The Major Meets His Match

Chapter Three

‘Nobody is going to ask you to dance if you don’t sit up straight and take that scowl off your face,’ said Aunt Susan, sternly.

They might if Aunt Susan hadn’t already repulsed the young men who’d shown an interest in her when she’d first come to Town, on the grounds that they were all fortune-hunters or scoundrels.

Nevertheless, Harriet obediently squared her shoulders and attempted the social smile her aunt had made her practise in the mirror every day for half an hour since she’d come to Town.

‘That’s better,’ said Aunt Susan out of the corner of her mouth which was also pulled into a similarly insincere rictus. ‘I know it must chafe that Kitty is having so much more success than you, but you must remember that you are no longer in the first flush of youth.’

Harriet only just managed to stop herself rolling her eyes. She was only twenty, for heaven’s sake. But eligible gentlemen looking for brides, her aunt had informed her, with a rueful shake of her head, wanted much younger girls. ‘It’s perfectly natural,’ she’d explained. ‘Gels usually make their debut when they are seventeen, or eighteen, unless there’s been a death in the family, or something of a similar nature. So everyone is bound to wonder why any girl who looks much older hasn’t appeared in society before. And,’ she’d added with a grimace of distaste, ‘draw their own conclusions.’

‘Please, dear,’ she was saying now, ‘do try to look as if you are enjoying yourself. Gentlemen are much more likely to ask you to dance if you appear to be good-natured.’

Harriet was beginning to suspect that actually she was not the slightest bit good-natured. She’d always thought of herself as being fairly placid before she’d come to Town. But ever since her aunt had descended on Stone Court like a fairy godmother to take her to the ball, she’d been see-sawing from one wild emotion to another. At first she’d been in a froth of excitement. But then had come the painful discovery that no amount of fine clothes could make her compare with her prettier, younger, more sociable cousin Kitty. After that, in spite of her aunt’s best efforts to bring her up to scratch in the short time they had, had come the discovery that actually, she didn’t want to conform to society’s notions of how a young lady should behave. And now she just felt as if she had a stone permanently lodged in her shoe.

‘Now, there is a young man with whom you might safely dance,’ said Lady Tarbrook, nudging Harriet in the ribs. And drawing her attention to the slender young man who’d just come into the ballroom. A man she’d been dreading coming across for the last two weeks. Ever since he’d fallen off his horse and tricked her into kissing him.

‘Though I shouldn’t like to raise your hopes too much. He hasn’t asked any eligible female to dance since he came to Town. Not that he’s actually attended many balls, to my knowledge. Well, not this sort of ball,’ Lady Tarbrook was muttering darkly. ‘Not his style. Not his style at all.’

No, his style was roistering all night with a pack of reprobates, then taking part in reckless wagers that ended up with him almost breaking his stupid neck. To say nothing of molesting people who went to help him.

And yet Aunt Susan was prepared to give her permission to dance with him. In the unlikely event he were to ask her.

It beggared belief.

‘Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ said Aunt Susan, fluttering her fan wildly and smiling for all she was worth in his direction.

While Harriet did her best to shrink into the meagre upholstery of the chair upon which she was sitting. Oh, where was a potted plant, or a fire screen, or...a hole in the ground when she needed one?

Ulysses—for that was the only name she knew him by—ran his eyes round the ballroom as though searching for someone before setting off in the direction of a group of military men gathered in the doorway to the refreshment room.

‘Oh, I see,’ said Lady Tarbrook with resignation. ‘He must have wanted to speak to one of his...associates. I don’t suppose he will stay long.’ She folded her fan as though consigning him to history.

While Harriet fumed. The...the beast! He’d looked right through her, as though she wasn’t there. Without the slightest sign he recognised her.

Well, he probably didn’t. He probably kissed random women senseless every day of the week. The kiss that she’d spent so many nights recalling, in great detail, before she went to sleep, and at odd moments during the day as well, had obviously completely slipped his mind.

