate—a popular place, that—talking with Tidmouth, who was oozing oily obsequiousness, especially after he spotted Percy approaching. And good God, there was actually a roof on the house, six workers swarming over it, looking diligent.

  Percy considered turning away and proceeding with his main plan for the morning, but sooner or later she was going to have to be confronted at more than a dining room table with her aunt and the female baritone to stand between him and embarrassment and humble pie.

  “Ah, Tidmouth,” he said after bidding Lady Barclay a good morning, “you are gracing us with your presence and your expertise again today, are you? Cracking the whip?”

  “Anything and everything to oblige a lady, Your Lordship,” the man said with a leer, revealing a mouthful of square, yellow teeth. “Cold as the weather is, it being only February and not normally the time of year for such bitter outdoor work, I will put myself and my men to any trouble and inconvenience necessary for the lady to have a roof over her head. No whipping required.”

  “Quite so,” Percy said. “I will leave you to it, then. Cousin, may I interest you in a walk?”

  She looked at him as though walking with him was the very last thing she wished to do. But perhaps she recognized the inevitability of a tête-à-tête encounter with him sooner or later.

  “You may,” she said.

  He did not offer his arm, and she did not show any sign that she either needed or expected to take it as she fell into step beside him.

  “I believe,” she said stiffly as they moved out of earshot of the man at the gate, “I ought to thank you for intervening on my behalf with Mr. Tidmouth. I was despairing of getting back into my house this year, but he has promised that I will be in next week.”

  “You are thanking me, then,” he said, “for making it possible for you to leave me so soon?”

  “That would sound ungracious.”

  “But true?”

  “May I remind you,” she said, “that it was you two evenings ago who lamented the fact that the longer my house was uninhabitable, the longer you were obliged to offer me hospitality in yours.”

  “I am sorry about that kiss,” he said. “It ought never to have happened, especially beneath my own roof, where I should be protecting you from insult, not offering it myself.”

  “But as you observed at the time,” she said, turning her head away so that he could not see her face around the brim of her bonnet, “it was only a kiss.”

  It sounded as if he was not to be forgiven.

  They stopped at the top of the broken cliff face with its zigzagging path downward. He had stopped a little farther back two nights ago, on the other side of the gorse bushes, when he had come to see if any smugglers were swarming the beach, cutlasses at the ready—at least, that was what he assumed he had come to see. He had been a bit agitated at the time. His knees felt decidedly weak now, and his breathing quickened.

  It was not a windy day, but there was enough of a breeze to make the air nippy. The tide looked halfway in—or halfway out. He had no idea which. Waves were breaking in a line of foam along the beach. The sea beyond them was foam-flecked too. Apart from that, it was steely gray.

  “Would you care to go down?” he asked her.

  Please say no. Please say no.

  “I thought you were afraid of the sea and the cliffs,” she said.

  “Afraid?” He raised his eyebrows, all incredulity. “I? Whatever gave you that idea?”

  Her eyes searched his face for a disconcerting moment, and then she turned and disappeared over the edge. Oh, nothing quite as drastic as that. She stepped off the cliff-top path and onto the track down and then she kept on going. She did not look back.

  He looked down at Hector. “Stay here or trot back home,” he advised. “No one, least of all I, will call you a coward.”

  And no one would call him a coward either, by thunder. No one ever had. No one had ever had cause—well, except once. He just happened to be terrified witless of the sea. Ditto of sheer cliffs. Not too fond of golden sands either, mainly because they had a nasty habit of widening and narrowing
with the tide—sometimes narrowing to a point at which sea and cliffs joined forces.

  Why the devil did he need to prove anything to himself? But it was too late now to change his plan. He could hardly stand up here and wait to wave down at her when she reached the beach.

  He launched out into space.

  It was not even a particularly dangerous track, of course. Indeed, it was a well-used thoroughfare. It had been climbed numerous times, had it not, by bands of smugglers as they hauled casks of brandy and Lord knew what other contraband, to be stored in the cellar of the dower house. Lady Barclay had probably tripped up and down here a thousand times for pure pleasure—though his mind’s choice of the word tripped caused his stomach a moment of distress.

  There were just a couple of places where the path disappeared, to be replaced by rocks large and sturdy enough to provide perfectly safe footing. He was down on the beach almost before he knew it, his feeling of relief and triumph tempered only by the knowledge that somehow he was going to have to get himself back up there in the foreseeable future.

  Something was bleating. There was no sign of any sheep. But Hector, he could see, was stranded on the jutting rock just above shoulder level and could not seem to find the path that would have brought him the rest of the way down.

  “I believe,” Lady Barclay said, “you have a friend, Lord Hardford.”

  “Only one?” he said. “Could I be that pathetic?”

  He reached up and gathered the dog in his arms. He did it carefully. The creature’s legs still looked as if they could be snapped as easily as dry twigs. Its ribs were still clearly visible, though they were beginning to acquire a thin covering of fat. He turned, the dog still in his arms, and caught a look on Lady Barclay’s face that surely teetered on the brink of laughter.