Only Enchanting (20 page)

“Oh, he assured the others he would return,” Lady Harper said, “but they do miss him. And he gave no explanation, the wretched man.”

Lady Trentham’s eyes were resting upon Agnes. “I am
sure he
will
return if he said he would,” she said. “Besides, he took the Earl of Berwick’s curricle and horses, and will feel obliged to return them. Will you come this evening? Miss Debbins? Mrs. Keeping? We were to tell you that no would not be an acceptable answer and that the carriage will be sent for you at seven.”

“In that case, we must be gracious about it and say yes,” Dora said, laughing. “There is no need to send the carriage, though. We will be happy to walk.”

Lady Harper laughed. “We were told you would say just that, and we were given an answer from Lord Darleigh himself. We were to inform you that the carriage will be here whether you choose to walk beside it or ride inside.”

“Well, then. We would look silly walking beside it, I suppose.” Dora laughed again.

He was gone. Without a word.

He had said he would return, and it seemed he
must
return, since he had a borrowed conveyance with him. But there was only one day of the visit left.

Agnes turned and half ran up the stairs to her room after she and Dora had waved the ladies on their way. She did not want to talk about it. She did not want to talk at all. Ever. She wanted to climb beneath the bedcovers, pull them up over her head, curl into a ball, and stay there for the rest of her life.

And
this
, she thought, catching a glimpse of her image in the dressing table mirror and pausing to nod at herself in some disgust, was a fine way to be behaving when one was twenty-six years old, a staid, refined widow, and wise enough to have turned down an advantageous marriage offer because it could lead only to lasting unhappiness.

This
was not unhappiness?

Besides, she had not turned it down, had she? She had promised not to until he left.

He
had
left. But he had also said this time that he would return. It all seemed
so typical
of Viscount Ponsonby. She would be a fool. . . .

But at least she could prepare for this evening without a palpitating heart. He was not at the house. She could occupy her mind with nothing more disturbing than the enormously important question of which of her three evening gowns she would wear. Certainly not the green. The blue or the lavender, then. But which?

She grimaced at her image and turned away.

11

T
here was a degree of tiredness at which one was bone weary yet beyond feeling sleepy.

It was a point Flavian had reached by the time he drove himself through the village of Inglebrook in the middle of the evening. There was no light in the cottage. They must be in bed already. He could not remember when he had last slept, though he had taken a room at the same inn both going and coming and had certainly lain down on the bed on both occasions. He remembered hauling off his boots and wishing for his valet.

He should drive straight to the stables, abandon his rig—or rather Ralph’s—to the care of Vince’s grooms, go up to his room, and collapse on the bed without summoning his valet, who was probably still sulking anyway over the unexpected five-day holiday he had been given.

There were lights blazing in the drawing room windows, he saw as he was approaching the house. That was not surprising, of course. It was not
that
late, even though it was dark outside already.

There were two unfamiliar gigs outside the stable block. Ah, visitors. Another reason why he should go straight to bed. He would have to change and wash and shave even to appear before his friends and their ladies,
of course, but he would have to make a more special effort for visitors. And he would have to smile and be sociable. He was not sure he
could
smile. It sounded like too much of an effort.

He would not sleep either, though, he suspected. He felt wound up like a child’s spinning top. And the closer he had come to Middlebury, the madder his whole errand seemed. What the devil had possessed him? It was too late to ponder that question now, however. He had gone and he had returned, and if he had wasted his time, then there was nothing he could do about it now.

He nodded to the footman on duty in the hall and directed the man to send his valet up to him. Perhaps a wash and a shave and a bit of sociability would make him properly tired and enable him to sleep tonight.

Who
were
the visitors? he wondered.

