Even as she watched, a shadow flickered across them, and for the second time that day, she found herself being inspected with a sort of curious frown.
Tugging off one glove, he raised his hand and brushed the pad of his thumb beneath her eye, flicking away a clump of mud. Beneath his surprisingly warm touch, her own skin felt cold. She shivered, then darted her gaze away from his face to discover her dress and Jane’s cloak were all but ruined. Although the state of her clothes was the least of her worries, she found herself blinking away tears.
Shock. She drew her shoulders back and lifted her chin. “I must t’ank—thank you for saving my life,” she said, marshaling every trick she had learned to make her English sound perfectly . . . well, English. And failing miserably.
Nevertheless, he paid her the compliment of replying in the same language. “I was simply in the right place at the right time. May I be of some further assistance, Miss . . . ?”
The hesitation at the end of his question begged for an introduction. “Lottie Blake—” she began, unthinkingly. Blakemore, she had been about to say, as if she could afford to go about revealing her real name to anyone who asked.
But it little mattered, because before she could finish, his brows dove downward. “Lottie?” he echoed disapprovingly. “Charlotte, surely.”
She had never really been fond of the nickname. Her aunt had begun it, disliking how Charlotte rolled off a French tongue. Before that, Charlotte could hardly remember having been called anything at all.
It felt doubly strange, then—doubly good?—to hear her given name now, even on the lips of a perfect stranger.
“Yes. Charlotte,” she agreed, “Charlotte Blake.” It was a comfortable alias, at least as fitting as Her Grace, the Duchess of Langerton had ever been. Although the muscles in her legs still quivered, she managed a curtsy. “Very pleased to make your acquaintance, sir.”
“The pleasure is mine, Miss Blake.” He bowed in return. “Edward Cary, at your service.”
Chapter 2
Perhaps if he had not been so foolhardy as to touch her, Edward might have been able to pluck his hat out of the muck and simply walk away. The streak of mud across her pale cheek had been a distraction, but the chill of her skin felt like a call to arms.
“Allow me to take you back to the rest of your traveling party,” he said, bending to pick up her valise and a good portion of Wiltshire clay along with it. He had a few choice words for the person or persons who had left a young woman to wander about a bustling inn yard unescorted on a wet, gray afternoon.
“I thank you, Mr. Cary. But that won’t be necessary.” She reached for her bag, making no move to take his arm. “I am traveling alone.”
Alone? His chin jerked upward as if he had been struck by the word, sending more cold rain where it assuredly was not welcome. A few drops found their way beneath the upturned collar of his greatcoat to trickle down his neck and along the valley of his spine.
So much for the celebrated beauties of England in the springtime.
In twenty years, he had forgotten how the damned chill settled into one’s bones. Or perhaps, when he had last felt it, his bones had been more forgiving.
Doubtless he ought to prepare himself for frequent repetition of the facile assertion that his time in the West Indies had thinned his blood, although he rather suspected that his blood was the same consistency it had been when he had left England as a boy. Suppressing a curse, he turned toward the inn, still carrying her satchel, stepping deftly around a puddle that promised to be deep.
“Sir,” Charlotte Blake called after him, “you have my—”
“Come.” Spoken from between teeth clenched against chattering, the word sounded like a growl, even to his ears. “We’ll sort it out inside.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she followed. He could hear her picking her way across the ruts behind him, then felt her hand tugging on the valise. “I do not wish to go inside, Mr. Cary.” She had managed somehow to hone her soft French accent to a stern English edge.
But they were already to the inn, and he stepped into the warmth and dryness it promised, pulling her with him when she did not release her satchel. Hoping to secure a private parlor for Miss Blake, somewhere she might freshen up, he was forced by the crowd of stranded travelers to make do with the bustling public room instead. Dark walls were adorned with a series of cheap prints depicting charming country scenes that did not bear comparison with the gloom beyond the room’s windows. Fingers of heat beckoned from an enormous stone fireplace, curling just out of his reach. Near it sat two young men who, by their looks, had been traveling in an open gig. Small puddles had formed on the floor around their boots and beneath a third chair, where their coats drooped and dripped. With a jerk of his chin Edward evicted them from their table and installed Charlotte in the seat closest to the fire, facing out into the room.
“How came you to be here alone, Miss Blake?” he asked, taking the chair opposite and setting her bag at his feet.
“I was traveling with my employer,” she said. “I am a lady’s maid.”
“Oh?”
What fueled his skepticism he could not say. Her dowdy clothes, perhaps, which were far from the quality or style in which fashion-conscious lady’s maids usually dressed. Or her voice, which even as he contemplated his reaction, shot through him with a throaty, “Oui.”
The “lady” she served might be anyone, he told himself, tamping down his suspicion. Miss Blake could hardly be blamed for taking employment with some parsimonious social climber who hoped to bolster her status with a real French maid.
“And you were somehow separated?”
“As we were returning to London from Bath,” she explained, “I informed her ladyship I wished to be released from her service. When she resumed her journey a short while ago, she did so without me.”
