Page 29 of Miss Beresford and the Beast

He gestured stiffly to the window seat. “Will you sit with me?”

Charlotte bit her lip. Why not here on the bed? she nearly asked. And she might have done if her husband wasn’t behaving in such an oddly formal manner. It put her distinctly on her guard.

“If you like,” she said.

Rising, she crossed to the window. Magnus followed her at a distance. He remained standing until she sat down. Only then did he join her on the upholstered seat. The modest window embrasure was dwarfed by his great size, making the space feel at once too small and far too close. It was a trifle difficult to breathe.

“Has something happened?” she asked.

Magnus didn’t prevaricate. “Yesterday morning, shortly after your fall, Turner found a letter of yours in the garden.”

“Of mine?” Her mouth tilted with bemusement. “Was it something I’d written to you?”

“Not to me. To your sister.”

Her smile faded.

“It had no envelope,” he said, “and no direction. Presumably, it was in the basket you’d been carrying, waiting to be posted. Turner read its contents and conveyed the particulars to me.”

“Turner read my letter?” Charlotte was appalled. “Why would he⁠—”

“To ascertain the facts of the situation,” Magnus said. “Inaccurate facts, as it turns out. Which is my fault. I should have insisted on reading the letter myself. But I confess, I was too cross to be bothered with it. Which is why I accepted Turner’s findings as gospel. The first of my mistakes, as it happens.”

“I don’t understand.”

Magnus’s jaw was tense, as though he was steeling himself. “I trust this will help.” Reaching into the inner pocket of his coat, he withdrew a folded letter.

Charlotte’s brows lifted as she took it from him. She looked from the letter to Magnus’s face.

“Read it, if you please,” he said.

Her stomach trembled. Goodness. It was sure to be something dreadful, wasn’t it? More dreadful than the facts as she’d already ascertained them. That she had a dog who was afraid of her, a husband who found her a nuisance, and that she had a propensity for foolish behavior like climbing up onto enormous garden walls.

“I don’t think I can bear to find out anything worse about myself,” she remarked in a feeble attempt at humor.

“It’s not your opinion of yourself that will be worsened by this,” Magnus said.

Charlotte’s attention lingered on him a moment longer before returning to the letter. She slowly unfolded it. Mustering her courage, she began to read.

Magnus watched Charlotte’s face as she pored over the words she’d written. He marked every notch of her brows, every tremor of her mouth, the way her dark lashes fluttered as her gaze moved down the page.

She wasn’t just pretty, he realized with an aching twinge of regret. She was beautiful. And not only because of her eyes and her hair and the elegant turn of her countenance. It was because of her soul. A soul that had shone out to him from her letter more clearly than it had from their brief interactions. The girl who’d written those words was a creature of courage, of imagination, of limitless affection. Willing to dare all. To risk all.

And here he was with her in his father’s old bedchamber. The two of them seated in an antiquated window embrasure, half hidden by dust-laden draperies, amid a decade’s evidence of rot and neglect.

Magnus well recalled this room. This seat. On any other occasion, he would doubtless be plagued by unpleasant remembrances.

But not now.

In this taut moment, with her ruffled skirts bunched against his leg and her faded perfume whispering to his senses, he scarcely registered the dust and the damp. Barely recollected the dark days before his disgrace. Charlotte—irritating, ill-timed, inconvenience that she was—had temporarily blotted it all out.

By what cruel quirk of fate had she fallen into his power? And through what misguided attempt at chivalry had Magnus unwittingly made everything worse?

As if it could be any worse.

“I’m staying with the Champions?” Charlotte murmured to herself. “But I thought…”

He waited for her to complete her words. To turn to him with a look of accusation. To say, but I thought we were married.