He found out half an hour later when he sauntered into the drawing room, quizzing glass in hand. Vincent was sitting by the fire with Imogen and Harrison, his neighbor and particular friend. George was standing beside the fireplace, one elbow propped on the mantel. Harrison’s wife was seated at one card table, as was the vicar. The vicar’s wife and Miss Debbins were at another. Ben, his wife, Ralph, and Lady Trentham made up the two tables. Lady Darleigh was carrying two drinks to the vicar’s table. Hugo was standing behind his wife’s chair but was conversing with Mrs. Keeping, who stood beside him.

She was wearing a very modest, almost prim blue gown, which had surely never, ever been even remotely fashionable. He suspected its color was slightly faded too. Her hair was ruthlessly tamed, with not a single strand fallen loose by accident or design to tease the imagination.

She looked utterly delicious.

Short as he had been of time in London, he had nevertheless looked about him quite deliberately at the ladies. There had been some real beauties among them, and others who had made themselves
seem
beautiful or at least alluring by what they wore and how they wore it. He had been quite unenchanted by every single one of them.

It had been most alarming.

He met her eyes for a heartbeat before Lady Darleigh spotted him at the same moment George and Imogen did.

“Flavian!”

“Lord Ponsonby!”

“You are back, Flavian,” Imogen said, coming toward him, both her hands extended. She turned her cheek for his kiss as he dropped his quizzing glass on its ribbon and clasped her hands.

“I h-had to return Ralph’s curricle and horses,” he said, “or he would have borne a g-grudge for the next ten years or so. He is t-touchy that way.”

“I would have taken your carriage instead, Flave,” Ralph said, looking up from his cards. “No carriage seats have any right to be so plush and cozy.”

“Do let me fetch you a drink and something to eat,” Lady Darleigh said after everyone else had greeted him—with one or two exceptions. “Are you cold? Do move closer to the fire.”

He went to squeeze Vincent’s shoulder and tell him how good it felt to be back among all his friends again. He exchanged a few words with George and Harrison, he spoke with Hugo for a minute or two, and then he went to stand beside Mrs. Keeping, who had moved to look intently over her sister’s shoulder as though it was
she
who was playing the hand.

She pretended not to notice him. It might have been
a convincing performance if every muscle in her body had not visibly tensed as he approached.

“Far from being cold in here,” he observed to no one in particular, though all except one person close by was involved in the card game, “it is actually overwarm. Quite b-boiling with heat, in fact.”

No one either agreed or disagreed.

“And although d-darkness has fallen,” he persisted, “and it is still only M-March, it is not a cold night, and there is not a breath of w-wind. It is perfect for a stroll on the terrace, in fact, p-provided one wears a warm cloak.”

It was Miss Debbins who answered. She looked over her shoulder, first at him and then at her sister.

“Take mine, Agnes,” she said. “It is warmer than yours.”

And she returned her attention to her cards.

Mrs. Keeping did not react at all for a moment. Then she turned to look at him.

“Very well,” she said. “For a few minutes. It
is
warm in here.”

And she turned to precede him from the room. He had to move smartly in order to open the door for her.

And here he went again. Acting from sheer impulse before he had prepared himself properly or composed any pretty speech or gathered any rosebuds or their March equivalent. And with a mind befuddled from lack of sleep. Would he never learn?

He suspected that the answer was no.

She asked the footman in the hall for her sister’s cloak, and she and Flavian stood side by side, not touching, not looking at each other, while it was fetched. He took it from the footman’s hand and draped it about her shoulders, but before he could touch the fastenings, she very firmly buttoned the cloak herself.

The footman had moved ahead of them and was holding open the door.

Flavian hoped the Survivors, their wives, and all the guests were not lined up at the drawing room windows, looking down at them. It might as well be daylight. The moon was more or less at the full, and every star ever invented was beaming and twinkling down from a clear sky.

But, no, not a single one of them would even peep from a window. They were far too well-bred. But he would wager there was not a one of them who had not noticed and drawn his own conclusion. Or
her
own conclusion.

Mrs. Keeping kept her hands very firmly inside her cloak as he indicated the terrace that ran along the east wing of the house.

