Chapter 7
Chapter
Seven
What a wreck of a day it had turned out to be.
Cassie had known some women came to Hope House to evade the men in their lives, and when Lila—or rather, Isabel—had been so guarded upon her arrival, she suspected that may be the case. However, this was the first time any man had found the safe house.
On the drive back into Mayfair, Cassie removed her flannel cape and bonnet and replaced them with her velvet pelisse and finer hat. She lifted the cushion beside her and folded the Spitalfields clothing into the hollow underneath. Tris had helped to alter the bench so she could store them there.
“That’s convenient,” Lord Thornton said from the opposite bench as he watched her.
“Lord Thornton—”
“You may call me Grant. We are past formalities, I think. Besides I already call you Cassie.”
“That is because you’re impertinent and have no respect for propriety.”
He only tucked up the corner of his mouth in a smirk.
During the hour it had taken Tris to fetch his brother Patrick, she’d avoided Lord Thornton—Grant—and whatever it was he’d wanted to discuss by helping Isabel settle into her room.
It didn’t matter that Grant had offered to shelter her, or that earlier, he’d knelt before Cassie and taken her scraped hands into his with surprising tenderness.
All she could hear was what he’d shouted in his clinic kitchen.
That she didn’t belong there. It had cut her with startling ferocity, straight down to the bone of the unspoken burden she’d carried all year, ever since she and Elyse opened the doors to their refuge: She didn’t belong.
This wasn’t her place. She was forcing her way into a world in which she had no part.
Usually, the tasks she busied herself with drowned out these thoughts. But hearing the same accusation on Grant Thornton’s tongue had exhumed them.
What a hypocrite! If she didn’t belong in the East End, then neither did he.
Cassie folded her hands, ignoring the pull of her scraped knuckles.
“There is something we need to discuss,” he said, the carriage lantern casting changing light over his face.
“So you’ve said,” she sighed. “What is it?”
“My apology.”
She peered at him, waiting for his well-practiced sarcastic grin. But it didn’t form. He was in earnest.
“Apology for what?”
He sat somewhat slouched on the bench, against the squabs.
His hat was off, his ebony hair falling across his brow.
With his long legs and broad shoulders, he looked a little like a giant on the dainty bench.
The top of his head practically brushed the quilted silk of the ceiling.
Cassie swallowed and shifted on her cushion when his incisive stare continued to hold hers.
“My temper, back at the clinic. I shouldn’t have shouted at you.”
“It was what you shouted that offended me, not your raised voice.” She sat taller. “I am well aware that I’m a fish out of water in that part of London.”
But she was a fish out of water here, too.
“I know the feeling,” he said. “It took some time to learn how to tread there.”
The carriage shook, rocking them both side to side as Cassie held his stare. “Why do you do it?”
He pulled a frown. “Run a free clinic?” At her nod, he shrugged nonchalantly. “Because it is needed. The only doctors most people there can afford are charlatans and barbers, who think they can perform surgery as proficiently as they can shave a beard or yank out a rotten tooth.”
She didn’t know how to respond. He’d never struck her as a serious or charitable sort. He saw her indecision.
“What, you think I have some other motive?”
“It is only that most men of the peerage don’t bother to think of anyone outside their own part of society,” she answered.
“Perhaps I’m not as entirely self-serving as you imagined.”
“Maybe not entirely.” Though he was surely no saint.
The carriage slowed as Patrick turned onto another street. Grant’s knee brushed against hers, and his unyielding stare started to feel less provoking and more penetrating. As if he was trying to see something in her that had eluded him so far.
“Do you get your charitable soul from the marquess?” she asked to pierce the silence.
He seemed to recoil and then sat straighter. “About as much as you get yours from the duke.”
“Michael is very charitable,” she said, offended on her brother’s behalf. “He and Genie support a number of foundations.”
Grant hinged forward, his elbows braced on his knees. “So, he would be supportive of your safe house, Miss Banks?”
“You know he would not.”
The galling man sat back again. “Neither would my father. He’d cut me off in a blink if he found out.”
“Oh, boo-hoo,” she said with a roll of her eyes.
Grant challenged her with a taunting look. “You think that isn’t serious? I am the fourth son. Do you know how much fourth sons are given?”
