It's In His Kiss

Chapter 2

Thirty minutes later, and somewhere not too far away, a small dog is howling in agony. Unfortunately, no one can hear him over the din…

There was only one person in the world for whom Gareth would sit politely and listen to really bad music, and Grandmother Danbury happened to be it.

“Never again,” he whispered in her ear, as something that might have been Mozart assaulted his ears. This, after something that might have been Haydn, which had followed something that might have been Handel.

“You’re not sitting politely,” she whispered back.

“We could have sat in the back,” he grumbled.

“And missed all the fun?”

How anyone could term a Smythe-Smith musicale fun was beyond him, but his grandmother had what could only be termed a morbid love for the annual affair.

As usual, four Smythe-Smith girls were seated on a small dais, two with violins, one with a cello, and one at a pianoforte, and the noise they were making was so discordant as to be almost impressive.

Almost.

“It’s a good thing I love you,” he said over his shoulder.

“Ha,” came her reply, no less truculent for its whispered tone. “It’s a good thing I love you.”

And then-thank God-it was over, and the girls were nodding and making their curtsies, three of them looking quite pleased with themselves, and one-the one on the cello-looking as if she might like to hurl herself through a window.

Gareth turned when he heard his grandmother sigh. She was shaking her head and looking uncharacteristically sympathetic.

The Smythe-Smith girls were notorious in London, and each performance was somehow, inexplicably, worse than the last. Just when one thought there was no possible way to make a deeper mockery of Mozart, a new set of Smythe-Smith cousins appeared on the scene, and proved that yes, it could be done.

But they were nice girls, or so he’d been told, and his grandmother, in one of her rare fits of unabashed kindness, insisted that someone had to sit in the front row and clap, because, as she put it, “Three of them couldn’t tell an elephant from a flute, but there’s always one who is ready to melt in misery.”

And apparently Grandmother Danbury, who thought nothing of telling a duke that he hadn’t the sense of a gnat, found it vitally important to clap for the one Smythe-Smith girl in each generation whose ear wasn’t made of tin.

They all stood to applaud, although he suspected his grandmother did so only to have an excuse to retrieve her cane, which Hyacinth Bridgerton had handed over with no protest whatsoever.

“Traitor,” he’d murmured over his shoulder.

“They’re your toes,” she’d replied.

He cracked a smile, despite himself. He had never met anyone quite like Hyacinth Bridgerton. She was vaguely amusing, vaguely annoying, but one couldn’t quite help but admire her wit.

Hyacinth Bridgerton, he reflected, had an interesting and unique reputation among London socialites. She was the youngest of the Bridgerton siblings, famously named in alphabetical order, A-H. And she was, in theory at least and for those who cared about such things, considered a rather good catch for matrimony. She had never been involved, even tangentially, in a scandal, and her family and connections were beyond compare. She was quite pretty, in wholesome, unexotic way, with thick, chestnut hair and blue eyes that did little to hide her shrewdness. And perhaps most importantly, Gareth thought with a touch of the cynic, it was whispered that her eldest brother, Lord Bridgerton, had increased her dowry last year, after Hyacinth had completed her third London season without an acceptable proposal of marriage.

But when he had inquired about her-not, of course because he was interested; rather he had wanted to learn more about this young lady who seemed to enjoy spending a great deal of time with his grandmother-his friends had all shuddered.

“Hyacinth Bridgerton?” one had echoed. “Surely not to marry? You must be mad.”

Another had called her terrifying.

No one actually seemed to dislike her-there was a certain charm to her that kept her in everyone’s good graces-but the consensus was that she was best in small doses. “Men don’t like women who are more intelligent than they are,” one of his shrewder friends had commented, “and Hyacinth Bridgerton isn’t the sort to feign stupidity.”

She was, Gareth had thought on more than one occasion, a younger version of his grandmother. And while there was no one in the world he adored more than Grandmother Danbury, as far as he was concerned, the world needed only one of her.

