Indiscreet by Mary Balogh

“that you will marry impulsively someone who cannot make you happy. Ellen, for example. She is a sweet girl, Rex. Truly. I have known her since she was a child. But she needs someone less—forbidding than you.”
    â€œThank you,” the viscount said.
    His brother chuckled. “You are ten chronological years older than her,” he said, “and about thirty years older in experience.”
    â€œYou need not fear,” Lord Rawleigh told him. “I am not aboutto marry your sister-in-law, impulsively or otherwise. What is your other fear?”
    â€œThat you will not marry at all,” Claude said. “That you will merely allow your bitterness and cynicism to grow. It would be a shame. You have a great deal to offer by way of love, even if you do not realize it.”
    The viscount laughed. “We really have moved in opposite directions in the years since your marriage, Claude,” he said. “I no longer fit the image you have of me.”
    â€œAh, but I am bound to your soul,” his brother said. “I do not need to be with you or living a similar life to yours to know you, Rex.”
    The conversation was becoming uncomfortably personal. And one-sided, of course. His brother could probe his private life to his heart’s content. But he did not have the same freedom. One could not discuss a brother’s marriage even if he was an identical twin. The viscount was glad of a diversion.
    They were taking a shortcut across a large meadow. So was someone else. At first it seemed that it was only a little dog, which came streaking toward them, barking furiously and seemingly with a death wish, since the two horses were giants in comparison to its size. But the wise dog did not come too close. It danced about at a safe distance, still barking its challenge.
    Toby!
    Where was she? Lord Rawleigh looked about and saw her approaching from the direction of a stile at the far side of themeadow. She was not hurrying. He guessed that she would have retreated if her dog had not betrayed her presence.
    â€œAh, Mrs. Winters’s dog,” Claude said, “with Mrs. Winters herself not far behind.” He smiled and removed his hat and called out a greeting to her as she came closer.
    She was dressed in a simple, rather drab gray cloak with a plain blue bonnet to match the blue dress she had worn that morning. She smiled and curtsied to Claude after she had come closer—she seemed to know unerringly which of them was which. Her dog had called off the attack and sat beside her, tongue lolling, ears cocked to give the illusion of intelligent attention. She greeted Claude just as she had greeted
him
on their arrival at Bodley, the viscount thought wryly. With a sweep of the eyes she included him in the greeting.
    The viscount remembered, as she and Claude exchanged brief pleasantries and he looked silently on, that she had given him a blistering set-down this morning and that he had been unable to retaliate because Clarissa had interrupted them. She would have been an interesting mistress, he thought with faint regret. All the interest of their relationship would not have been confined to their bed.
    And then she was on her way again, her terrier loping off ahead of her. He touched his hat and inclined his head to her.
    â€œA beauty,” he said to Claude. “And she has been in residence here for five years, someone was saying? One wonders about the late Mr. Winters. Was he so good that he cannot be replaced? Or was he so bad that he
will
not be replaced?”
    â€œI hope you will exercise the proper care in seeing that she is not compromised,” his brother said.
    What the devil?
    â€œI suppose Clarissa was convinced that if she had not entered the music room at the precise moment she did,” he said irritably, “I would have had Mrs. Winters stretched back over the pianoforte with her skirts hoisted and her body mounted? I concede that the sight would have