“In your considered opinion, have I drunk the ocean dry tonight? It would be surprising if I had not. “Sid.” He turned his head on the back of the chair without taking the risk of raising it. The others must have taken themselves off to other revelries, or perhaps merely to their beds. Some amicable solution must have been found, however, for here he was in his own home with a small and faithful band of comrades. How did one chuck out a band of drunken gentlemen, some of them of noble birth, without giving permanent offense to them and to all their family members to the third and fourth generation past and future? But how did one not do the chucking when inaction would incur the wrath of the equally nobly born fogies? The noise level, he remembered, had escalated to the point at which several of the older members had frowned in stern disapproval-old fogies and fossils, the lot of them-and the inscrutable waiters had begun to show cracks of strain and indecision. Through the fog of his inebriation he seemed to recall that there had been celebrations at White’s Club with a satisfyingly largish band of cronies, considering the fact that it was very early in February and not at all a fashionable time to be in London. He was lounging in his favorite soft leather chair to one side of the hearth in the library of his town house, he was pleased to observe, but he was not alone, as he really ought to be at this time of night, whatever the devil time that was. He suspected that by now it was well past midnight, which fact would mean that his birthday was over and done with, as were his careless, riotous, useless twenties. He was celebrating his thirtieth birthday, or at least he had been celebrating it. Maybe he had even gone as far as drinking the ocean dry. He was almost too bored to heave himself out of his chair in order to refill his glass at the sideboard across the room.

All of which descriptors were basically the same thing, of course, but really he was bored to the marrow of his bones. Percival William Henry Hayes, Earl of Hardford, Viscount Barclay, was hugely, massively, colossally bored.

Only a Kiss by Mary Balogh