No Man's Mistress by Mary Balogh

said.
    He reached down a hand and helped her to her feet. He took the chain from her and looped it over her head.
    “My wholesome country lass,” he murmured, and bent his head to kiss her on the lips. He raised his head again sharply, but too late, of course. What sort of a blithering idiot had he turned into for that brief, thoughtless moment?
    Color flamed in her cheeks, and her eyes sparked. He waited with an inward grimace for the crack across the cheek he fully expected—he would not defend himself, since he had undoubtedly been in the wrong. But she kept her hands to herself.
    “Lord Ferdinand,” she said, her voice cold and quavering, “you may have grounds for believing that Pinewood is yours. But I am not part of the package. My person is my own property. I believe I have said this before, but I say it again, lest you did not believe me the first time. I am no man's mistress. I am my own.”
    She turned and strode away, not along the river path but across it and up the steep bank beyond, to disappear over the top.
    The devil! Ferdinand thought. What in thunder had possessed him? He had come out here to be firm, to assert himself, to get rid of the woman, and he had ended up kissing her and murmuring something so deucedly embarrassing that he did not care to remember the exact words.
    My wholesome country lass
.
    Each word taken separately was enough to make him wince for a week.
    Lord, but she had certainly been transformed beforehis eyes. A daisy-bedecked country lass one moment, a frosty, tight-lipped lady the next.
    He wished suddenly that he could be as iron-willed and ruthless as Tresham would undoubtedly be in a situation like this. The woman would have been gone yesterday, forgotten today.
    How the devil was he going to get rid of her?
    He set off back along the river path, feeling all the frustration of having settled nothing but only compounded his problems. What he needed to do was sit down quietly somewhere and think for a few hours. Make plans. And then carry through on them. But as soon as he set foot inside the house, he knew that he was not going to get what he needed—not for a while anyway. The hall seemed crammed to capacity with people, all of whom turned at his entrance and gazed expectantly at him.
    “Jarvey?” Ferdinand singled out the butler and raised his eyebrows in inquiry.
    “Mr. Paxton is awaiting your return in the library, my lord,” Jarvey told him. “And there are a number of persons who are requesting an audience with you.”
    “Paxton?”
    “Pinewood's steward, my lord,” Jarvey explained.
    Ferdinand glanced about at all the silent persons who awaited an audience with him, and turned in the direction of the library.
    “I had better see him, without further delay, then,” he said.
    Viola walked in the avenue until she felt she had calmed down sufficiently to risk meeting other people. She had
talked
with him, almost as if he were a friend. She had let him
kiss
her. Yes, she had allowed it. She hadknown somehow as soon as he took the daisy chain from her hands and looped it over her head that he was going to do it. She could have stopped him. But she had not. All the time he had been sitting beside her, half reclined on the grass, she had fought the effects of his attractiveness on her breathing, her heartbeat, her nerve endings.
    She did not want to find him attractive. She wanted to hate him. She
did
hate him.
    She turned her mind determinedly to her letter, slipping her hand into her pocket and closing her fingers about it. The answer was no—again.
    “We are all very much obliged to you for your kind invitation,” Claire had written. “You must know how we long to see you again after so long. Two years is
too
long a time. But Mama has asked me to express our deepest regrets on her behalf and to explain why we cannot go. She feels that she owes too much to our uncle, especially now that he has been generous enough to send Ben to school. She feels that she must