Because it had meant nothing to him.

Because she meant nothing to him.

Well—he meant nothing to her, either. And nor did that kiss. Just because it was her first and still had the power to make her toes curl if she dwelt on it for too long, did not mean that...that...

Oh, bother him for getting her thoughts into a tangle.

A loud burst of laughter gave her the excuse she needed to let her eyes stray to the doorway of the refreshment room and the group of men who’d opened up to admit him to their company.

She couldn’t help noticing several other women turning their heads in his direction, too. And eyeing him with great interest. Which came as no surprise, seeing the way he moved. There was a vitality about him that naturally drew the eye, for it was so very different from the languid stroll affected by the other men present tonight. And in the candlelight his hair, which had just looked a sort of dull brown in the shade of that chestnut tree, gleamed with traces of gold.

She flicked her fan open and plied it vigorously before her face. Which she turned away from the part of the room in which he was standing. She would not stare at him. She would do nothing to attract his attention, either, in case he did have a dim recollection of her. You could sometimes get even quite stupid people to remember things if you constantly reminded them of it, or so Aunt Susan had told her, when she’d despaired of ever grasping the myriad rules of etiquette that seemed to come naturally to Kitty.

But then Kitty had been drilled into good behaviour from the moment she was born.

‘I don’t know what your mother was thinking, to leave you to run wild the way she has,’ Aunt Susan had said upon discovering that Harriet had only the vaguest notion of how deeply to curtsy to people of various ranks.

‘She didn’t let me run wild, precisely,’ Harriet had countered, because there had definitely been times when Mama had applied the birch. When she’d used phrases she’d picked up in the stables at the dinner table, for instance. ‘It’s just that she doesn’t think things like teaching me to curtsy are terribly important.’ Nor having a Season, come to that. In fact, she was beginning to think her mother might have a point. How on earth could anyone pick a life partner this way? Nobody really talked to anyone. Not about anything important. Everyone in Town seemed to Harriet to behave like a swarm of giddy mayflies, flitting above the surface of a glittering pond.

‘Clearly,’ Aunt Susan had said frostily. ‘But even if she couldn’t prise herself away from her books and bottles to do it herself, she could have engaged a sensible woman to take over that side of your education. In fact,’ she’d said, shifting in her seat as though she was itching to get up and stride about the room to make her point, ‘for a woman who goes on so about how important the life of the mind is to her, you’d think she would have wanted you to have had the same education as her sons. Instead of no education at all. Why, if it hadn’t been for me sending you that Person to teach you how to read and write you could have ended up as ignorant as a savage!’

Harriet had hung her head at that reminder of how much she owed to Aunt Susan, stifling the flare of resentment she’d been experiencing at being forced to curtsy over and over again until she got it right. Because the truth was that Mama had been too interested in her books and bottles, as Aunt Susan had so scathingly referred to Mama’s laboratory, to concern herself with something as mundane as the education of her daughter. Papa had arranged for the education of his sons. But a girl’s education, he’d said, was the province of her mother.

Between Papa’s focus on his three fine sons and Mama’s absorption with her hobbies, Harriet had been forgotten entirely.

And if her own parents could forget her existence for weeks at a time, it stood to reason that Ulysses would do the same.

Although perhaps it was just as well. Far better that, than that he should come over and start talking to her as if she was an old acquaintance, or something. Which would make Aunt Susan ask questions. All sorts of awkward questions.

At which point, naturally, he sauntered over to where they were sitting and bowed punctiliously to her aunt.

‘Good evening, Lady Tarbrook,’ he said in a voice that struck like a dart to her midriff.

‘Lord Becconsall, how delightful to see you,’ simpered her aunt.

Lord Becconsall?

Well, obviously, Ulysses couldn’t be his real name, but she was still surprised he had a title.

Though perhaps she shouldn’t have been. The kind of men who were out in the park after a long night of drinking could only be men who didn’t have jobs to go to in the morning. She should have known he was titled, really, now she came to think of it.

