Even half an hour later, his body still felt the effects of her caresses. His skin prickled as if awakened from a long slumber. His heart had not yet settled back into its normal beat. Instead, it remained erratic and as excitable as a young hare in spring. And his mind… well… his mind kept straying back to the amorous encounter despite the current presence of not only Charlotte’s brother but of Hannah, Sophia, and Tavish as well.
Matthew tried to remind himself of Alexander’s warning. A romance with Charlotte, no matter how innocent, would make her a target for Hawley’s vile vengeance. Even without the very real specter of his brother’s violence, Matthew knew he wasn’t a proper match for Charlotte. Yet in the face of these facts, Matthew still could not help but imagine taking Charlotte into his arms again. Feeling her lithe form as she…
Swounds.He needed to focus on the conversation swirling around him and not on the woman perched less than a yard away.
“Now that we are all properly assembled and provided with appropriate refreshments, does anyone care to tell me how my twin came to have her arm in a sling?” Alexander asked the question with his typical good humor, the ankle of his bad leg propped on the knee of his good one. He looked like any gentleman of leisure, but Matthew knew that his best friend was concerned beneath the veneer of joviality.
“I was shot by a dragoon when he fired at Matthew who was leaping from rooftop to rooftop.” Charlotte’s face did not betray even the slightest hint of impishness, but Matthew could sense that she was enjoying shocking her brother. It was exactly how Alexander would relay such a story.
Charlotte’s pluck soothed some of Matthew’s guilt, replacing it with warm pride. He hated that he had dragged her into danger—however inadvertently—but it seemed that Charlotte was made of stern stuff.
Alexander’s mien of nonchalance dropped as he bolted upright in his chair. His raised leg thumped to the ground with a resounding bang.
This was Alexander-the-athlete, ready to defend his sister against any foe.
“What?” Alexander demanded. “You were shot! Tavish’s missive said you had a minor accident.”
“Well, it is only a flesh wound. Matthew stitched it up very handily. Didn’t you, Matthew?” Charlotte idly took a bite of a scone and winked impishly at Matthew over the pastry. Despite the seriousness of the situation, Matthew felt a bubble of mirth.
Alexander, however, remained unamused. Glancing at each of the room’s occupants, he whirled back and forth in his chair like a well-engineered Swiss automaton. “Matthew needed to sew your flesh back together! And what is this about jumping on rooftops?Have you all gone mad? What were you truly doing last night? Any of you?”
“I believe we were helping free children being transported to the Colonies. I am a little unclear on all the details.” Charlotte took a sip of coffee.
“Are you telling me that you confronted dragoons, and you don’t know exactly why?” Alexander folded his arms across his chest. “Can someone please make sense of this jumble?”
“I suppose we should commence at the beginning,” Hannah said, her tone just as light as Charlotte’s.
“Which one?” Sophia asked. “There are so many to choose from.”
“Just start somewhere,” Alexander ground out.
“Tavish. The tale opens with him,” Matthew said, taking pity on Alexander. He paused to glance at his mentor. “That is, if you wish to tell the story, sir.”
That succeeded in quieting the room. Hannah and Sophia knew some of Tavish’s background but not nearly all of it.
Tavish’s questioning blue eyes solemnly regarded Matthew. After all, their pasts intertwined in ways no one suspected.
Matthew nodded, feeling a sweeping sensation of relief that he could finally reveal years of secrets. He’d longed to confide in Alexander, but he hadn’t wanted to needlessly endanger his best friend. Now though, Alexander had become a part of this and so had Charlotte. Half-truths imperiled them more than the full, unabridged story.
“My family were crofters on Matthew’s father’s estate in Scotland,” Tavish explained. “Poor ones with cursed luck at farming. My father had tried his hand at soldiering but returned from fighting in the Colonies with ill health that left him bedridden. My mother tried her best to support me, my father, and my twograndmothers, but there was never enough bread to feed us. I started poaching as a wee lad—first with snares then with a crossbow. One day, Matthew’s mother caught me setting a trap when I was about seven. Instead of telling her new husband, the duke, she offered me a job at the manor house, making sure I was paid well enough to help my family. The duchess developed a maternal interest in me, teaching me to read and write. She cared a great deal about nature, and she taught me what she knew about the woods surrounding the estate. I believe that she was preparing for how she would instruct her children but—”
Tavish paused as he looked at Matthew, obviously seeking permission to continue. The next part revealed more about Matthew’s past than it did about Tavish’s. Yet it was critical to both their histories.
Matthew cleared his throat. He hated talking about his family, the way he’d been raised, but he needn’t expose it all… just enough to connect the pieces of the tale. “My father believed in a rigid upbringing for his heirs, so he insisted that his own nursemaid from his childhood oversee most of the care for Hawley. The same happened with my second eldest brother. My mother hoped that since I would be the third in line that she might finally be allowed to play a more active role in my care, but she died shortly after I was born.”
The last words fell from Matthew’s mouth with an ease that he did not feel. It sounded so dry, so divorced from the devastating loss of what her love might have meant to his awful boyhood. The sentence did not hint at how his superstitious father had immediately blamed Matthew for her death and suspected him—an undersized babe—of being a changeling.
“I was able to speak with the duchess one last time before her passing.” Tavish smoothly reentered the conversation. Unlike the others, he knew exactly what Matthew had left unsaid. “She askedme that I teach Matthew all that she had shown me—how to love the beauty of the natural world. I was kept on as part of the household staff, but when my attempts to teach Matthew about flowers and songbirds were eventually brought to the attention of the duke, I was dismissed without reference. Without means to care for my family, I again resorted to poaching.”
“I shall never understand the aristocracy.” Hannah shook her head in disgust. “That is absurd. You would think the duke would want his son to have the broadest education possible.”
“Not from the poor son of a crofter,” Tavish said swiftly.
Alexander and Charlotte nodded as if they understood, and to a great extent, they did. Alexander’s family had outright rejected and punished him for his clubfoot, and Charlotte had lived a strict, highly regulated existence. But unlike what the twins believed, it wasn’t just societal rules that had driven the old duke to fire Tavish, but his fears that Matthew was a fae. He’d believed that exposure to the natural world would further foster Matthew’s innate dark magic.
“This time when I was caught hunting, I was arrested and sentenced to exile in the Colonies. The passage over was… brutal, disease filled, not something I wish to recall.” Tavish’s tone became both rough and rushed as the words seemed to squeeze from deep inside him.
Matthew’s father—his family—had caused this pain. The duke, Hawley, and Matthew’s middle brother, Henry, still condemned poachers, mere lads, to hard labor far from their homes. The guilt of that ate at Matthew. His family’s mistreatment of their crofters had festered inside him since boyhood, long before he’d even learned of Tavish’s plight.
