Read Online His Mistress by Morning by Elizabeth Boyle - Free Book Online Page A

colors and fancy feathers. And beside Lord Trent’s sister stood his mother, Lady Walbrook, minus her penchant for bold and (some may say gaudy) silks and sarcenet; and on the other, Lady Cordelia Marlowe, Hermione’s older sister, dressed in much the same dull fashion. Lady Cordelia? What was she doing in London?
    “Oh, Hermione, how glad I am to find you,” Charlotte said without even thinking, reaching out to take her friend’s hand.
    At the utterance of her name, Hermione colored in embarrassment and drew back in horror.
    Charlotte looked from her dearest, most bosom friend to Lady Cordelia and then to Lady Walbrook and realizedthat these women, whom she knew so well and loved like family, were not the same.
    Just as she wasn’t the same Miss Wilmont.
    The countess’s face turned a livid red. “Be off with you, baggage,” she screeched, waving her parasol at Charlotte as she might at a stray dog. “How dare you come lurking about here as if you belong!” Then she caught each daughter by the arm and pulled them away, towing them down the street and around the corner.
    “But I do…” she whispered after them. Belong .
    She looked up the steps at the house that was like her second home to find Fenwick glowering down at her. Before she could say anything (as if she would know what to say in such circumstances) the butler closed the door with a definitive thud.
    He hadn’t quite slammed it, but the meaning was all too clear.
    You, madame, are not welcome in this house .
    Charlotte backed away from the steps, stumbling across the curb and down into the street. Hot tears stung her eyes, ran down her cheeks as she made her way across the square and into the garden in the middle. She sank onto a bench, her hands knotting into a tangle of worry in her lap.
    Between quiet sobs and hiccups, she tried to catch her breath, make sense of this utterly impossible morning. “Whatever has happened to me?”
    “You made a wish, that’s what happened,” said a familiar voice.
    Charlotte’s head swung in the direction, and to her shock, there seated beside her sat the charwoman from this morning. “Quince!”
    “Oh, aye, that’s good you remember my name.” The woman’s wrinkled cheeks dimpled even further.
    “How could I forget it?” Charlotte said, an uncharacteristic temper rising inside her. She poked a finger at the woman, now back in her flower seller’s guise, a large basket of posies perched in her lap. “What have you done to me?”
    “Done to you?” The woman had the nerve to look affronted. “I gave you your wish.” She fussed over her bouquets, rearranging the already tidy flowers and ribbons.
    “This is not what I wished,” Charlotte told her. “To be shunned by my friends, to be accosted on the streets.” She glanced over at the Marlowe house, and tears threatened to spill from her eyes. “To be thought a common…a soiled…”
    “Dove?” Quince asked, handing her a worn handkerchief. “Point in fact, your wish was rather vague. You asked for love, and you got it.”
    “I am not this woman,” she said, her hands fluttering from the top of her flirtatious hat, over the low cut of her bodice, and ending at her embroidered and trimmed skirt.
    “Of course you are!” Quince told her, tipping her head as she surveyed her handiwork.
    Charlotte leaned forward. “I haven’t the wherewithal for this life. Why, Arbuckle wants to paint me…well, I was supposed to wear…what I mean is, not supposed to…”
    “Nude.” Quince looked heavenward. “My dear, if you can’t even say it, you are going to be in quite a quandary.”
    Charlotte sputtered. “Exactly my point! I cannotpose…I mean, stand about…” She still couldn’t say the word.
    “Like that, ” she finally managed. Naked. Bare to the world. It reminded her too much of how she’d found herself this morning.
    Of seeing Lord Trent striding across the room without a care or a stitch…
    “I think you’ve made a mistake,”