“Aren’t you glad you came?” the elderly lady in question asked, her voice carrying quite well over the applause.

No one ever clapped as loudly as the Smythe-Smith audience. They were always so glad that it was over.

“Never again,” Gareth said firmly.

“Of course not,” his grandmother said, with just the right touch of condescension to show that she was lying through her teeth.

He turned and looked her squarely in the eye. “You will have to find someone else to accompany you next year.”

“I wouldn’t dream of asking you again,” Grandmother Danbury said.

“You’re lying.”

“What a terrible thing to say to your beloved grandmother.” She leaned slightly forward. “How did you know?”

He glanced at the cane, dormant in her hand. “You haven’t waved that thing through the air once since you tricked Miss Bridgerton into returning it,” he said.

“Nonsense,” she said. “Miss Bridgerton is too sharp to be tricked, aren’t you, Hyacinth?”

Hyacinth shifted forward so that she could see past him to the countess. “I beg your pardon?”

“Just say yes,” Grandmother Danbury said. “It will vex him.”

“Yes, of course, then,” she said, smiling.

“And,” his grandmother continued, as if that entire ridiculous exchange had not taken place, “I’ll have you know that I am the soul of discretion when it comes to my cane.”

Gareth gave her a look. “It’s a wonder I still have my feet.”

“It’s a wonder you still have your ears, my dear boy,” she said with lofty disdain.

“I will take that away again,” he warned.

“No you won’t,” she replied with a cackle. “I’m leaving with Penelope to find a glass of lemonade. You keep Hyacinth company.”

He watched her go, then turned back to Hyacinth, who was glancing about the room with slightly narrowed eyes.

“Who are you looking for?” he asked.

“No one in particular. Just examining the scene.”

He looked at her curiously. “Do you always sound like a detective?”

“Only when it suits me,” she said with a shrug. “I like to know what is going on.”

“And is anything ‘going on’?” he queried.

“No.” Her eyes narrowed again as she watched two people in a heated discussion in the far corner. “But you never know.”

He fought the urge to shake his head. She was the strangest woman. He glanced at the stage. “Are we safe?”

She finally turned back, her blue eyes meeting his with uncommon directness. “Do you mean is it over?”

“Yes.”

Her brow furrowed, and in that moment Gareth realized that she had the lightest smattering of freckles on her nose. “I think so,” she said. “I’ve never known them to hold an intermission before.”

“Thank God,” he said, with great feeling. “Why do they do it?”

“The Smythe-Smiths, you mean?”

“Yes.”

For a moment she remained silent, then she just shook her head, and said, “I don’t know. One would think…”

Whatever she’d been about to say, she thought the better of it. “Never mind,” she said.

“Tell me,” he urged, rather surprised by how curious he was.

“It was nothing,” she said. “Just that one would think that someone would have told them by now. But actually…” She glanced around the room. “The audience has grown smaller in recent years. Only the kindhearted remain.”

“And do you include yourself among those ranks, Miss Bridgerton?”

She looked up at him with those intensely blue eyes. “I wouldn’t have thought to describe myself as such, but yes, I suppose I am. Your grandmother, too, although she would deny it to her dying breath.”

Gareth felt himself laugh as he watched his grandmother poke the Duke of Ashbourne in the leg with her cane. “Yes, she would, wouldn’t she?”

His maternal grandmother was, since the death of his brother George, the only person left in the world he truly loved. After his father had booted him out, he’d made his way to Danbury House in Surrey and told her what had transpired. Minus the bit about his bastardy, of course.

Gareth had always suspected that Lady Danbury would have stood up and cheered if she knew he wasn’t really a St. Clair. She’d never liked her son-in-law, and in fact routinely referred to him as “that pompous idiot.” But the truth would reveal his mother-Lady Danbury’s youngest daughter-as an adulteress, and he hadn’t wanted to dishonor her in that way.