And for all she knew, Ulysses was his real name. She had an Uncle Agamemnon, after all. And a distant cousin by marriage by the name of Priam. The craze for all things classical seemed to have affected a lot of parents with the strangest urges to name their children after ancient Greeks lately.

She snapped back to attention when she heard her aunt say, ‘And you must allow me to present my niece, Lady Harriet Inskip.’

‘Lady Harriet?’

Though he bowed, he did so with the air of a man who wasn’t sure he should be doing any such thing. How did he do that? Inject such...mockery into the mere act of bowing?

‘Oh, you have not heard of her, I dare say, because she has lived such a secluded life, in the country. This is her first visit to London.’

Harriet gritted her teeth. For this was the excuse Aunt Susan was always trotting out, whenever some society matron quizzed her over some defect or other. Or a gentleman drew down his brows when she made an observation that ran counter to some opinion he’d just expressed. ‘Oh, fresh up from the country, you know,’ her aunt would say airily. ‘Quite unspoiled and natural in her manners.’ Which invariably alerted her to the fact she must have just committed a terrible faux pas for which she’d be reprimanded later, in private. Though the worst, the very worst fault she had, apparently, was speaking her mind. Young ladies did not do such things, Aunt Susan insisted. Which shouldn’t have come as such a surprise, really. She should have known that females, and their opinions, were of less value than males. Hadn’t that fact been demonstrated to her, in no uncertain terms, all her life?

Except when it came to Mama. Papa never found fault with anything she ever said, or did. Even when he didn’t agree with it.

‘That would account for it,’ said Ulysses, with a knowing smile. And though Aunt Susan heard nothing amiss, Harriet could tell that he was remembering their last encounter. And decrying her behaviour. The way those society matrons had done. Though at least this time she knew exactly what she’d done to earn his scorn.

‘You might know one of her older brothers,’ Aunt Susan was persisting, valiantly. ‘George Inskip? Major the Honourable George Inskip? He’s a Light Dragoon.’

‘Sadly, no,’ said Ulysses, though he didn’t look the least bit sad. ‘The cavalry rarely fraternises with the infantry, you know. We are far, far, beneath their notice, as a rule.’

So he was in the army. No—had been in the army. He was not wearing uniform, whereas men who still held commissions, like the group still milling around in the doorway to the refreshment room, flaunted their scarlet jackets and gold braid at every opportunity.

So, that would account for the tanned face. And the lines fanning out from his eyes. And the energy he put into the mere act of walking across a room. And the hardness of his body. And the...

‘Oh, I’m sure you are no such thing,’ simpered Aunt Susan. Making Harriet’s gorge rise. Why on earth was she gushing all over the very last man she wished to encourage, when so far she’d done her level best to repulse every other man who’d shown the slightest bit of interest in her?

‘And probably too far beneath Lady Harriet to presume to request the pleasure of a dance,’ he said. Placing a slight emphasis on the word beneath. Which sent her mind back to the moments he had been lying beneath her, his arms clamped round her body as he ravaged her mouth.

Which made her blush. To her absolute fury. Because Aunt Susan gave her a knowing look.

‘But of course you may dance with Lady Harriet, Lord Becconsall,’ trilled Aunt Susan, who clearly saw this as a coup. For a man notorious for not dancing with debutantes was asking her protégée to do just that. ‘She would love to dance with you, would you not, my dear?’

Ulysses cocked his head to one side and observed her mutinous face with evident amusement. Just as she’d suspected. He was planning on having a great deal of fun at her expense.

‘I do not think she wishes to dance with me at all,’ he said ruefully. ‘In fact, she looks as though she would rather lay about me with a riding crop to make me go away.’

Harriet was not normally given to temper. But right at this moment she could feel it coming to the fore. How she wished she were not in a ballroom, so that she could slap that mocking smile from his face.

