Page 43 of Miss Beresford and the Beast

“How was I to know her rules were so draconian?” Charlotte asked with a huff. “My own mother⁠—”

“It’s not the same,” Lucy objected. “A dog in my family isn’t the same as a dog in your family.”

“A dog is a dog!” Charlotte exclaimed.

“Miss Beresford,” the constable interrupted. “Miss Champion. Perhaps this can wait? The carriage is outside. And we have imposed on his lordship long enough.”

Charlotte was at once drawn back into the moment. Here, in this great musty drawing room in this neglected old manor house, with Magnus standing steadfast by her side. There was no warmth here save that generated by the four of their bodies. There would be even less once Charlotte had gone.

Emotion constricted her throat. “I won’t abandon him,” she said. “He needs me. He has no one else.”

She was talking about Chance, obviously. Yet Lucy and the constable shifted where they stood, averting their eyes from both Charlotte and Magnus.

Surely they didn’t think Charlotte meant…?

Magnus cleared his throat. “If I may propose a solution?”

Charlotte looked up at him, still vastly out of countenance. Lucy looked at him too, but only briefly. Her gaze quickly darted away. She retreated several steps.

“Another cabbage crate?” Charlotte inquired. “Or is it an apple crate this time?”

“Neither,” Magnus said. “I propose you leave the dog in my care.”

Charlotte blinked. “Leave him with you?”

“Temporarily,” Magnus said. “Until such time as you can take him.”

She searched his face, her temper slowly receding. “But…you don’t like him.”

“True.” The wryest of smiles quirked the edge of Magnus’s mouth, as fleeting as it was surprising. “Then again,” he said. “I don’t like anyone.”

Charlotte’s stomach trembled with the delicate flutter of butterfly wings. Never had she been so convinced that he meant the opposite.

It was a wondrous feeling. As though she had been invited through a long-bolted door. A secret door. One that hadn’t been opened in ages, but that was unlocking now to admit only her.

Well, her and her dog.

It was a one-time invitation, she sensed. To refuse it would be to close that door forever. To leave Moorcross Manor and to never see Magnus again.

Walking through the door, on the other hand…

It meant that this wasn’t the end of their story.

She would, after all, have to come back and collect Chance eventually. Or perhaps Magnus would return him to her at the Hall?

Charlotte wasn’t going to quibble over the details. Her brain hadn’t been so addled by her fall that she couldn’t recognize a good thing when she saw it. “Very well,” she agreed. “If you insist.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Magnus said.

“But you must talk to him as I have,” Charlotte said. “He needs gentling.”

Lucy regarded Charlotte with an expression of dismay. One would think that Magnus was a man incapable of being gentle, and that Charlotte was certifiably insane for addressing him so.

Well, and perhaps she was.

“I’ll make no promises,” Magnus said. “I do have my own affairs to attend to.”

Yes, digging holes, Charlotte nearly retorted.