Mary Fran and Matthew Read Online Free PDF

honed just to show off, and his boots and breeches weren’t in the first stare of fashion. They looked comfortable, like Mary Fran’s old green velvet riding habit.
    He gestured to the west, to the gleaming gray edifice under construction farther up the River Dee. “I take it that’s Balmoral?”
    “None other. Albert had it designed for his Queen—and their children, of course. It seems a shame to use such a lovely property only a few months of the year.”
    “It seems a shame that you are moldering away here in the countryside the year round, my lady. Doesn’t some part of you long for the society of Edinburgh?”
    If he’d been flirting with her the livelong morning, if his efforts to boost her into the saddle had been the least forward, if he’d done anything except appreciate the beauty of her home, Mary Fran might have launched a barbed retort discouraging his suggestion that her life was somehow incomplete.
    But he’d been a perfect gentleman. Polite and friendly without a hint of impropriety. His demeanor reminded Mary Fran of the way all the gentlemen had treated her prior to her marriage.
    “I might like to see a bit of the South, but then I’d have to leave my Fee, wouldn’t I?”
    “I beg your pardon?” He stood in the stirrups then settled back into the saddle, an equestrian at his leisure. “Your fee? I can’t imagine your brothers would begrudge you wages should you take a short holiday.”
    Too late, Mary Fran realized that the barrier she vigilantly maintained between her role as hostess and her role as mother had fallen. Oh, the female guests usually got wind of Fiona at some point—the child was outright pestering the spinster cousin, Augusta Merrick—but Mary Fran kept her daughter away from the gentlemen guests.
    Far, far away, particularly from the English ones.
    “Not that kind of fee, but my Fiona.”
    Daniels’s expression didn’t change.
    “My daughter Fiona.” Mary Fran pretended to study Balmoral, a brand-new building intended to resemble something medieval, at least from a distance. She knew the place well—Her Majesty was a good neighbor, and His Highness an avid sportsman—but she did not know why she kept talking.
    “Fiona is my heart. I love her dearly, but she’s impossible sometimes. She says the most confounding things, and she has no sense except at the oddest moments. Her uncles dote on her, and I worry that isn’t a good thing, then I worry that I ought to be doting on her.”
    She fell silent, wishing not that she’d kept her mouth shut, but that her companion would say something.
    “You sound like my commanding officers, fretting over the troops. Doubting yourself for coddling them, doubting yourself for enforcing the discipline an army needs to function, despairing over the best soldiers when they do the most idiot things on leave.” He offered her a smile, a slow tipping up of his lips, the same smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. “It’s the very devil when one can’t help but care, isn’t it?”
    She realized something about him then. He was not only a former military man at loose ends in the civilian world, not only an Englishman, not only a paying guest whose sister might well be the next Countess of Balfour.
    He was a man, a human being, a fellow creature. A man who had refused Mary Fran’s invitation to sin simply because he was decent.
    She basked in his smile, in the understanding of it, and offered him her own smile in return. “The very devil, indeed. I want to brain my brothers most days. They must wear their muddy boots in the house, swear in front of Fiona, and tell lewd jokes when they think I’m not listening.”
    “Sounds like life in the military—though you might also have alluded delicately to the noisome bodily functions one doesn’t speak of in Polite Society.”
    He was pretending to study Balmoral now too, but Mary Fran couldn’t help it. She laughed, a chuckle at first, then a great big belly laugh that had