And Then He Kissed Her Read Online Free PDF Page A

Of course you must. Time is going by. Why,you’re thirty-six now, and in a few more years, it’ll be too late. You’ll be forty, and we all know what happens to men around that time, poor dears.”
    Harry choked on his wine.
    Louisa didn’t seem to notice. “You must find a wife immediately.”
    He told himself his mother didn’t know what she was talking about. “Why should I go to the trouble of finding a wife, Mama, when my sisters are exerting such strenuous efforts to find one on my behalf?”
    “What happens to men at forty?” Phoebe wanted to know.
    “Never mind,” Diana told her, and before Phoebe could ask any more questions, she once again returned the conversation to the Dillmouth girls. “You know, Phoebe, I believe you’re right. Lady Melanie would be a better choice. Some would say she’s on the shelf a bit at twenty-eight, and she isn’t as pretty as Florence, but she does have black hair, and Harry has such a decided preference for women with hair of that particular shade. Melanie is also the more intelligent of the two sisters.”
    “Intelligent?” Harry gave a long-suffering sigh. “Melanie Dillmouth can’t carry on a conversation. She’s so tongue-tied, I wonder how any of you can form an opinion of her intelligence.”
    “She’s tongue-tied around you ,” Diana told him. “It’s understandable, I suppose, given her feelings, though I’m not sure those feelings make her a good wife for you or not.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    His eldest sister groaned. “Oh, Harry! Sometimes you are the densest of creatures.”
    “No doubt,” he agreed at once. “I am a man, after all. But what is it about me that causes Melanie Dillmouth’s tongue to cease functioning?”
    “She’s in love with you, of course!”
    “What?” Harry was astonished. “Don’t be silly.”
    “She is,” Diana insisted. “She always has been. Ever since you saved her cat.”
    He paused in his supper to take a glance around the table, and his lack of memory about the event in question must have shown in his face. His inquiring glance was answered with four sighs of exasperation and one aggravated elderly harrumph, all of which slid off his back like water off a duck. Surrounded as he was by females, with his father dead nearly twenty years now, and without a single brother to help even the odds, he had learned long ago it was impossible to live up to feminine expectations. “You’re mad, Di,” he said and resumed eating. “I’d never save a cat. I loathe cats.”
    “I can’t believe you don’t remember,” Diana chided him. “That summer when the Dillmouth girls stayed with us at Marlowe Park. You were just out of Cambridge. Melanie’s cat got caught in a rat trap and you got it out.”
    A vague memory surfaced. “For heaven’s sake, that was ages ago. Fifteen years, at least.”
    “She’s never forgotten it,” Diana told him. “She cried when you married Consuelo.”
    “If I’d known what I was in for, I’d have cried, too.”
    None of them seemed to find that amusing. Harry wondered how his family could ever think the image of Melanie Dillmouth crying over him would spark any romantic interest on his part. The only desire that pity for a woman inspired in a man was the desire to run away.
    “What about Elizabeth Darbury?” Phoebe suggested. “She’s got black hair.”
    “Good breeders in that family.” Antonia gave a nod of approval. “The Darburys always have at least two sons in every generation.”
    “Lizzie Darbury won’t do,” Vivian said. “She never understands Harry’s jokes. She just stares at him as if he’s a bit touched in the head and doesn’t laugh.”
    “And that’s important,” Louisa said. “Men do hate it when we don’t find them amusing. Especially Harry. It quite upsets him.”
    “It does not upset me. And I don’t know why my sisters are so determined to choose a wife for me.”
    “Because you are so bad at it,” Vivian said at once,