Page 22 of An Unwilling Earl
“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.”
