Temptation Read Online Free PDF Page A

and pretending that her letters could make a difference.
    “You have all the luck,” Lenora said, her voice tinged with envy. “I wish Dr. Hyde had chosen me to go out walking with.” She reached for another piece of shortbread and took a contemplative munch. “But with hair the color of mine, and a bottom the size of an omnibus, it’s no wonder he chose you instead.”
    “You have a perfectly normal-sized bottom,” Beatrice protested, elbowing her friend in the ribs. Though Lenora had generous curves, she had a small waist—a perfect hourglass figure. The lumpish uniform they had to wear at the hospital hid the finer points of her figure, but then it hid everyone else’s, too.
    Lenora pulled a face. “Yes, for an omnibus,” she muttered through a mouthful of shortbread. “Dr. Hyde clearly thinks so.”
    “Hang Dr. Hyde—he’s a dry stick,” said another. “I wish I could write to your soldier, too, and get such a letter back. There’s nothing quite like a redcoat to make a girl happy.”
    Even the matron looked a little misty-eyed. “Our poor young men. They are sent over to foreign countries to protect us and our way of life, and expected to live there without any of the comforts of civilization. How they must miss their friends and family back home.”
    By now Beatrice had tucked the letter safely away in her pocket. “Teddy says that some of them don’t have any family at all. Or none that care enough about them to send them letters or to knit them new socks when their old ones wear out and the army has none to give them.”
    “It’s a crying shame, the way they are treated.”
    “They shouldn’t send our boys to war if they can’t look after them properly.”
    “Then we should be their family,” the matron said firmly. “We should write to them and let them know they have not been forgotten, even though they are far from home. If the army has no socks for them, we shall knit them. I am sure they will be grateful for the attention.”
    The girls all perked up at this suggestion and a mutter of approbation ran through the group.
    The red-haired Lenora gave a rare smile that lit up her face as if a gaslight had been turned on behind her eyes. The radiance made her look almost pretty. “My uncle is a hosier. He will give us wool at a good price if we explain it is for the soldiers. He fought in the Crimean War when he was younger.”
    Her suggestion had the ideas flowing thick and fast.
    “I have heard that their rations are poor. Maybe if we asked people for donations we could send them some tinned food as well as knitted socks.”
    “We can do a collection around the hospital.”
    “One of my relations imports tea and coffee. We could ask him to give us some coffee.”
    “But how will we know where to send our letters and parcels?” one of them cried.
    Beatrice smiled at their enthusiasm. Who would have thought her sudden impulse to write a letter to a lonely soldier would have led to all this? “I will ask Teddy, and he will tell me.”
    Later that evening, Beatrice sat in her bedroom and smoothed the letter out on her lap. She had not been entirely open with her friends. Captain Carterton had written a postscript that she had not shared with them—it had been altogether too personal to read out in company.
    Reading his words again caused a tingling in her limbs that she didn’t altogether like. She was sure it wasn’t the sort of feeling that a well-bred woman ought to have.
    Dr. Hyde would never say anything so personal to her—more’s the pity. Though she had gone out walking with him for some weeks now, he had always been scrupulously polite and had never so much as kissed her glove. He was a bit of a dry old stick, she supposed, but he was at least a gentleman and he treated her with great courtesy. He had no bad habits that she knew of, but was spoken of by everyone as a respectable person.
    Besides, she had to admire a man who made it his life’s work to heal the sick and