“More than what ninety-five percent of the people in the rest of this city have a year,” she replied lightly.
“You are impossible.”
Cassie bit her inner cheek, pleased to be getting under his skin for once.
A dose of his own medicine, so to speak.
Though, it didn’t dispel the vibration of friction she felt whenever she was around him, that constant urge to slap him.
It also did not dispel the memory of Lady Dutton’s closet.
The press of his thighs against hers, the tip of his nose, brushing the crown of her head, his breaths warming her scalp when he asked if she’d always smelled of apricots.
The plague of these memories had to stop.
They’d taken up residence in her mind and were driving her mad.
For so long, she’d successfully pushed away all thoughts of Winston Renfry and the few times she’d allowed him liberties.
However, she’d never felt the strange curling of warmth through her lower abdomen when he stood close to her, as Grant had in the closet.
No, every time she thought of Renfry and what occurred between them in his bed, she could only cringe in revulsion.
She could not imagine Lord Grant Thornton had ever once made any female cringe in such a way.
They came about on Grosvenor Square and Cassie thanked the stars. It had started to feel too hot in the carriage, even with her dress still damp from her plunge into the alley puddle. It brought her mind back to Isabel and the dangerous man she was hiding from.
“I will pay you,” Cassie said as they came to a full stop in front of her residence.
Grant cocked his head. “What for?”
“For the use of your clinic while Isabel is there.”
He scoffed. “I don’t want your money.”
“Then what do you want? I must repay you.” If anything, just to stay out of his debt. Something like that could be dangerous with a man like Grant Thornton.
He shifted on the bench. His pinched brow made him look discomfited. Was it the talk of money? It was, after all, crass to speak of such things.
“May I come in?” Grant asked.
Cassie froze. “Why?”
She’d offered to repay him… He couldn’t possibly be asking for something untoward?
He seemed to comprehend the direction of her thoughts and groaned. “There is something more I need to discuss with you.”
“Still?” Patrick opened the door, but Cassie remained seated. “Can’t we leave it at your apology? I rather liked that.”
“I’m sure you did. But no.”
She took her new driver’s extended hand. “Fine. But you will go around the back. I can’t have anyone seeing you enter my house, the two of us alone.”
Cassie entered through the front door while Patrick took the carriage, and Grant, to the mews.
Her footman, Pierce, greeted her, and she asked for Ruth to be sent to the study.
Cassie had been thrilled to take over the room when she arrived at the house; she’d always adored the small study Audrey kept at Violet House, but there was something about the dark mahogany walls, the rich, wine-red carpet, and the masculine furnishings of her brother’s former study that gave her extra pleasure.
To be a female in command of this space was practically heretical.
Ruth arrived there only a minute after Cassie, collecting her pelisse, hat, and gloves that Cassie had tossed onto the sofa.
“I have a visitor arriving with my new driver, Tris’s brother, Patrick, in the mews,” Cassie told her, glossing over the change in staff. She would deal with that later. “Can you see him in through the tradesmen’s entrance without Pierce and the others learning of it?”
Ruth bobbed. “Yes, milady.”
She disappeared on her task, and Cassie went to the fireplace, the flames already built up in preparation for her. Her small staff knew she preferred this room to any other and always kept it ready for her. She held out the skirt of her gown to the fire’s warmth and waited impatiently.
“I don’t think your maid likes me.”
She turned to find Grant standing in the study behind her, the door already shut behind him.
“She is a good judge of character,” Cassie replied with a goading arch of her brow.
In truth, Ruth likely believed her mistress was about to embark on a tryst with Lord Thornton and disapproved.
The notion sent a charged frisson through her belly.
She folded her arms around her waist. “What did you so urgently need to discuss?”
Grant moved through the study, toward the fireplace. “At dinner tonight, my father will have invited at least two eligible young ladies to fawn over me.”
“Lucky you,” she replied. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“He has instructed me to select a lady by the first of the year. And marry her.”
A quick, hot spike lanced her abdomen. She scowled at the reaction. “So?”
Grant came to her side at the hearth. “You want to repay me for helping Isabel? There is something you can do for me.”
The rest of the study began to darken at the edges as the physician’s green eyes seemed to reach for her. Cassie stepped back, as wary of him as she was entranced. But then he spoke and severed the thrall.
“Court me.”