‘Oh, no, not at all! She is just a little...awkward, in her manners. Being brought up so...in such a very...that is, Harriet,’ said Aunt Susan rather sharply, ‘I know you are very shy, but you really must take that scowl off your face and tell Lord Becconsall that you would love above all things to dance with him.’

Ulysses schooled his features into the approximation of a man who had endless patience with awkward young females who needed coaxing out of their modest disinclination to so much as dance with a man to whom she had only just been introduced.

While the twinkle in his eyes told her that, inside, he was laughing at her. That he was enjoying taunting her with those oblique references to their previous meeting. And, she suspected, that he was going to enjoy holding that episode over her head every time they met from this time forth.

Oh, lord, what was she to do? What would happen if Aunt Susan found out she’d been caught, in the Park, by a group of drunken bucks and kissed breathless by this particular one? When she should have been in her room, in her bed, recovering from the exertions of the ball the night before?

Disgrace, that was what. Humiliation. All sorts of unpleasantness.

If she found out.

Therefore, Aunt Susan had better not find out. Had better not suspect anything was amiss. Or she would start digging.

That prospect was enough to make her draw on all those hours she’d spent in front of the mirror, perfecting that insincere smile. And plastering it on to her face.

‘Lord Becconsall,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘I would love above all things to dance with you.’

With a triumphant grin, he held out his hand, took hers and led her on to the dance floor.

Chapter Four

‘Lady Harriet,’ he said, raising one eyebrow.

‘Lord Becconsall,’ she replied tartly.

He grinned. Because addressing him by his title had not managed to convey the same degree of censure at all. But then, as she very well knew, lords could get away with staggering around the park, drunk. Or riding horses bareback for wagers.

Whereas ladies could not.

Not that she’d been doing either, but still.

‘I suppose you expect me to feel flattered by your invitation to dance,’ she said, ‘when you are notorious for not doing so.’

‘Flattered?’ He raised one eyebrow. And then the corner of his mouth, as though he was biting back a laugh. ‘No, I didn’t expect that.’

‘Do you want me to ask what you did expect?’

‘Well, if we are about to delve into my motives for asking you, then perhaps I should warn you that you might not like mine.’

‘I’m quite sure I won’t.’

‘But would you like me to be completely honest?’

‘Yes, why not,’ she said with a defiant toss of her head. ‘It will be a...a refreshing change.’ At least, in comparison with all the other encounters she’d had in Town, where people only talked about trivialities, in what sounded, to her countrified ears, like a series of stock, accepted phrases they’d learned by rote.

‘Well then, if you must know, I felt so sorry for you that I felt compelled to swoop in to your rescue.’

‘My rescue?’ That was the very last motive she would have attributed to him.

‘Yes.’ He looked at her with a perfectly straight face. ‘You looked so miserable, sitting there all hunched up as though you were trying to shrink away from the silly clothes and hairstyle you are affecting tonight. And I recalled the impulsive way you dropped to your knees beside my prone body, to give what succour you could. And I thought that one good turn deserved another.’

Harriet sucked in a short, shocked breath. Though it was more in keeping with what she knew of him so far to fling insults at her, under cover of escorting her to the dance floor, than to swoop in to her rescue.

He would definitely never say anything so...rude to any other lady to whom he’d just been introduced. It just wasn’t done. Even she knew that.

But then, since he held her reputation in the palm of his hand, he clearly felt he could get away with saying anything he liked.

‘Well, if we are being honest with one another,’ she said, since what was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander, ‘I have to say I agree with you.’ There, that should take the wind from his sails.

‘Surely not. Or—’ A frown flitted across his face. ‘Is your duenna compelling you to wear gowns of her choosing?’

‘I wish I could say you were correct. But this display of poor taste is entirely my own doing,’ she said.

‘You are deliberately making yourself look ridiculous?’

Far from looking shocked, or disapproving, Lord Becconsall only appeared intrigued.

