Knots (Club Imperial Book 4) by Katherine Rhodes Page B

out when Cece bought her own house with her own money. No one questioned why she had enough money to buy the darling little cottage she lived in-- they were just mortified that she had done so. And lived alone without a man to help and protect her.
    And pay for her. Unheard of in Marjorie Turing Robbe's world.
    Quelle horreur.
    Who knew what their reaction would be if they found where Cece had gotten her money for the house. It was his opinion that they didn’t care; they probably just assumed that she had used her trusts to buy it. That was completely against what Cece was trying to prove. But then, her family wore blinders to the rest of the world.
    Cece was Prima Domme at Club Imperial.
    Not many people outside her weekend job knew that Dusty Rose Milan and the bookish Cece Robbe were the same person. During the week, she wore wool skirts below her knee with impeccably coordinated shirts and blazers. She loved Burberry, and loved to pop the color red with it. She even managed to wear their perfume. Cece always had sensible shoes, and a solid sense of time. She was late or early as the occasion demanded. Her weekday life was neat. Organized.
    Her club presence was a force to be reckoned with. Her ability to be present in a moment was surpassed only by the former Prima Domme of Club Imperial, Tessa Saint. However, Tessa had moved to management, and engagement, and moved Dusty Rose as the Prima.
    Now Cece was fighting against everything her parents deemed proper. Well, everything Charles and Marjorie deemed such. They wanted her in their house, where they could protect the legacy of the Robbe family-- because she as the only hope for a grandchild, a legacy. Chas had taken up with the Oetler heiress who was not interested in having another child. Nothing Charles could do would change her mind. And Hannah... sweet, fragile Hannah. Her chance of every having a child was small; she was too weak, and too sick. All the doctors she would ever talk to would tell her that if she could conceive, she shouldn't. She just wasn't a woman who could carry a pregnancy. Which meant adoption.
    Which to Marjorie meant- don't bother. An heir to her and her husband's money could and should only be blood. He knew they had to get Hannah away from the beast that was her mother soon. Things were going to go very wrong with that girl if her father wasn't there to protect her.
    Much as he wasn't for Cece.
    Thank God for Gordon Macdonald. He trusted that Gordon would do the same for Hannah if it came down to it. Not exactly the same, but help her nonetheless.
    He had seen the contract. He didn't know how they got Cece to sign it; she wasn't the kind of woman who would surrender her freedom to the will of her mother. And especially not to her brother.
    Whatever leverage they had, it had to be big. Cece knew Paul Wainwright.
    He watched, and wondered. What had made Cece sign that contract... Paul was not an easy person to get along with.
    Paul Henry Wainwright, doctor of forensic sciences and a coroner for Allegheny county. Mostly quiet, withdrawn. While generally the same intellectual level as Cece, there have been occasions where he was embarrassed by his inability to communicate effectively. He was awkward and ungainly as a child and seemed to never quite fit into his body.
    Paul was the victim of serious bullying in high school and he quickly became an outcast. So much so that he chose to go to college in California to escape the past. Without the bullying and cruelty he shot to the top of his class and sailed through his education to finish with a doctoral degree in Forensic Science.
    He moved back home to Pittsburgh, easily got a job as an assistant coroner with Allegheny County, and forged a solid relationship with Thurmon Chemcials. He worked with one particular chemist, Dr. Nicholas Dovadsky, on a regular basis and had a terrible habit of relying on him to translate his reports into something readable.
    The black cloud of his childhood hadn't