To be fair, his fiancée had not shown any reluctance to accept his kisses, to the best of his recollection. It was he who had thought to protect her maidenly virtue, never venturing more than to give her a chaste buss. If he had kissed Opal more passionately, would she have turned to him, rather than the dancing master?

He rather suspected that might be the case.

One could almost think that she had deliberately planned that he should discover her in a compromising position. When he’d entered the room, she had seemed neither shocked nor dismayed. He had stood there, consumed in an incandescent rage, and Opal watched him as she pushed away her dancing master, smiled prettily, and said, “Well, I suppose our betrothal is at an end.”

The more he thought about it . . . the more he was convinced the whole scene was calculated. She probably paid that dancing master for the kiss. That was how much she wanted to get rid of him. Of him, the Earl of Oakley.

Yet his figure was agreeable, if not better than that. His nose was Roman, as Marilla had pointed out, but not overly so. He was wealthy and titled.

But he hadn’t bothered to woo Opal. In fact, he’d been something of a pompous ass about it, bestowing his hand upon her with the expectation that she would consider it life’s greatest blessing.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t recognize the prototype. His father had judged people solely on their claims to bloodlines and estate. No maid in the late earl’s presence raised her eyes above shoulder level unless spoken to. No child, including his own, spoke unless invited to do so. No woman, including his own wife, expressed disagreement with one of Lord Oakley’s opinions, at least to the best of Byron’s memory.

He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. He might have inadvertently fallen into some of his father’s habits of mind and conduct. But that needn’t mean he had to retain them; he was, after all, possessed of a free will. The late earl had been a cold-blooded man whose only deep concern was for his reputation. He had sent Robin to Rugby after the comte died because of what people would say if he didn’t; but he wouldn’t let Robin come home on holidays because of the French “taint” in his nephew’s blood.

He, Byron, didn’t have to take after his father. He could be spontaneous and warm. Amusing, even. Charming. All those things that Robin was and he wasn’t . . . but only because he hadn’t ever really tried.

He couldn’t imagine himself in love—but he could damn well make a woman fall in love with him. For a moment he considered Fiona Chisholm, but there was something in her gaze that suggested she was unlikely to succumb to tender feelings. Some sort of reserve that echoed his own.

Lady Cecily was pretty as a picture, but his friend Burbett had mentioned that he was as good as betrothed to her, so there was no point looking in her direction.

That left Marilla. She was lively, beautiful, and—for the most part—well mannered. Her joie de vivre would keep him young. He could play blindman’s buff with his children someday.

Byron took himself downstairs that afternoon resolved to win Marilla’s heart. He would begin by reiterating the request he had made to her to address him by his Christian name.

If he married someone like Marilla, it would prove to Taran that he wasn’t stuffy, like his father. The more he thought on it, Marilla was practically perfect. The other young ladies seemed to regard her as something of a leader: witness the way that they followed her suggestion of blindman’s buff.

Leadership was a good attribute for a countess.

He reached the bottom of the stairs, hesitated, and then turned into the library rather than the drawing room. Even given his new determination to consider Marilla as a countess, it was something of a relief to find that she wasn’t in the room.

In fact, the library’s only occupant was Marilla’s sister, Fiona. She lay on a sofa before the fire, reading a book, dark red curls tumbling down one shoulder. Her spectacles were surprisingly winsome, he thought. Really, it was enough to make one think that they might become fashionable.

As he walked over to the fireplace, she looked up from her book, and her brow creased for a moment. He could tell perfectly well that she had momentarily forgotten who he was. This was a woman truly unimpressed by his consequence.

“Lord Oakley,” he prompted, adding, “but please call me Byron; we are all on terms of the greatest familiarity at Finovair.” It wasn’t at all hard to ask her that. In fact, he would rather like to hear his name on her lips.

She swung down her legs, rose, and dropped a curtsy. “Lord Oakley,” she said, her eyes shadowed by curling eyelashes.

Byron bowed to the young lady and then walked over to stand in front of the sofa. He nearly sat down without being invited to do so, because that was the way people on easy terms behaved. Or at least, so he thought. But his breeding got the better of him and he remained on his feet. “We all agreed to address each other by our Christian names,” he informed her, hating the hectoring tone of his voice even as he spoke. “Mine is Byron.”

She regarded him silently for a moment. Her eyes were just as green as they had appeared last night, and her spectacles perched on a delightfully pert nose.

“In fact, you and my sister made that agreement between you, though I must presume that the Duke of Bretton and Catriona have agreed to the same informality. Does all this lack of ceremony distress you?” she asked, avoiding use of his name, he noticed. And not offering to allow him to use her own.

“I am not accustomed to it,” he admitted. “Do I remember that your name is Fiona?”

“Yes,” she confirmed, again not granting him permission to address her as such.

Despite himself, he felt a little stung. “I apologize for interrupting your reading,” he said, making up his mind not to leave the room directly, because it was good for him, one might say instructive, to remain with people who took no account of his importance. Fiona certainly fell into that category. “May I ask what volume has caught your interest?”

The earl was dangerously beautiful, Fiona thought. But so controlled. Did he even perspire when he made love? Did his face turn red, did he make inelegant noises, did he . . .

“I am reading a novel called Persuasion,” she said, jerking her mind from that disgraceful (though interesting) subject. As it happened, she had not personally acquired information about intimate encounters of that nature, but she had heard all about them. Nothing she had heard about grunting, sweaty encounters sounded terribly appealing.

“You have found your way into the wrong room, Lord Oakley,” she said, tucking herself back into a corner of the sofa. Her finger marked her place in her novel. When he first entered the room, the pompous Sir Walter of the novel and the pompous earl in front of her were confused in her mind; she had blinked at Byron as if he had somehow materialized out of the book’s pages.

In reality, her comparison wasn’t fair in the least. Oakley was young and remarkably good-looking, with white-blond hair clipped very short, and winged black eyebrows. He reminded her of a medieval saint carved from ivory: all dignity, virtue, and pale skin.

But he was still Sir Walter, under that lovely exterior. A man who could not conceivably feel other than disgust for her.

“Everyone is doubtless having a wonderful time in the drawing room. They will be missing you,” she said encouragingly.

“I am too old to play games,” he countered, as if she’d shown the faintest interest in his age.

“Does that mean you actually played games as a child?” she asked, with a queer mix of genuine curiosity and a strong wish to puncture his rigid control. He looked as if he had been born in an immaculately pressed—and elegantly tied—silk neck cloth.

“Certainly, I did.”

Frankly, while the man might be an exceptional physical specimen, he was not a very captivating conversationalist. All the same, it would be rude to simply resume reading in front of him. “Is there something I might help you find in the library?” she asked, her tone once more implying that he should take himself elsewhere.

Instead, he sat down beside her.

Fiona took a deep breath, and then wished she hadn’t. He even smelled good, like starched linen and manly soap. She didn’t like English earls. In fact, she didn’t like Englishmen in general. This one was distracting her from her book. He made her . . . he made her think about things she had given up.