Another man, she knew, might take advantage.
They were in this house alone, the two of them, with none to hear her if she raised a protest. And he surely had to know by now, from how she did not try to guard her feelings when they were in private, that she’d not protest.
Lily had never felt so nervous as she felt when she stepped back into the chamber from the closet, in the orange-flowered gown, her damp hair loose about her shoulders.
Matthew stood, his back toward her, at the little table with the oval mirror set on top of it. He’d set out a new pinner for her and was now arranging all the pins in almost military order, in a neat and perfect line.
The silence must have somehow warned him. Glancing up, he met her gaze within the mirror.
Lily’s breath caught, hard.
She told him, softly, “You’re a good man.”
Matthew turned, and came toward her. “No, I’m not.” He stopped too close. He was all she could see when she tilted her head up. “I’m not a good man at all.” Smoothing her hair back, he rested one hand at the nape of her neck and said, “You would do better to run from me, Lily. As far and as fast as you can.”
Lily shook her head, steadily holding that brown gaze that suddenly seemed her whole world. In a voice that was barely a voice, she assured him, “I’m no feart.”
She saw the quick flash of his smile, then he lowered his head and he kissed her and Lily saw nothing at all, for her eyes were closed and she was drifting on feeling.
A sound from the passage below brought them instantly arm’s length apart.
It was no more than Simon and Walter, returning from Mr. Kay’s illegal church service at his own house in the Yardheads. When one of them started upstairs, Matthew moved. He was casually standing just inside the door of the chamber when Simon appeared on the landing.
“Still raining?” he asked, noting Simon’s wet coat.
Simon stopped for a moment, his eyes moving past Matthew’s shoulder to Lily and back again. “Aye.”
“We were out on the Links,” Matthew said.
Lily held her breath, wondering what Simon thought of her, but he said only, “’Tis none of my business,” and would have walked on but he caught himself. Glanced back at Matthew. “Ye staying for dinner?”
Lily had never seen Simon when he was a child. He’d already left childhood behind when she’d met him, and now he was twenty. A man.
But there was something almost boyish in the way he faced his brother. Something almost hopeful.
Matthew must have seen it, too.
“Aye,” Matthew said. “I think I will.”
*
Barbara reckoned it a fair exchange—her old hat’s ivory plume, which had been lost out on the Links in that hard rain, in trade for Matthew coming round more often. She stitched a broad, brown ribbon on the hat instead, and said to Lily, “Mind, now, what I telt ye. The mistakes I made when I was young. Ye would not wish to find yourself in trouble.”
There was no chance of that. Lily might have lost her heart to Matthew, but she was determined that was all she’d lose. For Matthew’s part, the manner of his birth had made him equally determined not to bring another bairn into the world in the same circumstances.
He was every inch the gentleman. And they took care to be discreet.
Matthew’s brothers helped by closing ranks around them, screening them from Archie’s watchful eyes so he’d not guess the truth.
The late November evening when the family gathered all together in the front room, with the shutters closing out the weather, keeping in the warmth and light, it would have seemed to anyone that Matthew’s whole attention was on Maggie.
He was sitting near the hearth and she had climbed onto his knee as she loved best to do whenever he was near, for although Maggie did love all of her adopted brothers it was plain to everyone that Matthew was her favorite. She’d turned five on her last birthday and was just the right size now to rest her head in the strong curve of his shoulder while he read to her.
At the small, square table by the window Barbara and the other brothers played a lively and good-natured game of cards, made all the livelier by the sure knowledge that they all were cheating at their play, while Archie sat beside them in his own chair, alternately reading from his papers and observing.
Only Lily was at work, having a will that needed altering for one of Archie’s clients by the morning. It was not a complicated task—a name razed out, another substituted, and the changing of a number. She did not allow herself to think who might be injured in the process. She preferred instead to twist it in her mind and think that she perhaps was helping someone who had been unjustly barred from an inheritance that they were rightly owed. That made it easier.