And strangely enough, his father-funny how he still called him that, even after all these years-had never publicly denounced him. This had not surprised Gareth at first. Lord St. Clair was a proud man, and he certainly would not relish revealing himself as a cuckold. Plus, he probably still hoped that he might eventually rein Gareth in and bend him to his will. Maybe even get him to marry Mary Winthrop and restore the St. Clair family coffers.

But George had contracted some sort of wasting disease at the age of twenty-seven, and by thirty he was dead.

Without a son.

Which had made Gareth the St. Clair heir. And left him, quite simply, stuck. For the past eleven months, it seemed he had done nothing but wait. Sooner or later, his father was going to announce to all who would listen that Gareth wasn’t really his son. Surely the baron, whose third-favorite pastime (after hunting and raising hounds) was tracing the St. Clair family tree back to the Plantagenets, would not countenance his title going to a bastard of uncertain blood.

Gareth was fairly certain that the only way the baron could remove him as his heir would be to haul him, and a pack of witnesses as well, before the Committee for Privileges in the House of Lords. It would be a messy, detestable affair, and it probably wouldn’t work, either. The baron had been married to Gareth’s mother when she had given birth, and that rendered Gareth legitimate in the eyes of the law, regardless of his bloodlines.

But it would cause a huge scandal and quite possibly ruin Gareth in the eyes of society. There were plenty of aristocrats running about who got their blood and their names from two different men, but the ton didn’t like to talk about it. Not publicly, anyway.

But thus far, his father had said nothing.

Half the time Gareth wondered if the baron kept his silence just to torture him.

Gareth glanced across the room at his grandmother, who was accepting a glass of lemonade from Penelope Bridgerton, whom she’d somehow coerced into waiting on her hand and foot. Agatha, Lady Danbury, was most usually described as crotchety, and that was by the people who held her in some affection. She was a lioness among the ton, fearless in her words and willing to poke fun at the most august of personages, and even, occasionally, herself. But for all her acerbic ways, she was famously loyal to the ones she loved, and Gareth knew he ranked at the top of that list.

When he’d gone to her and told her that his father had turned him out, she had been livid, but she had never attempted to use her power as a countess to force Lord St. Clair to take back his son.

“Ha!” his grandmother had said. “I’d rather keep you myself.”

And she had. She’d paid Gareth’s expenses at Cambridge, and when he’d graduated (not with a first, but he had acquitted himself well), she had informed him that his mother had left him a small bequest. Gareth hadn’t been aware that she’d had any money of her own, but Lady Danbury had just twisted her lips and said, “Do you really think I’d let that idiot have complete control of her money? I wrote the marriage settlement, you know.”

Gareth didn’t doubt it for an instant.

His inheritance gave him a small income, which funded a very small suite of apartments, and Gareth was able to support himself. Not lavishly, but well enough to make him feel he wasn’t a complete wastrel, which, he was surprised to realize, mattered more to him than he would have thought.

This uncharacteristic sense of responsibility was probably a good thing, too, since when he did assume the St. Clair title, he was going to inherit a mountain of debt along with it. The baron had obviously been lying when he’d told Gareth that they would lose everything that wasn’t entailed if he didn’t marry Mary Winthrop, but still, it was clear that the St. Clair fortune was meager at best. Furthermore, Lord St. Clair didn’t appear to be managing the family finances any better than he had when he’d tried to force Gareth into marriage. If anything, he seemed to be systematically running the estates into the ground.

It was the one thing that made Gareth wonder if perhaps the baron didn’t intend to denounce him. Surely the ultimate revenge would be to leave his false son riddled with debt.

And Gareth knew-with every fiber of his being he knew-that the baron wished him no happiness. Gareth didn’t bother with most ton functions, but London wasn’t such a large city, socially speaking, and he couldn’t always manage to avoid his father completely. And Lord St. Clair never made any effort to hide his enmity.

As for Gareth-well, he wasn’t much better at keeping his feelings to himself. He always seemed to slip into his old ways, doing something deliberately provoking, just to make the baron angry. The last time they’d found themselves in each other’s company, Gareth had laughed too loudly, then danced far too closely with a notoriously merry widow.

