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earthly right, interfering this way.
    And yet, she’d sent that letter.
    Kept it all those years, and then mailed it.
    That, he couldn’t ignore.
    Fitch reddened, clearly displeased. Mr. Feinstein ducked back behind the curtains, looking as though he might swallow the pins in the process.
    “Time to think?” Fitch thundered. “What is there to think about?”
    “Well, sir,” Gideon said diplomatically, “she’s not sure she loves you.”
    “What?”
    “Things like this happen. Women get the jitters. What with the wedding night and all—”
    “Who the hell are you?” Fitch shouted, knotting his banker’s fists at his sides, but not advancing.
    A prudent choice, Gideon thought.
    “I told you. My name is Gideon Yarbro.”
    Fitch, still seething, drew both eyebrows together into one long, bushy streak of hair. “And what have you to do with Lydia?”
    “I’m an old friend,” Gideon said.
    Fitch glowered. “Before Almighty God, if you’ve tampered with her—”
    “‘Tampered’ with her?” Gideon asked.
    “You know damn well what I mean!”
    Gideon was prepared to go to almost any length toprevent this wedding, but not quite so far as besmirching Lydia’s reputation. “No,” he said. “But I did kiss her this afternoon.”
    “You kissed my fiancée? And she allowed that? ” Now, Fitch looked as though he might blow a vessel, which would be an unfortunate solution to the whole problem.
    “I can’t say as I gave her much opportunity to decide whether to allow it or not,” Gideon admitted affably. He’d said too much already, he knew that. Adding that Lydia had responded to his kiss, nearly melted under it, would be over the line. “She needs time, that’s all I’m saying. A week. A month. A year?”
    Fitch practically spat his answer. “Until two o’clock tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “ That’s how much time I’ll give her.”
    With that, Lydia’s unlikely intended disappeared behind the curtains again. Short of going back there and hauling the man out by the scruff—and then doing what?—Gideon was out of ideas.
    Except one, that is.
    And the contingency plan had to do with Lydia herself, not Jacob Fitch.

CHAPTER THREE
    L YDIA DID NOT SLEEP A WINK that night, and little wonder, with her wedding scheduled for the very next day and the memory of Gideon’s unexpected visit to plague her thoughts.
    At the first crow of the neighbor’s rooster, Lydia arose from her bed, washed and dressed and replaited her hair, pinning the braid into a heavy knot at her nape.
    Just the way Jacob liked it. She was to wear it just so once they were married, he’d declared on more than one occasion. Modesty befitted a banker’s wife.
    Lydia stared miserably at her own reflection, pale in the mirror above her vanity table. Her eyes were hollow, the color of bruises, not violets, and her mouth pinched.
    Gideon, she thought, knowing she was torturing herself and unable to stop, would prefer her hair down, tumbling in curls to her waist.
    Behind her, the bedroom door opened.
    Helga, who never knocked, appeared in the gap, looking troubled. She’d been so sure Gideon would return—now, it seemed, reality was setting in. “Will you be coming down for breakfast?” she asked, keeping her voice low so she wouldn’t wake the aunts, who shared a room across the hall from Lydia’s.
    Lydia shook her head. If she tried to swallow so much as a morsel, she would surely gag.
    Helga hesitated, then stepped into the room. Crossed to stand behind Lydia and lay a hand on her shoulder. Her gaze strayed to Nell’s wedding dress, hanging like a burial shroud from a hook on the inside of the wardrobe door, came back to Lydia’s wan face, reflected in the vanity mirror. “You don’t have to do this,” the housekeeper said awkwardly. “You mustn’t do this. Lydia, please don’t sacrifice yourself to save a lot of musty old keepsakes and dented silver—”
    “Are the aunts ‘musty old keepsakes,’ Helga?”