“What?” At his exclamation, several heads in their vicinity turned. No maid in her right mind would have quit under these circumstances, to be turned loose in the rain at some roadside inn. Which meant the situation had likely been reversed. He tried to imagine what might have possessed a lady of rank to dismiss her servant so abruptly, to abandon a young woman at the side of the road. Insolence? Theft? Or worse?
“Have you another situation lined up?” he asked, trying to make the question sound idly curious.
“No.” The word seemed to have been jarred loose by a violent tremor that passed through her body—whether cold or shock or anger, he could not be sure.
“Brandy,” he barked to the barmaid as she danced past on her way to deliver two more pints to the ousted bucks. When she returned with a single tumbler of amber liquid and set it down before him, he pushed it toward Charlotte. “Drink this.”
His offer was met with a sharp shake of her head. “No. Thank you.”
“Purely medicinal. It will help with the shivering.”
Although it must have cost her tremendous effort, her shoulders and hands and knees stopped shaking. “I assure you, I am f-fine.”
“Are you always this stubborn?”
As if to prove the extent of her self-control, she raised perfectly steady hands from her lap and rested them on the edge of the table. “If you must know, Mr. Cary, I haven’t any money to pay for it.”
No money? That only confirmed his suspicions. Just a moment past, his bones had ached with cold; now, his blood threatened to boil. Someone had meant to condemn a vulnerable young woman to the village poor house. Or the village whorehouse. Stretching out one finger, he scooted the glass closer to her. “My treat.”
Her lips twitched and her nostrils flared, but in the end she lifted the glass to her lips and carefully sipped its contents. “Merci,” she said as she returned it, three-quarters full, to the table. He had expected watery eyes or a choking cough. What he got was a wry sort of smile. “But you ought to know you have been cheated. No Frenchman would honor that beverage with the name of brandy.”
A laugh rumbled in his chest. “Eng
lish palates have been stunted by the war, no doubt,” he said. “Nevertheless, it brought some color to your cheeks.”
He had meant it as a statement of fact, not a flirtation, but Charlotte’s gaze dropped to where her hands still rested on the table. “I should go.”
“Go where?”
“I do not know,” she said, pushing back as if she would stand. “It does not matter.”
“Let me help you. Take you where you wish to go. Or give you coach fare, at least.” The offer was past his lips before she could rise and walk away, before he could consider its wisdom.
At last she lifted her eyes to him, large in her still-pale face and such a deep brown he could not see where her pupils ended and her irises began. Separated from her only by the width of a small table, he could almost see his reflection in those dark eyes, but nothing of what she was thinking. She shook her head. “Why should you do such a thing? We are strangers. It would be most improper for me to travel with you or to accept your money.”
“I’ve been away from England for many years. Things have no doubt changed in my absence. But I was taught to believe it at least as improper for a gentleman to leave a lady stranded.”
“How can I be sure you are a gentleman?” Her lips quirked upward with the question as her gaze skimmed over him, cool but openly assessing.
A very good question indeed. The particular ways in which he had proved his character over the years would mean very little now he was back to England. “You cannot.”
His answer produced an unexpected nod of satisfaction. “How long have you been away?”
“Twenty-two years. Most of my life,” he explained at the slight widening of her eyes.
“Where?”
Was it his imagination, or did she hesitate over that simple question?
“The West Indies. Where I was employed variously as an errand boy, a shipping clerk, and most recently as the manager of a sugar plantation,” he added, before she could ask.
“An overseer, you mean. A driver of slaves.” Her English was better than she had led him to believe. She seemed to know the terrible burden those words carried, at least. “Are their lives really as bad as one reads about?”
Debates and discussions about abolition had begun to circulate in English drawing rooms, he knew, but he had imagined them occurring out of the earshot of servants. “I do not know what you have been reading, Miss Blake. But the vast majority live and die in conditions far worse than you, in all likelihood, can imagine.” He certainly had not come back to defend slavery and the planters’ way of life.
He might have separated himself from the implications of his statement. After all, he had worked for most of those same years to improve the conditions of the slaves under his supervision as best he could. But he had not come back to England to defend himself, either.
A long silence hung between them, filled by the noises of the public room. “Where do you go now?” she asked at last. One of the two men at the next table shot a glance her way and murmured something to his companion, who craned his head around.
All at once, Edward realized it was not her muddy clothes or disheveled hair that kept attracting their notice. Not even, perhaps, her accent. No, their heads had been turned by her large dark eyes, high cheekbones, and full lips.
Hers was a beauty perhaps not currently in fashion in England, and not the sort to which he himself had typically been drawn, but he could hardly deny there was something attractive—in the magnetic, irresistible sense—about Miss Charlotte Blake. Even her dowdy, ill-fitting dress did not disguise it. Had some lord’s head been turned by his wife’s maid, with or without the maid’s encouragement? If so, his lady could not be blamed for seeking to remove the temptation.
But how careless, how callous simply to throw that temptation into another man’s path.
“Gloucestershire,” he replied to her almost-forgotten question. The answer seemed to satisfy her. He might have said nothing more. Yet recklessly he added details to his story. Details that brushed against the truth. “I have a long-standing arrangement with a gentleman regarding the management of his estates. He will, I hope, be glad to see that I am at last able to assume my responsibilities on his behalf.”