Lord St. Clair had turned very red in the face, then hissed something about Gareth being no better than he should be. Gareth hadn’t been exactly certain to what his father had been referring, and the baron had been drunk, in any case. But it had left him with one powerful certainty-

Eventually, the other shoe was going to drop. When Gareth least expected it, or perhaps, now that he’d grown so suspicious, precisely when he most suspected it. But as soon as Gareth attempted to make a change in his life, to move forward, to move up…

That was when the baron would make his move. Gareth was sure of it.

And his world was going to come crashing down.

“Mr. St. Clair?”

Gareth blinked and turned to Hyacinth Bridgerton, whom, he realized somewhat sheepishly, he’d been ignoring in favor of his own thoughts. “So sorry,” he murmured, giving her the slow and easy smile that seemed to work so well when he needed to placate a female. “I was woolgathering.”

At her dubious expression, he added, “I do think from time to time.”

She smiled, clearly despite herself, but he counted that as a success. The day he couldn’t make a woman smile was the day he ought to just give up on life and move to the Outer Hebrides.

“Under normal circumstances,” he said, since the occasion seemed to call for polite conversation, “I would ask if you enjoyed the musicale, but somehow that seems cruel.”

She shifted slightly in her seat, which was interesting, since most young ladies were trained from a very young age to hold themselves with perfect stillness. Gareth found himself liking her the better for her restless energy; he, too, was the sort to find himself drumming his fingers against a tabletop when he didn’t realize it.

He watched her face, waiting for her to reply, but all she did was look vaguely uncomfortable. Finally, she leaned forward and whispered, “Mr. St. Clair?”

He leaned in as well, giving her a conspiratorial quirk of his brow. “Miss Bridgerton?”

“Would you mind terribly if we took a turn about the room?”

He waited just long enough to catch her motioning over her shoulder with the tiniest of nods. Lord Somershall was wiggling slightly in his chair, and his copious form was edged right up next to Hyacinth.

“Of course,” Gareth said gallantly, rising to his feet and offering her his arm. “I need to save Lord Somershall, after all,” he said, once they had moved several paces away.

Her eyes snapped to his face. “I beg your pardon?”

“If I were a betting man,” he said, “I’d lay the odds four-to-one in your favor.”

For about half a second she looked confused, and then her face slid into a satisfied smile. “You mean you’re not a betting man?” she asked.

He laughed. “I haven’t the blunt to be a betting man,” he said quite honestly.

“That doesn’t seem to stop most men,” she said pertly.

“Or most women,” he said, with a tilt of his head.

“Touché,” she murmured, glancing about the room. “We are a gambling people, aren’t we?”

“And what about you, Miss Bridgerton? Do you like to wager?”

“Of course,” she said, surprising him with her candor. “But only when I know I will win.”

He chuckled. “Strangely enough,” he said, guiding her toward the refreshment table, “I believe you.”

“Oh, you should,” she said blithely. “Ask anyone who knows me.”

“Wounded again,” he said, offering her his most engaging smile. “I thought I knew you.”

She opened her mouth, then looked shocked that she didn’t have a reply. Gareth took pity on her and handed her a glass of lemonade. “Drink up,” he murmured. “You look thirsty.”

He chuckled as she glowered at him over the rim of her glass, which of course only made her redouble her efforts to incinerate him with her glare.

There was something very amusing about Hyacinth Bridgerton, he decided. She was smart-very smart-but she had a certain air about her, as if she was used to always being the most intelligent person in the room. It wasn’t unattractive; she was quite charming in her own way, and he imagined that she would have to have learned to speak her own mind in order to be heard in her family-she was the youngest of eight, after all.

But it did mean that he rather enjoyed seeing her at a loss for words. It was fun to befuddle her. Gareth didn’t know why he didn’t make a point of doing it more often.

