To Love a Traitor by JL Merrow Read Free Book Online Page B

almost giddily as he followed. Damn it, he needed to calm his nerves a bit or Matthew would think him very queer.
    “Oh, but it’s true! Why on earth do you suppose I went into advertising? It’s one of the few professions that requires neither education nor accomplishments.” Matthew put down the bag in the middle of George’s room with an exaggerated sigh of relief.
    “But you must have to have a certain talent for it,” George protested. “I’m sure I couldn’t write advertisements to save my life.” Was he laying on the flattery a trifle thick? Of course, advertisements were notorious for being sometimes less than truthful. Perhaps Connaught’s choice of profession was proof of innate dishonesty?
    “You’d soon get into the swing of it if you tried. All you have to do is praise the product to high heaven, and hint that it was developed by scientists with only slightly lesser powers of creation than the Deity Himself.” Matthew sprawled on George’s desk chair, watching curiously as the books he’d just carried were evicted from the carpet bag and lined up along the back of the desk. “Do you really have to read all these?”
    “Not every page of them, no—at least, that’s the impression I’ve got so far. Don’t forget, I’ve only been at Forrester & Lindley for a fortnight. No, most of these are just for reference—I picked a job lot of them up at a secondhand bookshop, ridiculously cheap, before I started. Thought I might as well find out what I was letting myself in for.”
    “What made you go into this line of work, then, if you didn’t know anything about it?”
    George flushed a little. “Well, it was all a bit fortuitous, to tell you the truth. I needed a situation, and a, ah, friend of the family offered an introduction to Mr. Forrester. He seemed to think I wouldn’t be a total dead loss so, well, here I am.” George was aware of his heart beating uncomfortably fast by the end of his speech, despite the fact that it was essentially all true. He hoped desperately it wouldn’t look like he was lying.
    But Matthew just nodded. “It’s all who you know, not what you know, isn’t it? Nice when it works for you, but not so nice when it doesn’t, I suppose. Of course, I’m hardly one to talk—the head of my agency is an old friend of my father’s.”
    “Is your father in advertising too?”
    “Well, I suppose you could say so, in a way. Just the one client, though—but I must say, Father makes far more extraordinary claims about his product than I’ve ever dreamed of!” He laughed, while George frowned, puzzled. “Father’s a rector,” Matthew explained, grinning. “Sorry. I have this awful habit of making light of religion, but I’m not really as godless as all that. And while we’re on the subject, I do believe that’s the ladies of the house returning from church. Shall we go down and advise them of your arrival?”
    They trotted downstairs to find that Mrs. Mac and Miss Lewis had returned from church accompanied by a thin, somewhat ferrety young man in an ill-fitting brown suit and a flat cap. Matthew greeted him with a grin and a hearty clap on the shoulder, rather to George’s irritation. “Tom! Good to see you. Tom, this is George Johnson, our latest addition to the family. George, Tom Watkins, deliverer of letters and the future proud possessor of Miss Lewis’s lovely hand.”
    Miss Lewis blushed prettily at this. She seemed to have shed her competent, sensible air along with her nurse’s uniform, but perhaps it was the presence of her fiancé rather than the somewhat frivolous floral dress she was wearing that had brought out her more feminine side. George couldn’t help thinking how very different she and Mabel were, for two women of similar age and in the same profession. He nodded politely to Watkins, and was disconcerted to be met with a very speculative look in those narrow, dark eyes. “Play football, do you, Mr. Johnson?”
    Taken entirely by