Free One Wicked Sin by Nicola Cornick Page A

he said.
    “Fat.” Beneath her defiance he glimpsed a flash of despair. “I used to be rounded and dimpled. It wasfashionable. But then when I…when Gregory started the divorce proceedings I was unhappy so I ate.” A slight smile quivered on her lips. “Then I had even less money because in effect I ate it all away.”
    “You ate because you were unhappy?” Ethan frowned. He had not given much thought to what she had done in the months after her husband had thrown her from the Grosvenor Square house and the divorce had ground its way scandalously through the courts. He had assumed that her life would have gone on much as before, which was naive, now he thought about it. With little money, abandoned by friends and family, denounced as a wanton and vilified if she stepped outside the door, what could she have done?
    “I ate cake and pastries, biscuits and ice cream,” Lottie said, “until I was sick. I read copies of the Ladies’ Magazine and ate and slept all day.” She reached again for the sheet and this time Ethan did not stop her. “I suppose,” she added, “that should I fall into even greater penury I could live off my fat, like a camel.”
    “Camels store water in their humps,” Ethan said, “not fat.”
    “It is the same principle,” Lottie said. She sighed. “Please let me dress.”
    “A moment.” Ethan put out a hand and touched her wrist lightly. “You did not seem self-conscious before,” he said.
    “I forget,” Lottie said simply. “I feel the same inside. Then I see myself in the mirror—” she nodded toward the pier glass on the wall “—and it shocks me.”
    Ethan raised a hand and smoothed her hair awayfrom her face. “I like it,” he said. “You are not thin but I like that. You look very pretty to me.”
    Her eyes opened wide. “Pretty?”
    “Delightfully curved. Voluptuous.” He leaned forward and kissed her. She returned the kiss hesitantly, almost innocently. “We must make love in front of that mirror,” he said, against her lips, “and then you can see how beautiful you look.”
    She blushed. “ Beautiful now,” she said dryly. “How you flatter me, my lord.”
    “Your body is divine,” Ethan said. “Something else of which I must convince you?”
    “Later,” a delicious smile lit her eyes. “I really must wash and dress.”
    Ethan rang for hot water and fresh towels whilst Lottie wrapped the sheet about her and started to rummage through the bandbox she had brought with her.
    “What do you do today?” She was kneeling on the floor, looking up at him as he dressed. She was barefoot and tousled and once again Ethan felt that strange pang of emotion as he looked at her, the tug at his heart. He could imagine her, alone in her exile, sending a maid out for pastry and cake and cream, whilst in the outside world her husband destroyed her reputation and dragged her name through the gutter. A harsh anger gripped him. Whatever Lottie had done, he thought, Gregory Cummings’s behavior had been disproportionate and unforgivable, taking a hammer to crush a butterfly.
    “I have business to attend to,” he said, a little abruptly. He wanted to escape the warm intimacy of the room. He needed to break the spell, to refocus hismind upon the urgent plans that had brought him to London.
    “Of course,” Lottie said. She got to her feet and shook out the one respectable gown she had brought with her. “This gown needs pressing,” she added, “if I am not to parade about Town tricked out like one of Mrs. Tong’s harlots.”
    “Go and buy some new clothes,” Ethan said. “I want you to have something suitable to drive with me later in the park and an evening gown for the theater tonight.”
    Her gaze flickered to meet his and he sensed her unease. “We are to go out in public later?”
    “Of course,” Ethan said. “If I wished to sit quietly at home reading then I would have stayed in Wantage.” There was a tap at the door and a manservant brought in a