As she settled into the game of house with the girls, Tilly kept half an eye on Lord Rhys. Between the women and the children, he was being run ragged from one task to the next—serving tea…hanging decorations…extracting a toy giraffe whose long neck had become wedged inside the ark…
And she thought she might’ve been right about him.
She wasn’t sure he was good in the narrow way folk associated with good men.
He didn’t seem pious or particularly upright.
But he had good inside him—good intentions…a good heart.
The point was this Lord Rhys Osborne had no bad in him.
Which to her way of thinking counted for a lot.
How many “good” men had she known that were all bad on the inside?
“Oh, Lord Rhys?”
“Yeah?” he asked over his shoulder. Presently, he was on the top step of a stool in front of the hearth where he was hanging a gold star.
“This tea service won’t march itself back to the kitchen and clean itself up.”
From her place on the floor, Tilly watched his shoulders lift and fall. Then he said, “All right.”
He placed the gold star on the mantle, unhung, as he set to the task assigned him, sparing a harassed glance for Tilly in the process.
Again, she giggled and immediately felt naughty for taking such delight in his travails—then giggled again.
He straightened with the tea tray. “Where is the kitchen?”
Tilly scrambled to her feet. “I’ll show you.”
They weren’t three steps down the corridor when he groused, “I can’t see how this disaster of a day will count as a noble deed.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Tilly, all breezy in stark contrast to his plain frustration. “I rather think it does.”
Black eyebrows made for the ceiling. “You do?”
“It’s the intention behind a deed that makes it noble, innit?”
His brow furrowed, her words working on his frustration and wounded pride.
Again, she giggled, and the look of betrayal he shot her only induced another giggle. “Oh, Lord Rhys, but you were outnumbered, and those women were determined to have their way with you and cause some mischief.”
He snorted, and with the release returned that lightness she’d come to associate with this man. Half a smile curved his mouth, and he shook his head.
“A lord at the beck and call of a bevy of erstwhile strumpets?” she couldn’t resist saying as they crossed the kitchen to the scullery, where the washing up happened. “I’d say you made their day. So, a noble deed, aye. Now,” she continued, shrugging off her pelisse and draping it over the back of a chair, “have you ever washed a dish in your life?”
“I, erm, haven’t.”
A possibility struck her. “Have you ever even been in a kitchen?”
“Of course,” he said, defensive, then added, “a few times.”
As they stood, nearly shoulder to shoulder, her washing the dirty dishes in the soapy sink and him dipping them in the rinse sink, then placing the clean dishes on a towel to dry on the counter, she marveled. Housework with a lord… Couldn’t this old world offer up some surprises?
Once he’d rinsed the last teacup and set it on the towel, he turned to face her. A question was about to be asked, and she braced for it.
“Why did you cheat Sir Felix at the masquerade?”
