She hated that it made her trust him a fraction more.
“I’m Charity Cluett,” she said finally, “My father was Lord Orton. He died six months ago, as did my mother. My uncle holds the title now. I was living at our estate near York with my two sisters.The last thing I know is that I went to bed in that house and woke up in your woods.”
Duncan repeated the name slowly.
“Charity Cluett.”
The way he said it sent a shiver down her spine, and she hated that too.Howwas he able to have such a reaction from her?
“Now what?” she said, thinking it was easier to be impatient rather than confront the strange feelings this beastly man was invoking inside of her.
Duncan stared at her for a second longer, then his gaze moved to her shoulders. Only then did Charity realize she was shivering again. His brows drew together, and he turned, taking a thicker cover from the chair nearby, then draped it over her shoulders.
“What are you doing?”
“You’re shaking, cover yourself.”
His hands brushed her upper arm through the fabric for half a second as he settled the cover, and Charity’s heartbeat kicked hard in her chest.
There it was again, that same reaction. She swallowed, angry at herself for behaving like this.
“I’m not cold,” Charity lied.
Duncan didn’t argue and sat down on the edge of the bed after fixing the cover in place. From this point, she could see the scars more clearly now, the roughness of healed skin against harder planes of his face. She wondered, unwillingly, what had happened to him to leave marks like that.
I would not dare ask him,she thought to herself. She did not know how he would react, and she was still not sure if she could even trust him.
“You’re awake enough to speak,” Duncan said, pinching the bridge of his nose, “So answer one more thing.”
She waited for him to continue on.
“Who was the last person you spoke to before you lost consciousness?”
“Why are you asking me that?” she said. But her mind flashed back to her last day at the estate. Her uncle had arrived at the end of the mourning period, and she had her meeting with him and his son. She had avoided her sisters afterwards and excused herself to bed early. So that meant that the last person she spoke to… properly anyway, and who wasn’t a part of her immediate sibling family was….
Robert.
“It was my cousin,” she said.
“Which cousin?” Duncan’s eyes narrowed.
“Robert Mowatt.”
Duncan’s expression shifted immediately into something hard, “That’s your kidnapper,” he said.
“No,” she snapped, surprised at her own anger. “No, he is not.”
“You spoke to him last,” he said as though he was pointing out the obvious. “You were drugged by him, I guess.”
“You don’t know anything about him, and nor can you accuse someone just because it suits your logic.” She did not know why she was defendingRobertof all people, but he had not seemed as cruel as her uncle. Though, of course, she had no way of truly knowing. But then, neither did the duke and he was acting very sure of himself.
“Men do worse things than you want to believe,” he said.
“Robert is not a monster,” she snapped. “He’s a coward when it comes to his father. But he is not the sort of man who would drug me and drag me across the border, surely.”
There was a flicker in the duke’s expression at her defense of Robert, though Charity did not want to read too much into it.
“Cowardice and cruelty aren’t opposites,” he said. “Sometimes they go together.”
