Free The Kidnapped Bride (Redcakes Book 4) by Heather Hiestand

had learned, and eventually that pinched spot between Freddie’s eyebrows had disappeared.
    “I see,” Mr. Alexander said, seeming to read her emotions. “Well, no reason to have searched your own flat. I’ll assume the jewelry was not yours, then. An emerald necklace? A sapphire ring?”
    She stared at him. “No, I mostly had pearls. They are long gone; we pawned them months ago.”
    He nodded, clearly not surprised. “Very well. I extend tae you the hospitality of my brother, the Baron of Alix, for the night. We’ll have the girl buried and deliver you to your brothers in a couple of days. We can take the night train tomorrow.”

    Mr. Alexander and his brother’s household offered Beth no opportunity for escape. The housekeeper took her to a room up in a tower. She didn’t want to think about the struggle the servants had getting a steaming bath ready so high in the mansion, but she enjoyed it nonetheless. The clothing they’d found for her consisted of little more than a nightdress, and they’d taken away her damp clothes, saying they’d be dried and brushed for her. She had nothing to dress her hair with, either.
    After she finished her bath, she donned the combinations she’d managed to keep and the nightdress, then fashioned a bedsheet into something resembling an overdress. Finally, she made a shawl out of a lap blanket draped over a rocking chair. She had no stockings or shoes, which was a definite problem. Maybe she’d be lucky enough to find a dressing room on her way to the ground floor as she sneaked out.
    But that wasn’t so simple. Her door wasn’t locked, but when she went down the steps from the tower, she discovered the door to the main part of the house was.
    The baron’s brother had locked her in! He hadn’t bothered to tell her she was his prisoner. For a moment, she thought black thoughts about her brothers. Did they know they’d hired a man so willing to mistreat her? And her without so much as a hairpin with which to try to pick the lock.
    She went to a window on the landing and peered out, but the locked door was still a couple of levels aboveground. No handy trellises or such existed to help her down safely. All she could see were fields and outbuildings.
    She scrubbed her hands over her eyes, praying that Mrs. Shaw was taking good care of Hester. How long did she have before the woman took Hester to the workhouse? Sad to say, there was nothing for her to do tonight but gain strength. She resolved to crawl into the sumptuous bed in the tower room and go to sleep instantly. It might help the persistent headache that plagued her.
    But tomorrow she’d be going to Edinburgh, not London, to retrieve her ward.

    Birds chattered outside the window when she woke the next morning. A ray of light hit her face, shocking her sleep-fogged eyes. A maid was pulling back curtains. A tray with a steaming teapot already waited at a pie crust table near the freshly stoked fire.
    The maid removed a cloche covering a bowl of oatmeal and a rack of toast. Beth wondered if this meant she was to be kept in captivity until the moment they left for the train station. But she couldn’t go back. She’d rather be dead than ruined, forced to live out her life in a tattered suite like Aunt Mary had all those years after her fiancé died, getting old and bitter like her mother had in her disappointments.
    She could never explain Hester. Her oldest brother would not allow her to keep a prostitute’s orphan. He was too conscious of his role as an intimate of the royal family. Most people would believe Hester was her illegitimate child, and that would be insupportable to Hatbrook. Judah might understand. He’d tried to take an orphan under his own wing, but that was before he married the status-conscious Magdalene.
    No, she had to make her own way. Too bad she had no money of her own, only the jewelry that had long since been squandered. Before Hatbrook had restored the estate’s finances, she’d only thought