“Ah, yes,” she said, as mildly as she could manage. “We would simply seek an official institutional partnership to overcome some unfortunate attacks, anonymously published, over the last months. I expect that is the easiest of our requests.”
At that, Dr. Cecil actually smiled, a short chuckle escaping him. “I like you, Miss Casper,” he said, opening the front drawer of his desk and withdrawing clean parchment and a jar of ink. “I think, in another world, you would have been a formidable member of the Royal College of Physicians.”
“Perhaps that is true,” she said. “In this one, I shall have to remain content to simply be a formidable member of London’s medical landscape, such as it is.”
“And so you are,” he said to her, nodding. “And so you are.”
CHAPTER 31
There was a carriage waiting for them when they emerged from the hospital, evidently ordered by Guy’s itself as a courtesy, with the little man who’d shepherded them to and from the office encouraging them to take it to their next destination: presumably, the Clerkenwell Clinic.
Mae paused, smiling at her grandfather, her cheeks still warm with disbelief. “You take it,” she said to him, handing over her folio filled with the precious fresh ink of signatures. “I need to walk. I’m full of nerves.”
“Hm,” said her grandfather, his eyes flicking to Roland Reed awaiting her at the foot of the approach. “And eager to speak to your beau, I think, too?”
“Grandy,” she tutted, her cheeks heating further.
“Don’t dally,” he told her. “They’re all waiting for you at that clinic. Not me.”
But he went. He went.
And as the carriage rumbled off around the corner, she found Roland at her side, taking her hand gently in his and tucking it into his elbow. “Where are we going?” he asked her. “The clinic?”
“Where else?” she said with a little smile as they began to walk.
“I could think of a few places,” he returned, giving her a meaningful up-and-down look. “Venice. Seville. New York. My flat.”
“Hm,” she said, leaning into him. “Tempting.”
For a time they just walked in silence, their footfalls matching in pace and breadth as the city inched past. She was looking for the words, she realized, when really she needed only to say one thing.
“We won,” she told him, turning her head. “But you knew that, I think.”
“Oh, yes,” he assured her, pulling her closer. “I know everything.”
She shook her head, chuckling. “Sometimes I think you actually do. How did you know I was wearing the gold underthings?”
“Mae,” he said, turquoise flitting to the corners of his eyes as he glanced at her. “Do not make me tell you that while we are in full view of the public.”
“Make you?” she replied, grinning.
“I told you before,” he said. “Wear that and I will confess to everything.”
“Remarkable,” she marveled. “And you can’t even see it properly. Yet.”
He gave a little groan at that final word and tugged her down an alley, a shortcut, that would get them to the clinic in better time.
He spun her, pinning her quickly against a narrow wooden door with one hand at her throat and the other at her waist, claiming her mouth with an abrupt and burning hunger that scattered all the nerves she had felt leaving that hospital directly into the London air.
Before she could so much as catch her breath to kiss him back, he had pulled away again and was tugging her back down their path.
“You are becoming a very wicked woman,” he told her, smiling to himself at the way she was gasping for breath. “I hope that is my fault.”
“Oh,” she managed, stumbling after him. “It is.”
The clinic seemed to rush to meet them, evidently determined to rob Mae of any further surprise alleyways that might have otherwise intercepted their journey. But, she supposed, she was happy to see it too.
And the cheer that erupted when she entered would live in her heart for all the rest of her days.
