Page 7 of The Lady's Last Mistake
She knew so little of the world beyond her Mayfair life. Over the next few lectures, which she and Elyse attended together, she started paying attention to a common thread in the stories of births the midwife would tell her. Many of the women were young, under the age of twenty, and nearly half of them were not married. The unmarried ones, Elyse said, usually had no support at all from their families. They were often cast out if they dared to keep their child rather than send it to an orphanage or shuffle it off to an older relative.
“Is there no safe place for them?” Cassie had asked, thinking of her own safe place when she’d found herself in the same dire circumstances: unmarried, with child, and terrified.
A middle-aged couple, Mr. and Mrs. Olsson, who had been her late brother Philip’s old friends, had welcomed her into their small but caring home in Stockholm. At the time, Cassie had felt like a prisoner, separated from everyone and everything she knew, facing a moment that she dreaded with all her heart. But looking back, she realized that the Olsson’s home had been a blessing.
“Not yet,” Elyse had answered.
By the following week, Cassie had formed an idea. When she presented it to her new friend, Elyse had accepted on the spot.
Now, the clock on Cassie’s desk ticked softly toward two in the afternoon as she read a medical treatise Elyse had given her. It went in depth on childbirth and the unnecessary use of forceps, and to be honest, much of it turned Cassie’s stomach. She rubbed her eyes, the tips of her fingers chilled. Her toes were beginning to grow uncomfortably cold too. The coal delivery had been delayed several days now, andshe’d forgone a fire in her own office grate in favor of making sure their current residents had plenty to keep warm. For Elyse, too. She lived at Hope House, after all, and even though the rooms were updated and comfortable, the windows still let in drafts and poor insulation kept the walls cold. All fixable, of course, but after going through their accounts, they’d agreed not until the spring. Cassie had just five hundred a year from her inheritance, and she needed to reserve what little was left of it, at least for the next five months.
The thought of money reminded her of the previous week, when Lord Thornton had so casually implied that she was nothing more than a pampered female, frittering away pin money. She gnashed her teeth. The bigheaded boor! She still simmered over his ludicrous claim that he’d been checking Lady Brookfield for a mole. Utter nonsense. The widow’s hem had practically been up around her waist!
Her heart still stuttered when thinking of the several minutes she’d endured in the closet, pressed against him, as they hid from discovery. The moment she’d put her hands against Lord Thornton’s chest, she’d regretted it. The hard muscle underneath his evening clothes had made her feel too hot. His scent—a rich amalgam of cinnamon and sandalwood—made her head swimmy. Cassie had been painstakingly aware of her bosom against him, and of his bare hands drifting down the backs of her arms. And then, worst of all, of the rock of his thighs as her leg stumbled between his, during their tussling. Her breathing had grown stilted when the bully had covered her mouth with his palm. And then he’d had the audacity to be furious withher!
A single pert knock on her office door was all the warningElyse gave before coming in. Cassie was too slow to wipe away her grimace.
“Are you thinking about that horrible man again?” she asked.
The office was small and cold, but it was still cozy. On numerous occasions, Cassie had considered sleeping on the couch instead of returning to her home on Grosvenor Square. However, her staff would undoubtedly report her absence to the duke. Michael was the one who employed them after all.
Cassie closed the treatise and stood, regretful that she’d told Elyse about the encounter. But she’d still been beside herself the morning after the ball, and her friend had noticed. Elyse was aware that she was a lady of the peerage and that she was keeping her work at Hope House a secret. She’d been skeptical at first, uncertain if Cassie could maintain a double life, but here they were, one year later, and the rhythm of Cassie’s two lives had settled in rather well.
“Any thought of Lord Thornton is firmly in the darkest recesses of my mind,” she fibbed.
“Exactly where he should be. Men like him are the very reason this house exists.”
The urge to deny the accusation leaped to her tongue, but Cassie swallowed it. Why should she defend him? For all she knew, the man had sired a dozen by-blows. His reputation was cemented in the ton as a good physician but a scalawag who frequented the haunts of the demimonde rather than the typical social outlets of the peerage.
“Take Lila, for example,” Elyse continued in the rising tone that usually signaled a brief ticking-off.
“What about her?” The young woman had arrived a fewweeks ago, her abdomen just barely round enough to be noticeable.
A fresh purpling bruise on the side of her mouth, and an older one yellowing the fair skin at her temple, had not shocked Cassie when she’d entered the mock office in the front of the building. Many of the women and girls who arrived sported such marks, compliments of the men they were usually taking refuge from.
“I am looking for my friend, Hope,” the young woman had said, repeating the code that had been confided in her by one of the nuns or midwives in the area whom Elyse trusted implicitly.
It hadn’t taken more than a single conversation with Lila for Cassie to realize she wasn’t from the East End. She was educated, most likely finished at a respectable school. Her clothing didn’t look to be from any of the high-end shops on Bond or Oxford Streets, but they weren’t cast offs either. They’d probably been purchased readymade at a clothier.
“She was probably compromised by someone just like your blackguard.”
“He’s notmyblackguard,” Cassie snapped. Elyse rolled her dark brown eyes.
“You know what I mean. An upper-class rake who didn’t think twice before leading a young, impressionable girl to reach just above her station,” she said. “I’m almost positive she is gentry.”
She and Elyse had been trying to piece together Lila’s story on their own based on what little the young woman had offered. She’d only given her first name and that she was around four months gone. Nothing more.
Cassie reached for the shawl on the back of her chair andstepped out from behind her desk. “Whoever compromised Lila, there is at least one thing that sets Lord Thornton apart from him.”
“What is that?”
“He would never strike a woman.” Cassie knew this with pure conviction. “He might be an egotistical idiot, but he is not a violent man.”
Again, she recalled the gentle brush of his fingers down the backs of her arms while they stood in that darkened closet. The skin there tightened involuntarily at the memory. Cassie wrapped her shawl tighter around herself.
“How is Dorie faring?” she asked Elyse, eager to move away from the topic of the vexing physician.
The downward turn of her friend’s mouth wasn’t promising. “Her fever has worsened. She’s becoming insensible. It’s time we sent for a doctor.”
