Page 9 of A Wallflower to Win the Viscount

She would love to be able to do something, anything, to ease his hidden suffering, but she’d taken in enough strays in her time to also know the wounded ones sometimes mistook kindness for a threat.

‘So you had a social Season?’ he asked off-handedly, in what was no doubt a deliberate attempt to move the conversation away from himself.

‘Yes’ was all Primrose was prepared to say on that matter, one she was as reluctant to talk about as he clearly was about his father.

‘But you chose not to marry and have children?’

‘Mmm,’ she said. She was not exactly given a choice in the matter! ‘But I do have a family. I have my animals,’ she added, smiling at Clawdia, who had gone back to curling around the viscount’s legs.

‘Do your other neighbours not complain about all these animals? Do they not object to the noise or the smell?’

‘My animals do not smell. They are very clean.’

Little Honk took that inopportune moment to make an unfortunate mess on the edge of the terrace.

The viscount looked over at her and raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

‘Well, yes, that does happen occasionally, but we always clean up after them, immediately.’

As if with a sixth sense, Alfred appeared with a brush and shovel, promptly removing all signs of Little Honk’s indiscretion.

‘And the noise?’

‘Well, they don’t make much noise.’ She looked at Little Honk and Marigold and hoped neither would do anything to prove her wrong. They both continued their peaceful grazing. ‘None of the neighbours have complained so far. Your house has been empty since the animals and I moved in. Lord and Lady Trubridge on the other side rarely visit London, and when they do, they’re out most of the time shopping and going to parties and whatnot.’

‘I see,’ he said, still staring at the animals, his words suggesting he did not see at all. ‘Would you not prefer to live in the countryside?’ he asked. ‘Then you could have all the animals you want, and like that donkey, they’d have plenty of space to roam.’

‘I hate the countryside,’ she said with more vehemence than she’d intended. A reaction that caused him to look across the table at her, his eyebrows once again raised.

‘I spent my childhood in the countryside,’ she continued. ‘It looks very pretty, but underneath it’s simply awful. All those animals are just there so they can be eaten, and then there’s fox-hunting and shooting parties.’ She shuddered, remembering the huge piles of dead birds her uncle and his friends had always stacked up during the shooting season. ‘Everyone in the countryside seems to thoroughly enjoy killing things, all those farm animals, those birds bred just to be shot, and those poor little foxes, chased to exhaustion.’ She shuddered again, wishing he had not reminded her of the time she had spent living on her relatives’ Suffolk estate.

‘People need to eat,’ he pointed out, his tone suggesting she was being unreasonable.

‘Yes, but they don’t have to eat animals.’

‘Am I to assume you are a vegetarian?’

‘Of course, and I wish everyone else would do the same. I don’t even entirely approve of the way Hamish eats those snails.’

‘People eat snails in France. They’re rather tasty with lots of garlic on them.’

She stared at him, hardly able to believe he had said such a thing.

‘And I’m sure that your cat likes a nice meal of sparrow or mouse occasionally.’

The traitorous Clawdia meowed as if in agreement.

‘Well, yes, I suppose, but I don’t want to eat animals.’ She crossed her arms as if to underline the point. ‘Even Countess Stonely couldn’t make me do it, and as a child I was often sent to bed hungry because I refused to eat the meals served at dinner time.’

He frowned at her, and she braced herself for the inevitable mocking, certain that nothing he could say would be worse than the hardships inflicted on her by the countess or the cruel taunts she’d had to endure from Cousin Jasper during the years she’d lived in Suffolk.

Instead, his frown morphed slowly into a smile. It was the first time she had seen him smile, and it was so dazzling it seemed to steal the breath from her lungs. All her anger and resistance melted as she looked at the wondrous sight. His face softened, those deep brown eyes seemed to shine, and his lips—those full, expressive lips—curved in a manner that was utterly disarming.

Just as quickly as the smile appeared it disappeared, leaving Primrose wondering whether she had imagined it.

‘You’re surprisingly strong-minded, aren’t you?’

Primrose tried to assess the intent of his words. The countess had told her repeatedly that men liked compliant women who agreed with whatever they said. She had often reminded Primrose that when it came to finding a wife, men did not look favourably upon young ladies who held contrary views to their own. The countess would say that if a man described you as strong-minded, it was definitely an insult, tantamount to labelling you as a wallflower and a future spinster.