Page 81 of To Seduce a Stranger

What if Edward refused to forgive her?

Better to extend her travels, to delay the inevitable. And if that delay also provided an excuse for indulging in a few memories that ought to be resigned to the past—memories of Edward’s strong arms drawing her to safety, or the sweep of his blue eyes across her face—well . . .

Laying aside her book, now emptied of its banknotes, she rose and went to the door, opening it without looking at who was on its other side. “Just put the tray on the table by the bed,” she said, rummaging in her reticule for a coin. But the person who had entered was not carrying a tray. Was not a maid, but a man—and not the innkeeper either. A man whose weathered face and hair touched with silver were neither familiar nor strange. The man who had followed her once to this inn and apparently had been awaiting her return.

Why, oh why, had she been so foolish as to come back to this place?

Did she scream? No, the harsh sound jangling in her ears was the crash of china and silver. Oh, but her aunt would have her head when she found out Charlotte had been so clumsy as to drop the tea tray. Then she was slipping, scrambling, falling, while her cousins’ faces taunted her from the rim of the narrow trap door that led to the root cellar. How long would her uncle leave her in the darkness this time? A hand, a strong hand extended to help her rise from the mud and the muck at the rear of the Rookery. Edward looking down at her with laughing eyes. No, he was not here—none of them was here. Just her imagination, playing tricks . . .

But then he was there, stepping between her and the stranger. “Are you harmed, Charlotte?”

Once more, Edward had come to her rescue at this ramshackle inn. But what was he doing here? Had he been searching for her? Her head told her it was the cruelest of coincidences. Her heart, however . . .

“I’m fine.” Pushing up from the rough carpet, she came unsteadily to her feet. How had she ended up on the floor? Had she really fainted? How humiliating.

She turned to the stranger. “I suppose you were sent by my stepson? Even though I begged him to call off his dogs.”

“You are the Duchess of Langerton, then?” he asked.

She nodded before recalling that she had meant never to answer to that title again.

“Oh, thank God,” the man murmured, his lower lip beginning to tremble. “I’ve found you at last. No, I was not sent by the duke.” The suggestion seemed almost to offend him. “I tried more than once to enlist his help in finding you, but he could—or would—offer me no assistance.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

“James Winstead,” he said, with an old-fashioned bow. “Earl of Belmont.”

Charlotte swept one hand behind her, feeling for the bedpost, gripping it with all her might. “My . . . father?”

“Have you proof?” Edward demanded of the man as he jerked around to face him.

“Oh . . . well, yes. I have papers, and other things that will attest to the fact that I am who I claim to be. And my sister, Lady Penhurst, knows me.”

Finding the bedpost insufficient support, Charlotte allowed herself to sag against the bed itself. “This cannot be.”

Edward took a step closer, warmth and understanding in his eyes. “You’ve sustained quite a shock, I know. It is not every day one recovers a parent believed to be lost forever.”

With those words she could guess that her parting instructions to Garrick had been followed. “Was I right about Tessie?”

He took one of her icy hands in his warmer one and squeezed, as if words could not convey what he felt. “Yes. But all that can wait. For now, talk to your father, Charlotte.” Her fingers slipped from his grasp as he turned toward the door. “Pardon my interruption,” he said with a nod to each of them.

“Please,” she whispered, “don’t go.”

“I won’t be far away. If you need me, you have only to call.”

When the door latched behind him, she returned her attention to her father, who was studying her with his head tilted to one side. “From the moment I laid eyes on you in Bath, I knew,” he said. “There’s something of your dear mother in your face and in your bearing.”

Those words brought forth an unexpected surge of strength, fueled in large measure by anger, forcing her to her feet again. “My dear mother? The poor woman you got with child and then abandoned?”

“I did not abandon her,” he insisted. Then, more softly, “Or at least, I did not mean to. We were living just outside Paris. I was called half a day’s journey away on business. Her time was not yet so near that I felt a risk in going. But I should’ve known better than to have trusted her brother. He’d been against us from the start. When I returned, delayed some days by bad weather, the nuns at the hospital showed me your mother’s cold form, told me the babe she carried had never even drawn breath . . .” He shook his head, as if trying to dispel a particularly tenacious memory. “They must have given you into her brother’s care, but how was I to have known? I had no will left—even to doubt. Grief struck me like a fever. Once I recovered my senses, I left France, headed east. Across Europe, through the Levant. All the way to China. Twenty years of wandering. An adventure, to be sure, though it never succeeded in making me forget what I had lost.”

“You ran away.” She made no effort to keep the accusatory tone from her voice.

The notion seemed to catch him by surprise. “I . . . I suppose you could say that. I think that deep down”—he sounded exhausted—“deep down, I hoped I would die, too. A bandito’s knife between the ribs, some exotic illness. But I enjoyed no such luck. The worst I ever suffered was a fall from my horse,” he said, nodding down at his left leg, which stuck out stiffly at an awkward angle. “Broken crossing through the Khyber Pass. Took months to heal. But left me with nothing worse than a limp.”

Occasionally—when she was not grumbling about the thoughtlessness of people who ran off, expecting others to clean up the messes they left behind, without so much as a word of thanks—Aunt Penhurst had wondered aloud if her brother might not be dead. Then a letter would arrive from some faraway place where a reply was unlikely to reach him. Although those rare pieces of correspondence never inquired after his daughter, they did confirm his continued existence.

Charlotte had never considered that he might know nothing of hers.