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 hav
e 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—”
“Enough!” Harry dropped his knife and fork onto his plate with a clatter, at the end of his tether. “Will all of you stop this? No woman on earth will inspire me to make a second attempt at matrimony. I shall never marry again. Ever! Is that clear?”
In the wake of his outburst, the five women he loved more than anything else in the world stared at him like a litter of wounded kittens. He hated it when they did that.
He pushed back his plate, and since everyone else had also finished eating, he gestured to the waiter to begin clearing the table. “I don’t know why we’re discussing me anyway,” he said. “It’s Phoebe’s birthday. I think it’s time for her to open her presents. Speaking of which…”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the tiny, tissue-wrapped package. He presented it to his baby sister with a flourish. “There you are, Angelface. Happy birthday.”
She looked up at him, and her blue eyes were shining. “It’s a Limoges box, isn’t it? It must be. It’s so small, it can’t be anything else. Am I right?”
“Open it and see.”
She untied the ribbon and pulled off the wrapping paper. When she opened the paperboard box and saw what was inside, she began to laugh. “It has the faces of angels painted on it.”
“So it is Limoges?” Vivian craned her neck, trying to have a look.
“It is. Look.” Phoebe held it up so the others could see.
Miss Dove’s description came back to him, and he leaned over his youngest sister’s shoulder. “I say, those boxes open, don’t they?” he asked in pretended innocence.
Phoebe fell for the ploy. “Yes, they do,” she said and demonstrated by pulling back the small, hinged lid. “See how they—Oh, my!”
She tumbled the ring into her palm. “A sapphire! Look, everyone, it’s a sapphire.” Setting aside the Limoges box, she held up the ring only long enough for everyone to get a glimpse, then she slipped it on the finger of her right hand. It fit perfectly. Of course. Miss Dove, heaven bless her, would never let it be otherwise.
“You’re twenty-one now,” he said, “and sapphires seem right. Go with your eyes, you know. Like it?”
“Like it?” Phoebe turned to wrap her arms around his neck. “I love it,” she declared and gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek. “It’s perfect! And the Limoges box is perfect. You give us the best presents always!”
“That’s all right, then,” he said and pressed a kiss to her forehead.
Her mother, her grandmother, and Vivian gathered around Phoebe to admire her present, but Diana did not join them. Instead, she remained where she was and leaned closer to Harry. “That Miss Dove is amazing,” she whispered. “She always finds us the perfect gifts.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t worry, dear brother. I’m the only one who’s figured out your secret, and I won’t tell.”
“You’re a brick, Di.”
“Well, you may not say that after I confess what I’ve done.”
He turned to look at her.
She told him.
“What?” His roar silenced the room, and the four other women looked at him in alarm. Diana grimaced at the expression on his face.
“I was carried away by a spirit of compassion,” she explained and bit her lip, trying and failing to look contrite.
“Compassion, my eye!”
“Heavens,” his mother spoke up, “what ever is the matter?”
It was Diana who answered. “I told him about the invitation.”
“Oh, dear.” Louisa frowned with concern, studying him for a moment. “He doesn’t like it, does he?”
“How could you think I would?” Harry demanded, his voice rising.
“Well, it’s done now,” Diana said.
Louisa’s face brightened at those words. “Yes, and it was the right thing to do, after all.”
“Right thing?”
“Harry, darling, don’t shout. Those poor girls came to London with only crotchety old Dillmouth t
o watch over them. I mean, really! Awful to bring them for the season without a proper chaperone. What was he thinking?”
“No.” Harry shook his head. “I refuse to allow it.”
He might have been talking to the wind.
“All I can say is that losing his dear wife all those years ago has finally unhinged his mind,” Louisa went on. “Heavens, those poor girls wouldn’t have been able to go about at all. So dull for them.” She looked at him with a queer sort of defiance. “I still say Diana did the right thing.”
The idea of having four additional women living in his house for the next six weeks, all of whom were his sisters’ notion of marriage prospects for him, filled Harry with dismay. He thought of the weeping Lady Melanie, and his dismay deepened into dread. “Get a gun,” he muttered. “Put me out of my misery now.”
“What is all this about?” Antonia demanded. “Explain yourself, Diana.”
“Mama and I saw Dillmouth, his daughters, and their two Abernathy cousins during the intermission when we were at the opera. They have no chaperone but Dillmouth, and once I understood their situation, I issued an invitation for all four girls to come to us for a six-week visit. It never occurred to me that Harry would mind.”
“The hell it didn’t.” Harry scowled at her.
“I issued the invitation in front of Dillmouth,” she went on serenely, “and he accepted for them. I cannot retract it now.”
“I should say not!” Antonia frowned at the very idea. “That would be abominably rude.”
Harry groaned, knowing he was trapped. Though Dillmouth was severely in debt, he was a marquess, well above Harry in rank, and very powerful in the House. He was not the sort to forget a snub. With his sisters’ social prospects severely curtailed by his divorce, they could not afford to snub a man like Dillmouth. He didn’t know whether to throttle Diana or go pound his head into a wall.
“It’s settled, then. They come in a week, just in time for your return from Berkshire.” Diana smiled at him. “By the way, Harry, you have never met Lady Felicity. Beautiful girl.”
And Then He Kissed Her Page 3
