Free Only a Kiss by Mary Balogh Page B

had left, “that was all very gratifying, was it not? As you have seen, Cousin Percy, we are not without genteel neighbors and genteel entertainments in the country here. There is little chance you will find time hanging heavily on your hands.”
    “That Kramer woman who does all the talking for her mother and sister is a bore,” Cousin Adelaide remarked. “
You
may have a comfortable coze with her during the assembly, Lavinia.
I
shall choose more congenial company.”
    “It would seem,” Imogen said, “that you are doomed to remain here for at least the next two weeks,
Cousin
Percy, since you have accepted invitations extending that far into the future. Not to mention Ruth Boodle’s birthday party more than three months from now.”
    “Doomed?”
He smiled with what she recognized as his most practiced, most devastatingly charming smile at her. “But what a happy doom it is sure to be, Cousin Imogen.”
    God’s gift to womankind, Cousin Adelaide had said. And to mankind too. That was what he thought he was, and it seemed that everyone who had called here today was only too eager to confirm him in that opinion. He was in reality an empty shell of vanity and artificiality and arrogance and peevish temper when he was thwarted. He was in sore need of a good setdown.
    But it really would not do to allow herself to continue being ruffled by someone who had done nothing more lethal to harm her than to demand of her
and who the devil might you be
? She was not usually one to bear a grudge.
    His smile had become more genuinely amused, and she realized that she had been holding his gaze. She got to her feet and pulled on the bell rope to summon a maid to remove the tea tray.
    Had he been right earlier when he had suggested that she resented him because he was in the place Dicky should have been? She hated to think it might be so.
    Her eyes rested fondly on Aunt Lavinia for a moment. Imogen’s mother and Aunt Lavinia had been at a girls’ school together in Bath for several years and had remained fast friends afterward. Imogen had come here often as a girl, sometimes with her mother, sometimes alone for extended periods. Aunt Lavinia had always declared that Imogen was the daughter she had never had. Being rather on the tomboyish side, Imogen had played with the son of the house from the start. They had become fast friends and comrades. They had never really fallen in love. The very idea seemed a little absurd. But at some point after they grew up they had made the mutual decision to continue their friendship into marriage so that they could remain together. Imogen could not even remember if there had been a marriage proposal and, if so, which of them had made it. Everything had always been mutual with them.
    She had loved him dearly. There had, of course, been the sexual component too after they married. That had always been vigorous and satisfying, though it had never been central to their relationship. Perhaps she was incapable of that emotional condition people called “being in love.” Which was just as well under the circumstances.
    “Who, with the name of Alton,” the earl asked of no one in particular, “would name his son Alden?”
    It was clearly a rhetorical question.
    He shook his head as though to clear it and fixed his gaze upon Aunt Lavinia.
    “About the strays,” he said.
    “Oh, dear,” she said. “But they have remained in the second housekeeper’s room all afternoon, Cousin Percy. Please do not make me send them away. It would be worse than ever for them to become strays again now that they have experienced a roof over their heads and regular feedings. And a little love.
Please
do not make me send them away.”
    “I will not,” he assured her. “Those that are here now may remain, though I will doubtless live to regret that decision. But there must be no more.”
    “It is so hard to turn any away,” she said, clasping her hands to her bosom, “when they are starving and look at one with