Chapter Seven

Jacob’s mind was whirling with a thousand questions, but instinctively, he knew that he had to go slow with Charlotte. Her body language screamed that she wanted to run. She was perched on the edge of the chair, turned away from him, her arms crossed protectively over her stomach. When she wasn’t eating, that is.

She’d consumed her plate of food faster than he’d seen anyone eat, and she kept glancing longingly at the remaining sandwiches. He told her to eat more, and he could tell she wanted to, but she refrained.

She was so thin. Far too thin. Her cheeks were sunken, making her cheekbones more pronounced and her eyes larger, rounder. Even through the layers of clothes he could see her bony shoulders.

But despite her appearance, her mind was sharp and focused. She’d immediately drawn a parallel to their lives, and her wise observation that he did not want his life to change and that she desperately needed her life to change had startled him. She was absolutely correct, and he wondered why he had not drawn that conclusion sooner.

“Do you think that’s what it is?” he asked. “That I want my life to stay the same?”

She dragged her gaze from the remaining sandwiches. “That’s what it sounds like. Some people would love to have a title and all the freedom it gives you.”

“Freedom? I’m learning that there are many rules to being an earl.”

She shrugged a thin shoulder. “There are too many rules when you aren’t an earl, too.”

“What rules would those be?”

“No talking to the opposite sex. No going out in public alone. No wearing revealing clothes. You must pray four times a day, at least, if you don’t want to burn in the fires of hell. Don’t enter your cousin’s room. Stay away from the cellar.”

She was obviously referring to her aunt’s rules. “Is that what your life was like?”

She turned her face away to stare into the hearth. Firelight danced across her cheeks, dousing her eyes in shadows and creating dark hollows under her cheekbones, making her appear otherworldly.

The corner of her lips lifted slightly, but he wouldn’t go so far as to call it a smile. “It wasn’t pleasant.”

“Is that why you left?” he asked softly.

He waited in vain for her to answer.

And when the silence stretched to uncomfortable proportions, she stood so suddenly that it startled him. “I need to go.”

“Don’t go.” He held out his hand to stop her, and she recoiled, her frightened gaze bouncing from his outstretched hand to his face. Quickly he pulled back. “You can stay here.”

“That would be entirely improper.”

“I didn’t mean…” He was making a mess of this, and he hoped to God she didn’t take his offer the wrong way. “I have extra rooms. Surely it’s better than where you’ve been staying.”

“I have responsibilities. People who are expecting me to come home.”

He paused, surprised. People? “Who?”

“That’s none of your concern, Mr. Baker. Or rather, Lord…”

“Ashland, but you don’t need to call me that.”

“It’s your title, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“You can’t deny who you are.”

“I’m not denying it…” But wasn’t he denying it? And postponing the inevitable?

She almost smiled then. Almost. But it faded before it really started. “You can’t deny it forever.”

“You can’t run forever.”

Her cheeks turned pink, and her eyes narrowed. “I need to get home before dark.”

“Will you come back?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“My door is always open to you.”

“Will you tell Mrs. Smith that?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I was jesting, my lord.”

“About coming back or about Mrs. Smith?”

She pressed her lips together, but he saw the ghost of a smile. He wanted to see the entire smile. It would be devastating.

“At least let me call my carriage to take you to wherever you’re going.”

“You don’t want to send your carriage to where I’m going.”

“I know you’re staying in one of the rookeries.”

Her eyes glittered in suppressed amusement. “What gave it away? My fine gown?”

He blew out a breath. If he’d hoped to shock her into confessing, he’d failed. He’d vastly underestimated Charlotte Morris. He’d anticipated a frightened, cowering girl begging for his help, but Charlotte was making him work to help her.

To say he’d been shocked to see her on his doorstep would be an understatement. Of course, he hadn’t known who she was at first. He’d just heard Mrs. Smith shooing someone away and had come to the entryway out of curiosity. Something had told him to follow the tramp, and he was glad he had.

When Charlotte had begun to run he’d known she was a girl. Lads and lasses ran differently. And it had suddenly occurred to him that this could be Charlotte.

Now he quickly followed Charlotte to the front door. “How will I know that you made it back safely?”

“You won’t.”

“But…” She was out the door before he could finish. Every instinct told him to follow her and make sure she was safe, but he also knew that he needed to earn her trust, and that meant letting her go.

And praying that she came back.

