Page 58 of To Seduce a Stranger

Dipping his head, he avoided her question. “There’s something I need to say.”

He could not give her only part of himself. She deserved more.

She deserved the truth.

Chapter 15

Although she knew it was a childish response, Charlotte caught herself holding her breath. If she had not, she might have stuck her fingers in her ears. She did not want to hear what she knew he was going to say.

Her father had abandoned her. No one in her family had ever shown her affection. Even George had been unable to muster the enthusiasm to perform his husbandly duty.

Now, she had shocked Edward with her eagerness. Disgusted him. And as a result, he was about to add himself to the long list of people she had loved who could not bring themselves to love her.

Love? How could she claim to have loved her father, when she had never met the man, and likely never would? And as for her family . . . well, there had been a sense of obligation to them, certainly. A few, very few, moments of affection between them. But amour? Non.

On the short list of people who held a place in her heart, the only person who had some right to be there was her late husband, and if what she had felt for him had been love, then how could she use that same word to describe—?

Bah! Had she really been so unutterably stupide as to have fallen in love with Edward Cary? And for what? Because he had snatched her from harm’s way on a cold, rainy day, brought her to this run-down estate on the edge of nowhere, and then touched her—

Her heart. He had touched her heart with those big, strong hands of his.

And now, he was about to break it.

She shuddered, giving him an excuse to snatch up the blanket from the floor beside them and wrap it around her, looking all the while at the fire rather than at her, as if he could not bear the sight of her. When he sat back on his heels, she did too.

“You are better than I am at telling stories, Charlotte,” he said, after a moment. The words, not at all what she had expected, caught her reluctant attention. “I have not your gift for inventiveness. I lack your cleverness.” Inventive? Clever? No one had ever applied such words to her or her tales—her lies. “Any other time, I would far rather listen to you, but this time, I must do the talking. Your version of my childhood was interesting. But not . . . quite accurate, I’m afraid.”

As he spoke, he fiddled with the hem of the blanket where it lay between them. Just moments ago, those long, calloused fingers had been stroking her with such heart-stopping gentleness. It felt now almost as if he still were.

She fought the impulse to jerk the blanket from his reach.

“You were right about one thing,” he said, turning his blazing blue eyes on her at last. “I was born here.”

“In Little Norbury?”

A shake of his head. “At Ravenswood.”

At Ravenswood? How? She clenched the blanket more tightly around her, remembering his strange behavior the night before, still feeling the cold weight of that mysterious toy soldier in her hand.

“But my father did not send me away. I ran.”

So far, their pasts were still more similar than different. “I ran once too,” she confessed quietly. Afterward, while doling out her punishment for that display of base ingratitude, her uncle had insisted she ought to be ashamed. But Charlotte had only ever been ashamed that she had failed to get away. “You were more successful than I.”

“That, my dear, depends on your definition of success,” he said with a humorless sort of laugh. Though he was still looking in her direction, his gaze drifted until she felt as if he were far away. “I was just nine years old, but I got from here to Bristol without much trouble, and I had no difficulty at all finding a ship’s captain to take me on. I was tall for my age, and strong. Captain Keswick told me I’d make a fine addition to his crew, and I—I believed him. Like most boys, I suppose, I was eager for adventure. But I had never been to sea before. I was so ill at first, that I did not realize where we were headed.”

“To the West Indies, you mean.”

Another shake of his dark head. “To Africa. The Pearl was a slave ship.”

“Quel malheur!” she breathed, drawing backward without conscious thought.

The movement did not escape his notice. “You needn’t fear that I am about to regale you with its horrors. Even if I wanted to, I—I haven’t the words. It was a long, gruesome voyage. Sometimes, I still have nightmares. . .” A shudder passed through him. “Suffice it to say that more than a year later, I found myself in Antigua, tied by the neck to a hitching post outside some vile tavern.” His hand crept to his throat, as if the sensation of rough hemp rope abrading his flesh had not faded, even after all those years. “It’s not uncommon for the captains of slavers to abandon a portion of their crew in those port towns; it takes fewer men to sail the ship back to Britain, and there are always unlucky souls who can be made to sail out again. But Keswick had no intention of leaving me behind. In a fit of despair, I had told him who my father was, you see. I hinted there would be a sizeable reward for my safe return.”

From what Charlotte could tell, Edward’s criticism of his abilities as a storyteller had been too self-deprecating. He seemed, at the very least, to have managed to convince this Captain Keswick that a man who had carelessly fathered a bastard would be interested in whether he lived or died.

“What happened?”

“Thomas Holderin found me there. A religious man would call it providential, I suppose. I learned later that it was not a part of St. John’s he typically frequented. When he approached, offered to help, I was skeptical. He looked like a planter, and I had already seen enough to know that there’s usually not much difference between the men who sell slaves and the men who buy them. But his eyes were kind. And he had his daughter with him, a fiery-haired thing not half my age. I learned later that Mrs. Holderin had died not long before, and so he took his little girl everywhere with him. She—Tempest took my hand, though I was filthy and ragged. She chattered at me while her father worked at the knot around my neck. He had almost—”