An Unwilling Earl

by Sharon Cullen

  He led her into a room devoid of any comfortable furniture. A large desk with a good view of the street was to one side. The pictures on the wall were landscapes, giving away nothing of the person who occupied this house.

  He dragged the straight-backed chairs that had sat in front of his desk close to the fire, and as she sat he rang a bell, presumably for the angry Mrs. Smith, then he sat in the other chair. The fire felt deliciously warm, heating her cheeks. Surreptitiously she stretched her feet out, hoping to catch some of the warmth in her sodden shoes. It was going to be hard leaving all of this warmth and comfort when it was time to go. She would soak up as much as she could, while she could.

  Mrs. Smith entered and pulled up short when she saw Charlotte sitting in the chair.

  “Tea please, Mrs. Smith,” Mr. Baker said. “And maybe some of those delicious sandwiches you’re so good at making.”

  Mrs. Smith’s gaze bounced between Charlotte and Mr. Baker before she nodded and left.

  “I don’t think she likes me,” Charlotte said.

  “She doesn’t know you.”

  “Neither do you.”

  He tipped his head toward her. “Why don’t you change that?”

  “Maybe I don’t want to.” Her defenses were coming up because she was scared. Scared to tell him anything. Scared if she did it would all go awry.

  “I think you wouldn’t have knocked on my front door if there wasn’t something you wanted from me.”

  She lowered her chin and stared into the fire.

  “How did you find me, Charlotte?”

  Her head jerked up, and she stared at him, surprised. “How did you know my name?” she whispered.

  “The disguise is good. Not great, but good. No one could tell at a quick glance.”

  “You couldn’t tell when you saved me from the horse.”

  He frowned. “Horse?”

  He didn’t remember. That one moment had consumed her thoughts for days, and it had meant nothing to him. She wanted to laugh at her foolishness.

  “You pulled me from beneath the horse’s hooves on Regent Street the other day.”

  His frown cleared, and a beautiful smile erupted. “Yes! I remember. That was you? Good God. If I’d only known. All this time looking for you and you were literally right under me at one point.” He laughed, a rich, deep sound that was as warm as the fire. “I’ll be damned. Excuse the language.” He tilted his head and studied her. “It took more than a quick glance to see it was you, and…” His voice trailed off, and her attention sharpened on him.

  “And?”

  “I’ve been looking for you.”

  He reached into his pocket and produced a folded piece of paper.

  She opened it to find herself—her old self—looking back at her. It was a charcoal drawing, a quick sketch that she remembered sitting for so long ago, right before her papa died. He’d wanted to have her painted but had died before he’d had a chance.

  “Where did you get this?” she asked from a tight throat.

  “Lady Morris.”

  Charlotte handed it back to him and wiped her hand on her trousers. Jacob watched the motion as he took the paper from her.

  “Tell me about the picture,” he said. “When was it drawn?”

  “A lifetime ago.”

  “You don’t look that young in it.”

  “Trust me. That’s another person in that drawing. That’s not me. Not anymore.”

  He tucked the picture back in his pocket. “It’s the same eyes, the same lips. The hair is a bit different.”

  Self-consciously she smoothed her shorn hair, trying to tuck it behind her ear, but the curl sprang back. “Why are you looking for me?”

  He hesitated. “That’s a complicated answer.”

  “I have a feeling I can grasp the answer if you use simple words.”

  His lips twitched, but he did not smile, although his eyes were smiling.

  Mrs. Smith entered with a tray of teacups and sandwiches. She placed the tray on the table between Charlotte and Jacob.

  “I’ll pour, Mrs. Smith. Thank you. It looks delicious.”

  Mrs. Smith shot Charlotte a curious look before leaving.

  “See?” Jacob said. “She’s already warming to you.”

  Charlotte rolled her eyes and pretended to ignore the delicious-looking finger sandwiches. There were so many of them. A tower of them.

  Jacob poured some tea, then put a few sandwiches on a plate and handed it to her.

  Charlotte hesitated. She could feed her and Suzette for two whole nights with these sandwiches. She should put them in her pockets, but she also wanted to devour every one of them.

  “Go ahead,” Jacob said. “Take it.”

  Because she didn’t want to seem rude she took the plate and stared at the sandwiches. The crusts had been cut off. What had Mrs. Smith done with the crusts? Did she throw them away? Feed them to a cat warming itself by the kitchen fire?

  “Don’t be shy. Eat.”

  She took a sandwich and tried to remember her manners, but her stomach got in the way, and before she knew it the sandwich was gone, barely chewed, and another was heading toward her mouth.

  Embarrassed, she tried to put the plate back on the table.

  “You can finish it, Charlotte. And if you want more you can have more.”

  Suddenly her vision blurred.

  “Are you crying? Did I say something wrong?”

  She shook her head as a tear dripped down her cheek. Hastily, she swept it away and sniffed. A white handkerchief appeared in front of her, and she took it to mop up her eyes, then crushed it in her fist.

  “Why are you being so nice to me?” she asked.

  He sat back and contemplated her. He had a lean frame. His fingers were long and thin with square fingernails. But his eyes arrested her attention: warm and caring. They were her undoing, those compassionate eyes.

  “Because I want to help you.”

  “I don’t think you can help me.”

  “If you thought that you wouldn’t be here right now.”

  “Maybe I wanted finger sandwiches and hot tea.”

  “Then you can have all the finger sandwiches and hot tea that you want.”

  “You’re a strange man, Mr. Baker.”

  He grinned. “You’re not the first one to call me strange.”

  “You don’t even know me.”

  “I can’t help people I don’t know? I guess all those charities out there should close their doors then.”

  She didn’t know how to act around him or how to react to him. He wasn’t at all what she’d expected. He was irreverent, kind, quick-witted.

  “Mrs. Smith referred to you as your lordship,” she said.

  “Yes, well, that’s a recent development.”

  She raised a brow. “I’m not following.”

  His grin was self-deprecating. “Trust me, neither am I.” He took a deep breath, and it seemed he mentally straightened his shoulders. “I have recently come into an earldom. Quite unexpected.”

  “Unexpected and, I gather by your hesitation, unwanted?”

  He appeared surprised at her astuteness. “Let’s just say it’s taken me a bit of time to warm to the idea.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Interesting how?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “You don’t seem to want your life to change, and I desperately need mine to change.”

  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 che
eks 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, b
ut 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?”