She smiled at him as she sat down and picked up her cup and saucer. “You are good at arithmetic, are you, Sir Benedict? Let me save you the bother of doing mental calculations. I was seventeen. Matthew and I were together for a year before his regiment was sent to the Peninsula. I spent the next year at Leyland Abbey. After Matthew was brought home, we came here, where we lived for five years before his passing a little over four months ago. That makes me twenty-four.”
“You saw through my ruse, did you?” He laughed. “So you have been unkissed and celibate since the age of eighteen.”
“I can do arithmetic too,” she said as the flush deepened in her cheeks. “You have been unkissed and celibate since the age of twenty-three.”
He sipped his sherry. “This is not a very proper conversation for a respectable drawing room, is it?”
“This has never been called a drawing room,” she told him. “But you are quite right. Matilda would have an apoplexy if she could hear us. So would Lady Gramley, I suspect.”
“Lord, yes.” He put his plate down on the table beside him, the biscuit untouched. He set his sherry glass beside it, only two sips gone from it, and got to his feet again. “I believe I left common sense, not to mention my manners, outside in the rain when I stepped into Bramble Hall a while ago, Mrs. McKay. My being here alone with you is improper and would surely cause talk, even scandal if anyone were to learn of it. It must not happen again. I would not make you the object of unsavory gossip among your neighbors.”
There was a twinge of something to her smile. Scorn? Sadness?
“You are perfectly right,” she said. “But I will not regret this afternoon for all that, and I hope you will not. You have lifted my spirits when they were terribly low, and you have made me feel like a woman for the first time in years. I will remember our conversation and our kiss, brief and relatively innocent though it was. I will relive it far more often than I ought, I am sure. But you are right nevertheless. It must not be repeated. Will you give my regards to your sister?”
“I will,” he promised as she pulled the bell rope and then directed the maid to have Sir Benedict Harper’s carriage brought up to the door. “I am sorry about the ride. Perhaps we can try again on a better day. With Beatrice, of course.”
He reached out a hand to her and she took it.
“Do come to call upon Bea whenever you feel lonely,” he said. “She will be delighted. You could perhaps accompany her from time to time when she visits the sick. No one could argue that that is not an unexceptionable activity for a widow in mourning.”
“Thank you,” she said. “You are kind.” And yet there was an edge to her voice now that he could not quite interpret.
He turned and made his way to the door. He felt clumsy, even grotesque, knowing that her eyes were upon him.
He sat in the carriage a few minutes later and raised a hand to her as she stood in the open doorway of the house, the dog beside her, wagging its tail.
So much for offering her his friendship for a while. He had ruined that possibility by being damned selfish and flirting with her and even kissing her. Continuing to visit her alone was out of the question now that he knew she would be alone. It was a shame. She needed companionship. So did he. But a single man and a single woman could not be companions without courting scandal. And justifiably so, it seemed.
Perhaps he could find her other companions, ones who were neither single nor male.
Two days later Lady Gramley paid Samantha an afternoon call, bringing with her Mrs. Andrews, the vicar’s wife, and cheerful conversation and practical suggestions for how Mrs. McKay might involve herself in village life without in any way compromising her status as a newly bereaved widow. Before they left, Samantha’s name had been added to the list of official visitors to the sick, and she had become a member of two committees, one for organizing the church summer bazaar, and one for decorating the altar. She had been urged to pay social calls at Robland Park and the vicarage whenever she wished and was assured that she would soon find herself invited elsewhere too.
“I spoke with my husband about your situation, Mrs. McKay,” Mrs. Andrews told her, “and he assured me that neither church nor society would ever frown upon a widow involving herself in good works and the quiet exchange of companionship with her peers, even during the early months of her bereavement. And you may believe me when I tell you that the vicar is a stickler for correct behavior.”
Samantha suspected that Sir Benedict Harper was behind this visit, and she was grateful. Being busy in a way that was useful to others would surely still her restlessness and help her fulfill her desire to live again, not merely to exist from day to day. And perhaps making new friends here was not going to be so very hard after all.
But Sir Benedict did not come again. Neither was he at Robland Park when Samantha went there for tea, perhaps because she went by invitation and he knew about it in advance. When she saw him at church, he inclined his head politely but neither spoke nor looked fully at her.
She had relived their conversation and his kiss—especially his kiss—for the rest of the day after he left. She had lain awake half the night dreaming of it—ironic, that. And she had watched through the windows for him all the following morning and from the garden during the afternoon, when the rain had finally stopped long enough for her to take Tramp outside for some exercise.
But long before it was borne in upon her that he would not come again, she had succumbed to guilt. She had encouraged him to stay when he would have left after discovering that Matilda was no longer with her. She had encouraged him to flirt with her, though it had not been deliberate. And she had quite explicitly invited his kiss.