“If you merely go to sleep on my shoulder,” he said, “I shall be peeved. It is conversation time, Lady Barclay. On what topic do you wish to converse? The weather? Our own health and that of everyone else we know, the more gruesome the detail the better? Bonnets or parasols? Snuffboxes?”
Hector had come closer while he spoke and plumped down across one of his feet. The cat, which had been comfortably disposed upon its own bed when he went into the kitchen, had jumped onto the empty space at the other side of the love seat and curled up there to recover from the exertions of walking all the way to the sitting room.
“Oh, I would love to know about the latest fashions in bonnets,” she said. “Large brimmed or small? Ostentatiously trimmed or elegantly unadorned? Straw or felt? Tied beneath the chin or perched on the head to tempt the wind? But I suppose that being a man, you cannot give me the answers I crave.”
“Hmm,” he said. “How about snuffboxes, then? I can perhaps acquit myself more knowledgeably upon them.”
“But, alas,” she said, “I have not the smallest modicum of interest in snuffboxes.”
“Hmm.” He chewed the rest of the biscuit and frowned in thought. “Quizzing glasses?”
“I am about to break into a snore,” she said.
“Hmm.” He picked up the other biscuit. “Must we come, then, Lady Barclay, to the regrettable conclusion that we are quite incompatible in everything except sex?”
“Alas,” she said with a huge sigh—and then burst into laughter.
It was a sound of sheer silliness, and the thought occurred to him with a jolt of alarm that he might just possibly be falling in love with this woman—whatever the devil falling in lovewas.
He silenced her with his mouth.
“Alas that we are sexually compatible, did you mean?” he asked.
“You taste sweet.” She raised a finger, brushed what he supposed was a crystal of sugar from the corner of his mouth, and put the top joint of the finger in her mouth.
The minx. She was sheer blatant courtesan at that moment, and he was not at all sure she did not know it. Her eyes were steady on his.
“Sweet?” he said.
“It was not you after all.” She smiled at him. “It was the sugar on the biscuit.”
“Hmm,” he said.
“Tell me more about your childhood,” she said.
“It was really quite dull and uneventful,” he assured her, stretching his legs out before him and crossing them at the ankles—Hector made the necessary adjustments. “The greatest adventure by far was that episode on the cliff face I told you about. Apart from that, I was a docile, obedient lad. How could I not be? I was constrained by love. My parents adored me, as did my nurse, who, to my chagrin, stayed with me until I went away to Oxford at the age of seventeen. My tutors too, even the one who liked to swish his cane to punctuate his instruction and did not hesitate to use it on my backside when I was particularly thick about providing the right answers to his questions or when in a piece of writing I attached a plural verb to a singular subject or some such outrage. He loved me. He told me I had been blessed with a fine mind and that he was being paid to see to it that I learned how to use it properly, but I do believe he was motivated by more than just money.”
“Did you hate your lessons?” she asked.
“Not at all,” he told her. “I was that rarest of all breeds of boy—I enjoyed learning, and I enjoyed pleasing the adults who had the care of me. You would not have recognized me in those days, Imogen.”
“Were you lonely?” she asked.
“Oh, Lord, no,” he said. “There were regiments of relatives and others. Aunts and uncles galore and cousins abounding. I did not see the relatives with any great regularity, but when I did I had a grand old time. I was among the oldest of the cousins and I was always big for my age—andI was a boy. I quite undeservedly found myself the leader of the pack, and I was expected to lead my youngers into mischief. Even the adults expected it. I almost always did what was expected of me. But it was innocent mischief—climbing forbidden trees, swimming in forbidden lakes, stamping through forbidden muddy puddles for the sheer joy of getting ourselves thoroughly dirty, hiding in hedgerows and jumping out at unwary travelers, shrieking like demented things.”
Her head was turned on his shoulder and the side of her forefinger stroked lightly along his jaw.
“I ought to have been sent away to school,” he said.
“Youwerelonely.”
“If I was,” he said, “I am not sure I particularly noticed. I was so terribly innocent, though. I was shocked down to my toenails when I discovered that studying was the verylastthing a fellow was supposed to do at university. The height of accomplishment there was to drink one’s fellow imbibers under the table and to sleep with every barmaid in Oxford and its environs. Well, you know, Imogen, youdidask.”
“About yourchildhood,” she reminded him. “And you acquired these accomplishments, did you?”
“Not at all,” he said. “I thought I was there to learn, and that is what I did. It was not until the end that it suddenly dawned upon me that I was a thoroughly odd fellow and quite out of step with what being a gentleman was all about. I was a virgin when I came down from Oxford. Andthat,my lady, is something I have not told any other living soul. I am discovering that it is fatal to engage in conversation with a woman after two o’ clock in the morning.”
Deuced embarrassing, actually. What the devil had possessed him to divulge that particular detail from his inglorious past? A twenty-year-old male virgin, no less.
