“I think many women would agree with you there,” he nodded slowly.
“So, I know a woman staying unchaperoned in a man’s house is a scandal, and I thought if I went somewhere else, anywhere else, that the man would be…” She looked ashamed, hanging her head forward, not finishing her statement as she moved her hands to her hips.
Slowly, Seth backed up as he realized what she could not bring herself to say.
“You thought you might coax another man to marry you? By trapping him in scandal?”
“I thought that marrying any other man in this world would be preferable to Baron Tynefield.”
“Well, you are right about one thing.” He turned sharply in a circle. “I do not just think you mad. I think you are quite insane! What a thing to think in a wild moment!”
“I told you. I was in my cups. I was that desperate. I was not thinking straight.” She shrugged helplessly and suddenly stepped forward. Shelby strolled alongside her, as if he knew she still needed guiding and was nervous about her falling into the flowerbed. “Have you never felt that desperation, Your Grace? Where everything is so awful, where your fears and dreads are so great, that you are willing to do anything, even something insane, just to escape?”
He knew that feeling. He knew itall too well. Had he not broken into a man’s house the night before in his desperation to prove the man was guilty of arson and murder?
“I cannot speak of this now.” He raised his hands and covered his face, thinking fast and trying to come up with a plan of what to do next. “For all you knew last night, I could have been worse than the baron. I could have been the worst man that was ever born on this earth.”
“And yet, the worst man came back and saved me when Baron Tynefield attacked me?” she asked, arching her brow. He noticed something about her as he lowered his hands – she was very expressive, her full emotions revealed on her face constantly. “You proved yourself to be a better man than him last night. All I ask is this. Do not send me out of your house now. At least give me some time to think of something. I beg of you.”
She looked in danger of getting down on her knees to beg him. Shelby barked, clearly not wishing her to do it either.
Seth took her wrist, stopping her as she went to move. She gasped at that touch, and he quickly snatched his hand back as though she were living flowing magma. He should not touch her. It would remind him too much of the way he had kissed her the night before and how she had responded to him.
“Do not get down on your knees, and pray, do not look at me like that either.”
“Like what?” she asked, blinking those doe-like eyes.
“As if every hope in your life is pinned on me.”
Once more, she quirked her brows together, in that expressive way, as if to say, ‘well, it is.’
“You have a heart,” she whispered. “Exercise it now. I glimpsed your heart more than once last night.”
“It could be as black as night for all you know.”
“Yet you saved me from the baron. You helped me during the storm, you stayed beside me when I was afraid, and you… you kissed me too.”
“Shh woman!” He pleaded and whipped around, suddenly afraid that a gardener would walk by and see them together.
“Ah, you regret it so quickly, do you?”
“You speak rather freely, do you not?”
“I like doing so,” she insisted, folding her arms.
“Fine, then I shall speak freely too.” He turned back to face her. “You can stay for now, because I will not be the monster that turns you out on your ear, but know this. You must find somewhere else to go soon, Charity. I am no knight in shining armor here to save you. And I am wildly far from the man you give me credit for being.” With these words, he marched away. Rufus followed him, but Shelby stayed by Charity’s side.
CHAPTER 8
“Where is the Duke?” Charity asked as she prodded the pheasant on her plate. It was a full dinner, with so much meat and vegetables stacked so high, even the thought of it in her mind’s eye was appetizing enough. Charity adored the food. There was cranberry sauce to go with the pheasant and she eagerly ate it up.
Her father was somewhat restrictive with her diet, for he kept hearing of experimental remedies for blindness and believed that what she consumed, or did not consume, had a huge impact. He had once forbidden cranberries from the house, believing they made her blindness worse. For some reason, when she had told him it did not make a difference, he had not changed the rule.
Well, not forsomereason. She quite knew the reason. And it was stubbornness, mixed with the void of pride he felt at having a less-than-able daughter.
“He has resigned to having dinner in his study this evening, my Lady,” Isobel said, topping up her glass of wine for her, for Charity could hear the velvet cascade of claret trickling into the glass. “He has declared he has a lot of work to do this evening and will be tied up.”
Charity ate the last thing on her plate and sat back, thinking of what the duke had said earlier that day.