…

Charlotte wanted nothing more than to stay in Jacob Baker’s sitting room in front of the warm fire and eat more sandwiches and drink more tea. But it also felt like the walls were closing in and her past was catching up to her. He’d asked about her life with her aunt, and the alarm bells in her head had started clanging.

She needed to think about all of this before she decided what to do.

She skirted her way through the back streets of the rookery, alert to every movement in the shadows. Normally, she tried not to be out past dark, but it’d taken longer to get here from Jacob’s home.

Jacob.

Jacob, the earl. Lord Ashland.

That was something else she needed to think about. And as she closed the door to her lodgings, she knew that she would go back but not for the reasons he would assume.

She wanted to know more about Jacob Baker. He was a dichotomy, a reluctant earl. A working man, a solicitor, who wanted to continue with his work.

Why did he want to help her? What was in it for him?

…

The next day, Jacob approached his townhouse after a meeting with one of the barristers and noticed a person slouched on his front steps, legs outstretched, back rounded. Right away he recognized the once-black top hat, now faded to a patchy gray, the once-blue jacket with the old-fashioned wooden toggles, the mismatched shoes.

It was a beautiful sight for it meant that Charlotte had not only made it home last night, but she had returned—and far sooner than he had anticipated.

He approached cautiously. Everything he did with Charlotte was cautious. She’d washed her face. There were no more black streaks. But the clothes would probably never come clean.

He sat down on the step below her and angled his body to lean against the stone balustrade.

“Why do you want to help me?” she asked, forgoing any small talk and surprising him once again.

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Try.”

“Very well.” He thought about it for a moment, trying to choose the correct words to adequately describe his deep need to help her. “When your aunt told me about you, the little she told me, I wasn’t interested in searching for a runaway. I assumed you had met a lover and escaped a woman who, I could tell, was a…difficult person to live with.”

She huffed out a silent laugh.

“That’s not what I do. I’m not in the business of looking for missing people, unless they are involved in a crime and needed for a court case.” Jacob raised his leg to rest his elbow on his bent knee.

Charlotte stared straight ahead. Her back was rigid, her shoulders squared, her fingers fidgeting with a wooden toggle. She’d yet to look at him since he’d sat down.

“The solicitor for the recently deceased Earl of Ashland had just given me the news that I was the new earl. I was still processing this turn of events and didn’t really want to meet with Lady Morris, but she was insistent.”

“Oh, I have no doubt,” Charlotte murmured.

“She was also very demanding that I take this case, but I didn’t have a good feeling about her. I began to ask more pointed questions, but she became angry. She showed me a drawing of you—the one I showed you last night—I suppose she was hoping to sway me toward her cause.”

“It didn’t work?”

“Quite the opposite. It worked magically. But I didn’t want her to know that because I didn’t trust her. She left in a huff.”

“She doesn’t like it when people don’t cooperate with her.”

“She’s an interesting person.”

“She’s a horrible person.”

“Is that why you left?”

Charlotte continued to pluck at the toggle, but she didn’t answer him, so he continued. “You looked happy in that drawing. Carefree. But I knew a happy, carefree person wouldn’t run away. Something happened to make you so fearful that you had to run from the only home you had.”

Her fingers stopped plucking and tightened around the toggle. She hadn’t looked at him, but he could tell she was listening intently.

“You’ve cut your hair. You’ve run to the rookery. You’ve gone to great pains not to look like yourself. What happened, Charlotte?”

She stood quickly. “I have to go.”

“Aren’t you tired of running? Don’t you want help?”

“I won’t go back to her.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“But she wants me back.”

“You’re her ward. Of course, she wants you back.”

She swallowed, her eyes trained across the street. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “I’ll think about maybe letting you help me.”

He was going to lose her, but he also realized he couldn’t save her unless she wanted to be saved.

“You said others rely on you. I can help you with that.”

“You’d help us?”

Her look of cautious hope nearly broke his heart. “Of course.”

“Why? You don’t even know me.”

“Because I think you’re in trouble, and I don’t think you know what to do or where to go.”

“Far away from here. I’ll go far away from London.”

“I can help.”

The hope slowly leached from her expression. “I don’t think you can. I don’t think you understand the…depth of all of this.”

“What is this?”

She faced him fully, her head tilted to the side. “Do you think I ran away from my aunt because she was cruel?”

“Yes.” His heart was still hammering, and his breath was coming fast. They were on the precipice of something big here.

“Then you are wrong.”