“A clerk. A slave driver. Now a steward for a man of property,” she said, ticking off each title on her gloved fingertips. “I believe I have my answer, then. You are not a gentleman.”
Edward chose to laugh. “I fear many will agree with you, Miss Blake.”
Convincing them otherwise would be more than enough to be going on with. He needed no additional challenges. Certainly, he should be grateful Charlotte Blake had refused his assistance. Right now, he ought to rise, drop a coin or two, and be on his way.
Before he could move, however, she sucked in her breath and dropped her gaze to the table, murmuring words he could not catch, perhaps in French. He thought for a moment that her reaction was embarrassment, inspired by her sudden awareness of the young men’s interest. But they were not seated so as to be visible to her when she looked at him. Or rather, past him.
Twisting in his chair, he swept his gaze around the public room. The crowds had thinned once the east-bound stage had come and gone. Here and there, a few travelers lingered. Near the doorway, an older man in a dark coat stood speaking earnestly with the innkeeper, who listened with his arms crossed over his chest before shaking his bewigged head.
When Edward returned his attention to Charlotte, he discovered she had moved her chair away from the fire, shifting closer to him. With her back to the room, she pulled up the hood of her cloak, drawing it securely around her face.
Who or what she had seen remained a mystery to him, but it required no great feat of penetration to understand that behind him lay something she wanted desperately to avoid.
“Mr. Cary,” she whispered, her voice muffled, “I find I must accept your offer of assistance, after all.”
“Of course. Let me pay your way on the morning stage to London.”
An almost imperceptible shake of her head. “I must leave now. Just—please, will you take me with you?”
“To Gloucestershire?” Picking up his hat with one hand, he brushed away what he could of the partially dried mud with the other. “What would you have to do there?”
She studied her gloved fingers where they lay curled in her lap. “I am willing to work, Mr. Cary. Perhaps your employer will have need of a servant? I will repay your trouble,” she insisted.
“I cannot promise . . . That is, the gentleman who owns the estate is . . .” Prone to misconduct where serving girls are concerned? An understatement, surely.
“Not in residence?” she supplied. “I suppose a wealthy gentleman of property would prefer to be in town for the Season.” There was a certain wild eagerness in her eye when it met his. “So much the better.”
She was afraid. Afraid of being seen. Afraid of being recognized.
Had any part of the story she’d told him been true?
“Please,” she urged, glancing from beneath her hood toward the door. “May we go?”
Undoubtedly, spending two-thirds of his life in Antigua had affected him, shaped him. People would make assumptions about the sort of man he had become in such a place, and they might not always be wrong. But he had never been the sort of man who could ignore the plight of a woman in danger. His life experiences had not changed who he was.
From birth: Edward Cary, Viscount Ravenswood.
And when his father’s hard heart at last calcified to the point at which it no longer beat, he would be the Earl of Beckley.
Whether anyone would accept him as such after all these years was another question entirely.
With a curt nod, he gestured her toward the door. “All right.” As she turned away from him, he reached for the almost-full tumbler, downed its contents in a single swallow, and grimaced.
She had told the truth about one thing, at any rate. He’d be damned before he’d dignify that swill with the name of br
andy.
* * *
When Charlotte saw the horse, she began to have second thoughts about her request for aid. She’d imagined speeding away from the inn in a carriage, curtains drawn, unobserved by passersby. The discovery that he intended her to share his mount was, to say the least, alarming.
“Do you ride, Miss Blake?” he asked as he strapped her satchel to the saddle before swinging up with apparent ease.
Standing just out of reach of his outstretched hand, she shook her head.
“You aren’t frightened of horses, are you?”
“No.” The reply came quickly. Too quickly. That sort of obvious lie had on occasion earned her a rap across the knuckles or a pinch from Aunt Penhurst. She could hardly hope that Mr. Cary would prove less astute.
At least, however, he did not seem to be as quick-tempered. “You’re perfectly safe,” he insisted, his voice warm and his eyes smiling down on her. “Samson here is one of the most—er, placid animals I’ve ever encountered.”
Placid? No judge of horseflesh, she could not be sure whether he was sincere or merely trying to sound reassuring. The distinctions between a sway-backed nag and a high-strung racehorse were entirely lost on her. All of them were enormous and behaved unpredictably, as far as she was concerned. Looking about the muddy yard, she was forced to acknowledge that she had little choice, however. It was either back to the inn, or up.
Had the man questioning the innkeeper been the same man she had seen earlier? And if so, had he spotted her?
He was probably nothing more than a newspaper man, on the hunt for fodder for a gossip column. Well, she did not mean to stay and give him what he wanted. Laying her hand in Edward Cary’s, she set her toe on his boot and allowed him to pull her up in front of him.
“All set, Miss Blake?”
Tangling her fingers in the horse’s dark mane to hide her nervousness, she held her spine rigid. One of those wretched nervous giggles bubbled in her chest, but she fought it down. Although the ground looked to be an alarming way off, and the toss of the horse’s head made her certain they were about to be thrown, she managed to nod in acknowledgment of Mr. Cary’s words.
To Seduce a Stranger Page 3