But the necessity of taking her place in line, and dipping a curtsy as the first strains of music blared, prevented either of them from saying anything further. Which made her grind her teeth. Because of course she had not been deliberately trying to make herself look ridiculous. She’d just never had the chance to spend whatever she wanted on clothes, that was all. And it was only with hindsight that she’d seen that modelling her wardrobe so slavishly on Kitty’s, who had always looked so fashionable and pretty whenever she’d come to visit, had been a mistake.

But from now on, she was going to ask the modiste, and her aunt—and, yes, even Kitty—if the styles and fabrics she was choosing actually suited her.

For some time the intricacies of the dance meant that he could only take jabs at her during the few seconds during which they passed or circled each other. Jabs which she could deflect by looking blank, then twirling away as though she hadn’t heard them.

‘You are supposed to smile at your partner, just occasionally, you know,’ he informed her at one point.

‘I might do so were I dancing with someone I liked,’ she snapped back.

‘Tut, tut, Lady Harriet,’ he said dolefully. ‘You gave me to believe you wished above all things to dance with me.’

‘You know very well I had to say that,’ she hissed at him.

‘Do I?’ He looked thoughtful for a few measures. And then, with a devilish gleam in his eyes, asked her, ‘Would you mind explaining why?’

‘You know why.’

He widened his eyes in a look of puzzled innocence. ‘But...how can you have changed your opinion of me so completely? Last time we met, you flung yourself into my arms—’

‘I did no such thing,’ she hissed at him. ‘You...grabbed me—’

‘You put up no resistance, however. And you appeared to be enjoying the interlude as much as I did.’

Well, what could she say to that? Though he was wicked to remind her that she’d behaved with dreadful impropriety, he’d also admitted to enjoying kissing her. Which went a good way to soothing the sting imparted by his taunts. As well as doing something to her insides.

The same sort of something his kiss had done to them, actually.

‘No riposte?’ He sighed, looking almost disappointed. ‘I was so sure you would waste no opportunity to give me a tongue lashing.’

Since he looked at her mouth with a wistful expression as he said this, she couldn’t help licking her lips. And recalling the way his own tongue had probed at them, seeking entrance. Which made her unable to tear her eyes away from his mouth.

She cannoned into the lady to her right.

This was a disaster! Almost the first time she’d actually got on to a dance floor and he was ruining it by saying things that made her forget where she was, or which direction she was supposed to be hopping in.

‘You are determined to humiliate me, aren’t you?’ she said, next time they drew close enough for him to hear her.

‘I have no need.’ He chuckled. ‘You are doing an admirable job of it all on your own, what with the clothes and the scowls, and the growls and the missteps.’ He shook his head. ‘I cannot believe you are related to Major Inskip.’

Her head flew up. ‘You know George? But you just said you didn’t.’

He shrugged as he whirled away from her to promenade up the outside of the set. By the time she reached the head of it on the ladies’ side, she was seething with impatience.

‘Well?’

‘I only said cavalry officers don’t normally hobnob with the infantry. I didn’t say I didn’t know him. Though, to be precise, I only know him by sight.’ He eyed her with amusement before adding, ‘And what a sight he is to behold.’

She flushed angrily. George was, indeed, very often a sight to behold. For he had his uniforms made by a top tailor, out of the finest fabrics, and never looked better than when mounted on one of his extremely expensive horses. From which he did tend to look down his aristocratic nose at the rest of the world. Including her. And to her chagrin, although he’d always used to concede she was a bruising rider when they’d been much younger, the last few times he’d come home there had been a touch of disdain about his lips whenever his eyes had rested on her. Which had also, she now saw, influenced her decision to buy the most elaborate and costly gowns she could.

‘What, no pithy retort?’ Ulysses shook his head in mock reproof. ‘I am disappointed.’

‘Yes, well, that’s the thing with swooping to someone’s rescue, isn’t it? They do tend to do things you didn’t expect and make you wish you hadn’t bothered.’