Page 49 of An Unwilling Earl
“I’m so sorry, Charlotte.”
“When she would force me on my knees to pray, I would pray to my father to deliver me out of her grasp. When that didn’t work, I eventually stopped praying. It was my silent revenge against her. She could make me kneel there for hours, but she couldn’t force me to pray.”
“I’m impressed with your fortitude.”
“It was the little things that kept me sane. The not-praying. The secret letters to Sarah. And I started plotting my escape.”
“And that’s why you ran to the rookery.”
She didn’t correct him. She didn’t tell him that it wasn’t her aunt who’d made her run to the rookery—that the rookery had not been in her plans at all. But things had changed quickly, and she’d needed to escape, and it had been the only thing that she’d hoped would work. Aunt Martha would have known to look for her at Sarah’s.
“I stole a set of silver candlesticks,” Charlotte said. Another sin to add to her long list. “And I pawned them. I know I didn’t get what they were worth, but I didn’t care. I paid our rent out of it and hoarded the rest for my escape to America.”
“And then I came along.”
“And then you came along.” She tried to smile, but it fell short. The sticky residue of her dream was still present, mixed with the intoxicating kiss they’d shared. It was an odd, confusing combination.
America. Jacob.
She wanted both, but she couldn’t have both.
An earl couldn’t move to America, and she couldn’t stay here.
Chapter Fifteen
“Tell me about Edmund,” Jacob said.
Charlotte stiffened. The fire crackled in the hearth and the brandy warmed her insides, but the question jarred her. Her senses tingled, warning her that he was getting too close. “What about him?”
She sounded defensive, and she warned herself to calm down. The question had come too close to her encounter—if one could call it that—with Edmund in the market. Coupled with her dream, she was on edge.
“Was your aunt as cruel to him as she was to you?” Jacob asked.
She concentrated on Jacob, not Edmund. The firelight made Jacob’s hair a deep red, his eyes a whiskey color. He was holding his empty brandy glass, and it reflected the oranges and yellows of the fire. She felt as vulnerable here as she had in her bedchamber with him, but in a different way. Not a good way. She had felt far less exposed in the rookery than in Jacob’s home.
“If you don’t want to talk about him we don’t have to,” Jacob said.
“I’ve never talked about it to anyone,” she admitted. Even Sarah didn’t know the whole story, just the mild bits and pieces. “That life… People would be hard pressed to believe it.”
“Tell me more about your life with your aunt.”
She took a sip of brandy for fortification. She would tell him some. Not all. But some. She felt this pressure from inside of her to tell part of her story so someone else would know and understand.
“Aunt Martha hates men. I’m uncertain why or how it started.”
“She hates her own son?”
“Yes.”
“What about her husband?”
“I didn’t know my uncle. He died a few years before I lived with them.”
“What did he die of?”
Did his questions seem more pointed than usual? She took another sip of brandy. The room was taking on a warm glow, and her tongue seemed thicker than normal. The anxiety of the afternoon and her dream seemed far off and not so important.
“I don’t know what he died of. I’ve heard it was sudden.” A thought slithered through her brain, slipping through her fingers before she could grasp it. Was there something strange about her uncle’s death?
