Page 11 of Touched By a Traitor
Reality struck him, leaving him dizzy and breathless. His gaze darted between Charlotte and Chatham, taking in the duke’s hastily restored attire, his shirt missing and falls still agape.
Andrew pressed his palm to his brow, turning away, unable to bear the tableau before him. Whatever thoughts churned behind their silence, they granted him a moment to gather his scattered wits.
“Charlotte…” The name scraped from his throat like desert sand. He spoke barely above a whisper, as if speaking too loudly might shatter this cruel apparition. “Are you… well?”
“Yes,” she answered, her voice husky with emotion he couldn’t interpret. The sound of it—so familiar yet changed—sent a knife of longing through his chest.
Steeling himself, he turned back, raising the light to study her features. He searched for signs of mistreatment but found none.
Though thinner than memory painted her, she carried a new maturity in her bearing. Her skin still bore the bloom of her youth, but something haunted lurked behind her eyes—the look of one who had weathered too many storms.
“How do you know one another?” Chatham asked, bewildered.
Andrew ignored the duke, his entire world narrowed to Charlotte. “Are you here by choice?”
“Yes,” she whispered, her gaze never leaving his face. “The duke and I… we have an arrangement. A partnership of mutual protection and… understanding.” Her voice caught slightly. “Albert’s own circumstances require discretion, as do mine. We shield each other from society’s expectations.”
“Well, then…” he managed.
Andrew fled, his heart thrashing against his ribs like a caged animal. He stumbled through the doorway, vision swimming as his carefully constructed composure crumbled. The corridor air grew thick and suffocating, pressing in from all sides until he could scarcely breathe.
Breaking into the night air, he gulped great desperate breaths, trying to clear his head and ease the vise crushing his chest. He sagged against the building’s rough brick, eyes clenched shut as rage and anguish threatened to overwhelm him.
The knowledge that she had found sanctuary with another—that whatever arrangement they shared kept her safe but lost to him—was a poison he couldn’t purge from his system.
With a trembling exhale, he pushed away from the wall and began walking, each step heavy as lead as he vanished into London’s shadowed streets.
*
“Andrew!” The nametore from her throat before she could stop it. She lurched toward the door, her hands scrabbling at the handle. “I have to explain—he has to understand—”
“Charlotte, wait.” The Duke of Chatham’s gentle hands caught her shoulders, steadying her trembling form. “Think. What would you tell him? How could you possibly explain without revealing everything?”
She crumpled to the floor, heedless of dignity, her breath coming in ragged gasps as emotion overwhelmed her. The duke’s words didn’t ease the desperate ache in her chest. Six years. Six long years since that night she had offered herself to Andrew. The memory of his touch, his whispered devotions, had been her anchor through the lonely years that followed—a secret flame she’d nursed while masquerading as a man to study law. Even now, her body burned with the phantom sensation of his hands, his lips, the way he had looked at her that night as if she were precious beyond measure.
“Albert… he looked at me with such… such disgust,” she whispered, sinking back against the door. “As if I were something vile.”
Charlotte’s mind flashed unbidden to darker memories. She had abandoned her plan to study law in the United States when she received her acceptance letter from Cambridge, albeit under the guise of being a man. This had seemed the safer option rather than traversing foreign lands alone. She had been barely three and twenty when she desperately tried to maintain her disguise as a man while pursuing her legal studies. A monthlypayment had ensured one student’s silence, but then the dean had summoned her to his office late one evening. Her heart had nearly stopped when he’d revealed he knew she was a woman.
“I have no interest in your meager funds, Miss Morton,” he’d said, his eyes raking over her form with calculated intent. “I require… other forms of payment.”
The memory of those monthly meetings made bile rise in her throat—the musty office, the sound of the door locking, her quiet sobs muffled by her own hand. She had endured it silently, knowing that to refuse meant losing everything she’d sacrificed for. Until that final night, when another professor had walked in unexpectedly. The horror in his eyes had quickly transformed to fury as he’d pieced together what was happening.
The next day, Albert had offered her sanctuary. His quiet devotion had become her shield—born not of romantic love, but of mutual understanding. Two souls who required society’s protection from their own truths: hers, the dangerous ambition to practice law as a woman; his, the equally dangerous truth of where his romantic inclinations truly lay.
“My dear,” Albert said gently, settling beside her on the floor, “you rather understated your feelings for Carlisle when we began this arrangement.”
Charlotte’s throat constricted with unshed tears. “I thought I had buried them. I thought if I could just avoid him, pretend that night never happened…” She pressed her hands to her face. “But seeing him again, the way he looked at me—as if I’d betrayed everything good between us.”
“Perhaps,” Albert said carefully, “it might be worth considering whether our arrangement has served its purpose. You’re established now, Charlotte. You have your law degree, your barrister’s credentials. Perhaps it’s time to—”
“No.” The word came out sharper than she intended. “Albert, you don’t understand. He would never accept what I’ve become.That night, six years ago, he offered to fund my education—when I refused, when I chose my dreams over his proposal…” She laughed bitterly. “How could I explain that I’ve spent four years living as a man, that I’ve had to endure… compromising the virtue he’d tried to protect… just to earn the right to practice law?”
“He might surprise you,” Albert said quietly. “Love can be more forgiving than we expect.”
“Love?” Charlotte’s voice cracked. “He doesn’t love who I am now, Albert. He loved the grateful, desperate woman who would have been content to be rescued. But I’m not that woman anymore. I can’t be.”
Yet even as she spoke the words, her heart rebelled against them. The way Andrew had looked at her tonight, before shock and hurt had replaced recognition—there had been something there. Something that suggested the intervening years hadn’t dimmed whatever had existed between them.
