Free His Mistress by Morning by Elizabeth Boyle

Townsend creature?
    Quince seemed unfazed. “Oh, listen to you go on as if your life is over when in fact you have everything you’ve ever desired. Charlotte, you’re no fool. This is your chance to have everything you wished for.”
    “But—”
    “No buts. Certainly your sensibilities are a bit shaken—”
    Shaken? She was a soiled dove. A lady of ill repute.
    Beloved by Sebastian Marlowe, Viscount Trent.
    She pressed her lips together. There was that. Lord Trent .
    An oh-so-changed Lord Trent. Rakish. Naked. Hardly the sensible man for whom she’d carried her quiet torch about for years.
    “And what about him? What did you do to Lord Trent?” she asked.
    Quince shook her head adamantly. “I didn’t change a thing about the viscount. That’s all your doing!”
    “My doing? How could I have done anything? I merely went to bed last night and woke up with a—” Even as she was about to finish her sentence, a nanny with two small children strolled by, and Charlotte waited for the frowning lady and her charges to pass before she finished, lowering her voice when she did. “He’s a rake. The Lord Trent I knew”—loved, she would have said, but she certainly didn’t trust such a confession in front of this creature—“would never have been so…so…” She tried to find a word that best described him.
    “Lustful?” Quince said with a sigh. “Devilish? Glorious?”
    “No!” Charlotte colored. “You’re wrong. He’s all wrong. Lord Trent is a proper, respectful, honorable man.”
    Quince waved a hand at her. “And he still is, but as I was saying before, you’ve changed him.”
    “I’ve changed him?” Her hand went back up to her brow and she closed her eyes. This was all madness.
    “Yes, you,” the lady asserted. “And quite admirably, I must point out. He was a bit of a stick before he fell into your illustrious company. Caused quite a scandal, for he dotes on you quite shamelessly.”
    Charlotte put her hands over her ears. “I will not listento this. I do not believe it. I would never…he wouldn’t…”
    “But you did, and he does,” Quince told her. “Imagine, Charlotte, what his life would have been like if he hadn’t found you. Fallen in love with you.”
    “He’s in love with her, not me,” she argued back. “Why, up until this morning he barely knew I existed.”
    “I’d say he knows now,” the lady chuckled.
    “A little too much, if you ask me,” Charlotte said, feeling a bit annoyed at all this. It was one thing to wish for a man’s love, but quite another to have it—especially when he thought she was someone else.
    “So would you have it back the way it was?” Quince said, an ominous note to her words. “Have him calling you by the wrong name and picking flowers for another?”
    Charlotte didn’t even ask how the woman knew those things, for the image of Miss Burke rose up in her imagination more frightening than a banshee.
    “You freed his spirit, Charlotte,” she added softly. “And discovered your heart as well.”
    “I just can’t believe it,” Charlotte said, glancing up and into the lady’s clear eyes. “I don’t believe any of this.”
    “Believe what you will,” Quince said, rising to her feet, basket settled on her hip. “But this is your wish, so you’d best make the most of it.” With that, she turned to leave, and Charlotte sprang to her feet, catching her by her arm.
    “You can’t leave me like this,” she told her. “I don’t remember any of this. And I most decidedly don’t know what to do.”
    “Let him love you, and the rest, well…” Quince’s wrinkled face softened, her odd green eyes sparkled. “And in the meantime, don’t fret so much. Soon the memories of your old life will fade and you’ll have nothing butthe love you desired above everything else. I’m rarely wrong about these things.”
    Rarely wrong? That was supposed to reassure her?
    “Of course there is always a price, some necessary changes, but look