Free If He's Sinful by Hannah Howell Page B

completely respectable. I moved my brothers into this house. Then, one by one, the others began to arrive, starting with Darius, Uncle Argus’s boy by a mistress who decided to get married and could not take the child with her. Argus bought this house from Olympia and signed it over to my brothers, and me, with himself as tentative head of the household until I come of age. There are ten boys here now and their fathers do their best to help with the money needed to raise them.”
    “Should they not be at school?”
    “They attend when there is the money to send them but a tutor is usually all that can be afforded.”
    “And you live here? Is that why I have not seen you at Hutton-Moore House?”
    “Nay, I do not live here. Charles and Clarissa do not know about this house as far as I know. I come here when I can. Fortunately, that is quite often. Until I am five and twenty I must stay with the Hutton-Moores.”
    Penelope decided the men did not need to know that she stayed because she feared it was the only way to be certain she could still claim that house when it legally became hers. Nor did they need to know that the will said when she was five and twenty or married. As far as she knew, the house her stepbrother and sister claimed for themselves was all that was left of the riches her mother had brought to her second marriage. There was still a chance she could lose that, too, and be left with nothing more than a tiny annuity, but she held out the stubborn hope that Charles could not actually steal that away as she suspected he had stolen everything else.
    “You still have not answered the question as to why I have never seen you there,” Ashton pressed.
    “S’truth, none of us can recall seeing you anywhere,” added Lord Mallam. “At not one society function.”
    “Have never even heard you mentioned of by the Hutton-Moores,” said Baron Fisherton. “Yet you are a Hutton-Moore.”
    “Only in name,” Penelope said, realizing that these men had obviously gone ahunting for information about her. “Only because the old baron felt it would make it easier for him to get his hands on all my father left behind if he adopted me. The pretense that I was one of them died a swift death when the old baron and my mother were buried. I was banished to the attics and nearly forgotten. That is why I can come here so often and no one knows. Or cares. As long as I keep out of sight, they do not trouble themselves with me. I rather prefer that arrangement now.”
    She smiled faintly when she saw how shocked the men looked. “I keep informed of all that is going on in my house through a few of the servants and, I blush to admit, eavesdropping. The house has a great many little nooks and passages the Hutton-Moores know nothing about. For reasons she never explained to me, my mother never told her husband about them and ordered me to keep them secret as well.”
    “And that is how you learned I was betrothed to Clarissa or from the paper?” asked Ashton.
    “From Charles and Clarissa, but I did not really have to eavesdrop to learn that. Things got quite, er, loud after you left the house this morning, Lord Radmoor.” And the anger of her stepsiblings had so filled the air she had felt choked by it, but that was not something she could tell these men.
    Ashton grimaced and then stared at her in surprise. “You knew who I was that night.”
    “I did.” She struggled to subdue a blush but a slight heat in her cheeks told her she was only partly successful.
    “Nick me! Why did you not say something?”
    “That potion did rather dull my wits, m’lord, and I did make a fumbling effort to explain.” She frowned. “Are you here because you fear I will tell Clarissa about what happened that night?” Penelope was almost certain that Clarissa knew what had happened to her, all except for the fact that Radmoor would be the man sent to her. It was Charles’s part in it all that she was not yet certain of.
    “No, I…” Ashton