He watched as she set her glass down. “Tell me, Mr. St. Clair,” she said, “what did your grandmother say to you to convince you to attend this evening?”

“You don’t believe I came of my own free will?”

She lifted one brow. He was impressed. He’d never known a female who could do that.

“Very well,” he said, “there was a great deal of hand fluttering, then something about a visit to her physician, and then I believe she sighed.”

“Just once?”

He quirked a brow back at her. “I’m made of stronger stuff than that, Miss Bridgerton. It took a full half hour to break me.”

She nodded. “You are good.”

He leaned toward her and smiled. “At many things,” he murmured.

She blushed, which pleased him mightily, but then she said, “I’ve been warned about men like you.”

“I certainly hope so.”

She laughed. “I don’t think you’re nearly as dangerous as you’d like to be thought.”

He tilted his head to the side. “And why is that?”

She didn’t answer right away, just caught her lower lip between her teeth as she pondered her words. “You’re far too kind to your grandmother,” she finally said.

“Some would say she’s too kind to me.”

“Oh, many people say that,” Hyacinth said with a shrug.

He choked on his lemonade. “You haven’t a coy bone in your body, do you?”

Hyacinth glanced across the room at Penelope and Lady Danbury before turning back to him. “I keep trying, but no, apparently not. I imagine it’s why I am still unmarried.”

He smiled. “Surely not.”

“Oh, indeed,” she said, even though it was clear he was funning her. “Men need to be trapped into marriage, whether they realize it or not. And I seem to be completely lacking in the ability.”

He grinned. “You mean you’re not underhanded and sly?”

“I’m both those things,” she admitted, “just not subtle.”

“No,” he murmured, and she couldn’t decide whether his agreement bothered her or not.

“But tell me,” he continued, “for I’m most curious. Why do you think men must be trapped into marriage?”

“Would you go willingly to the altar?”

“No, but-”

“You see? I am affirmed.” And somehow that made her feel a great deal better.

“Shame on you, Miss Bridgerton,” he said. “It’s not very sporting of you not to allow me to finish my statement.”

She cocked her head. “Did you have anything interesting to say?”

He smiled, and Hyacinth felt it down to her toes. “I’m always interesting,” he murmured.

“Now you’re just trying to scare me.” She didn’t know where this was coming from, this crazy sense of daring. Hyacinth wasn’t shy, and she certainly wasn’t as demure as she ought to have been, but nor was she foolhardy. And Gareth St. Clair was not the sort of man with whom one ought to trifle. She was playing with fire, and she knew it, but somehow she couldn’t stop herself. It was as if each statement from his lips was a dare, and she had to use her every faculty just to keep up.

If this was a competition, she wanted to win.

And if any of her flaws was going to prove to be fatal, this was surely it.

“Miss Bridgerton,” he said, “the devil himself couldn’t scare you.”

She forced her eyes to meet his. “That’s not a compliment, is it?”

He lifted her hand to his lips, brushing a feather-light kiss across her knuckles. “You’ll have to figure that out for yourself,” he murmured.

To all who observed, he was the soul of propriety, but Hyacinth caught the daring gleam in his eye, and she felt the breath leave her body as tingles of electricity rushed across her skin. Her lips parted, but she had nothing to say, not a single word. There was nothing but air, and even that seemed in short supply.

And then he straightened as if nothing had happened and said, “Do let me know what you decide.”

She just stared at him.

“About the compliment,” he added. “I am sure you will wish to let me know how I feel about you.”

Her mouth fell open.

He smiled. Broadly. “Speechless, even. I’m to be commended.”

“You-”

“No. No,” he said, lifting one hand in the air and pointing toward her as if what he really wanted to do was place his finger on her lips and shush her. “Don’t ruin it. The moment is too rare.”

And she could have said something. She should have said something. But all she could do was stand there like an idiot, or if not that, then like someone completely unlike herself.

“Until next time, Miss Bridgerton,” he murmured.

And then he was gone.