Trifling Favors (Redcakes Book 7) Read Free

color was high. Normally, her forehead, chin, and the tip of her nose weren’t so pink. “Where were you just before you came upstairs?”
    “In the bakery, helping to load the cases for the afternoon.”
    “That isn’t anything you have to do.”
    She sighed. “The new girl isn’t pulling her weight, Mr. Redcake. I’m not sure she’s going to work out.”
    Ah. “Every hire will not be a perfect fit,” he said, then attempted some reassurance. “We all make bad hiring choices at times, and it isn’t even always our fault. People can be quite deceptive.”
    “She seemed bubbly in the interview. I may have mistaken her character for her energy level. She’s really rather languid.”
    “We don’t have room for languid at Redcake’s,” he agreed. “Give it a couple of days. She may be so nervous about making mistakes that she’s moving slowly.”
    “There is a lot to learn,” Betsy said. “Thank you, sir.”
    “Thank you, Miss Popham.”
    She nodded and left the room. Now, she was an employee who never had a slow-moving moment. She did the work of three of her counterparts, appropriate for someone, even young as she was, who had worked for Redcake’s since it opened, catching the notice of the owners. He’d heard rumors that she wasn’t as good as she ought to be, and might have entertained a fantasy or fifty that she’d show some of that reputed sexual fire to him, but it had never happened. Betsy Popham was the soul of propriety in his presence, and if she had ever been any different, he had never heard the details.
    With a shake of his head, he returned to his perch at the window and stared out again. He really ought to tend to his reports, but the twins had earaches and had screamed through the night. The nursemaid had threatened to leave if she didn’t have at least five continuous hours of sleep, so he’d been up through the wee hours, rocking one baby while Mrs. Roach took the other. He ought to fire the nursemaid and find a new girl, but he just didn’t have the energy. While nursemaids were lower class than nurses, a good one had still proved difficult to find.
    He’d never yet met a father who was so burdened with domestic concerns. Or perhaps, men like him were simply too tired to discuss it. Men like him weren’t relaxing at their clubs telling tales; they were at home tending their crises.
     
    The mottled brown and white brick house in Turnham Green Terrace looked homely even in May’s gleaming evening sunlight, but Betsy still smiled as she saw it. Soon she’d be frying the sausages she’d bought up the road and toasting a slightly singed and therefore unsellable Redcake’s loaf of bread. Her father would be home already, reading a newspaper in the embroidered rocking chair in the parlor.
    Most people like them would have a maid of all work at the very least, what with two incomes from two professional people, but she and her father got by with someone who came in to do the heavy work once a week. They split the household duties. Betsy handed over her pay without question, though she doubted it all went to the Carters. Had her mother poisoned more people than Mr. Carter? Were there reparations she was unaware of?
    Now that she was twenty-two and needed to think about finding a husband of her own, money would become more of a concern. Even knowing she had a murderess for a mother hadn’t made her completely give up hope of finding a husband. But her one great love had been Ewan Hales, and she’d lost him to a blackmailer. Ewan, now the Earl of Fitzwalter, had married one of the Redcakes and was gone from her life. He’d been much too good for her. She still missed his touch, his eager hands caressing her, the way he’d worshipped her body those scant two months they’d been lovers.
    With a sigh of regret, she stepped through her tiny front garden—more of a dirt patch really, because she didn’t have time to maintain it—and into the front hallway. She stuck her head into