A Dangerous Expectation (The Gentlemen Next Door) by Cecilia Gray

Chapter One
     
    Cassandra Drummond’s mind was unreliable at best.
    She hadn’t always known this to be so. As a child, when she had lived in the worst of slums with her father and sister, she had spoken her mind and there had been no one to correct her for it.
    But as a young lady, after her father had made his fortune in shipping, there were governesses and ladies’ maids and well-meaning matrons to hush and quiet and shush and chastise and correct and worst of all—criticize.
    Cassandra soon learned her mind was most unreliable in the presence of the opposite sex.
    "Is your shirt sewn so tight on purpose?" she’d remarked to a viscount.
    "Do you even like your wife?" she’d asked a particularly respected earl.
    "Can you breathe with that cravat bursting up to your nose?" That gem she had saved for a duke.
    After enough hand slaps and hushes, she could barely bring herself to speak in the presence of others—particularly men. In fact, now, when a man entered the room, Cassandra’s throat tightened and perspiration broke out until her skin felt clammy. The London social scene was unbearable.
    Fortunately, London, with its smoky stacks, its closely clustered buildings, and worse yet, its teeming hordes of fortune hunters, was receding further and further behind her.
    With every clop of the horses’ hooves against the uneven dirt road, the tension eased in Cassandra Drummond’s body. Her shoulders relaxed to reveal a graceful neck. Her tightly fisted hands, often cramped, softened their grip. Her clenched jaw slowly loosened until she managed a weak smile of relief. Lines eased around her otherwise perpetually knit brow so that a sparkle returned to her green eyes.
    Unfortunately, leaving London also meant leaving Chastity, although she’d promised to stay until week’s end to help select a wedding dress.
    While she couldn’t be happier for her sister’s whirlwind engagement to their neighbor, Lord Lucas Willoughby, Cassandra knew she would not survive another day in London. The engagement of one of the Drummond Shipping heiresses seemed to mean open season on her, the other, and the callers had come in full force.
    They seemed flabbergasted, sincerely flabbergasted, that she had no interest in wading into their ranks. She had to grit her teeth to keep from asking them, "How am I to love a fully grown man still attached to his mother’s teat?" or "If I am a banknote to you, how might you look to me, you philandering gambler?"
    Her dear sister lamented the crippling anxiety that overwhelmed Cassandra whenever she was in the presence of men, but at least it saved her from becoming an embarrassment to her family. At least it prevented her from possibly plunging her already socially precarious family back into ruin. By keeping quiet, she’d developed a reputation for being aloof. Better that than uncouth.
    Not that she had reconciled herself to a life of loneliness, a life without children or family or someone to love…perhaps one day she might outgrow her condition. But today was not that day.
    When Lord Willoughby had offered the use of his modest—and he had emphasized the word modest several times—home in the country, she’d leapt at the opportunity. So what if she was now leaping a week earlier than she’d anticipated? Chastity managed the financial operations of their father’s shipping empire; surely she could manage to find a dress on her own. Ah, there was that twinge of guilt again for abandoning her sister…
    But she need only peek out the carriage window to the sun dipping below the horizon of green meadows, she need only breathe in the crisp air, to know it was the right choice. She felt calm. She felt at peace. She’d never been in the countryside and was pleased to find it agreed with her.
    Here, in the countryside, there was nothing but space…between her and men. Nothing but freedom…from having to speak to strange callers.
    The summer in the country would allow her the chance to collect