*   *   *

All Agnes had been able to think of when he had walked into the drawing room, looking immaculate and immaculately gorgeous, was that she ought to have worn her lavender. On balance she preferred the blue, but it was primmer than the lavender.

How stupidly random and trivial one’s thoughts could sometimes be. As if his coming into the room had not turned her world on its head.

“Did you m-miss me?” he asked.

“Miss you?” she said, her voice surprised and brittle—she would surely be booed off any stage and perhaps even helped off with a rotten tomato. “I did not even realize you were gone until someone mentioned it today. Why
should
I miss you?”

“Quite so,” he said agreeably. “It was mere v-vanity that made me hope you had.”

“I would imagine,” she said, “it is your
friends
who have missed you, Lord Ponsonby. I thought this annual
gathering of the Survivors’ Club meant more to any of the seven of you than any fleeting pleasure that might draw you off for a few days to enjoy yourself elsewhere.”

“You are angry,” he said.

“On their behalf,” she told him. “And yet, even now that you have returned, you are not spending time with them. You have stepped out here with me instead.”

“Perhaps you are one of those f-fleeting pleasures,” he said with a sigh.

“Much of a pleasure I am to you,” she said tartly, “when you can go away for five whole days without a word in order to indulge some other whim.”

“You are a whim, Agnes?” he asked her.

“
I
am not what took you away,” she told him. “And I am Mrs. Keeping to you.”

“But you are,” he protested. “You are Mrs. K-Keeping to me. As well as Agnes. And you
are
what took me away.”

Her nostrils flared. And her steps slowed. She had been setting a cracking pace. With a few more steps they would be beyond the terrace and beyond the end of the east wing, and setting off across the lawn leading to the eastern end of the wilderness walk. She had no intention of walking in any wildernesses with Viscount Ponsonby.

“I am scarcely hard to avoid, my lord,” she said. “It is not as though I put myself deliberately in your path every hour of every day. Or ever, in fact. You did not need to go away for five whole days in order not to see me.”

“Counting, were you?” It was his lazy, slightly bored voice.

“Lord Ponsonby.” She stopped walking altogether and turned toward him. She hoped he could see the indignation in her face. “You flatter yourself. I have a
life
. I have been too busy—too
happily
busy—to spare you a thought. Or even to notice that you had gone.”

His back was to the moon. Even so, she could see the sudden grin on his face—before she took a sharp step backward and then another until the wall was behind her and there was no farther to retreat. He advanced on her.

“I did not know you could be p-provoked to anger,” he said softly. “I like you angry.”

He lowered his head toward hers, and she expected to be kissed. She even half closed her eyes in expectation.

“But I did need to go away,” he said, his voice no more than a whisper of sound and breath, “so that I could come back.”

“On the assumption that absence makes the heart grow fonder?” She raised her eyebrows.

“
Does
it?” he asked her. “Are you fonder of me now than you were f-five days ago, Agnes Keeping?”

It was hard to speak with the proper indignation when one had a man standing so close that one could feel his body heat and when, if one moved one’s head forward even an inch, one’s mouth would collide with his.

“
Fonder
implies that I was fond to start with,” she said.

“
Were
you?”

He was a rake and a libertine and a seducer, and she had always known it. How dare Dora aid and abet him by offering her own cloak because it was warmer than Agnes’s? Dora ought to have leapt to her feet and forbidden him to take her sister one step beyond the door of the room.

Agnes took her hands away from the wall behind her and braced them against his chest instead.

“Why did you go?” she asked him. “And, having gone, why did you come back?”

“I went so that I
could
come back,” he said, and he covered the backs of her hands with his palms. “What
sort of wedding would you prefer, Agnes? Something g-grand with b-banns and all sorts of time to summon everyone who has ever known you and all your relatives s-stretching back to your g-great-grandparents? Or something quieter and more intimate?”

That weak thing happened with her knees again, and she licked dry lips.