Page 21 of An Unwilling Earl
“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.”
