English Lord on Her Doorstep by Marion Lennox

Author:Marion Lennox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2018-06-04T18:18:30+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

THE NIGHT STILLED.

Neither of them spoke. There seemed to be no words.

Charlie’s hand still lay under his but it had stiffened. No longer was it loose, warm, trusting. It was as if she was waiting for...what? The axe to fall?

This woman had been betrayed, he thought. By her absentee parents, by her husband, by his uncle. She didn’t trust. And how could she trust? What he was proposing was crazy.

It was crazy for him, too. He didn’t do relationships. So why did what he was feeling now seem so different? As if the rules he’d held rigidly to for so long no longer applied?

‘What...what are you saying?’ she whispered at last and finally she drew her hand away.

He wanted it back. The link seemed more than important while he tried to sort what he needed to say.

What he’d asked had been a spur of the moment thought, an idea only, but this woman didn’t need speculation. She needed facts, something solid she could trust. Trust was something he could offer but who knew if it’d be accepted?

He had to give her space. The linking of their hands was a pressure she didn’t need, and maybe it formed an emotion he needed to back away from.

Facts. Right.

He thought of what he could tell her—he should tell her—who he was, the extent of his fortune, the power he wielded back home. And he thought of her words... ‘Titles and mansions and promises and lies...’ She didn’t need that. More, she couldn’t trust it. What he needed to offer was something solid, with no embellishments. Something to take away the shadows, not add more.

She was still fixedly watching the stars. Thinking who knew what? He had an image suddenly in his head of a fawn he’d once found, separated from its mother. Trapped in briars. Watching him approach without moving, but with every fearful sense tuned to what was coming.

He’d managed to free it so it could run back to where it belonged. He needed to do the same here, but he didn’t want Charlie to run. Whatever he offered had to be non-threatening.

‘Charlie, I told you I’m a farmer,’ he said and waited until he got a slight nod. It wasn’t a committal to anything other than she’d listen, but it was enough.

‘My land’s been in my family for generations,’ he told her. ‘It’s good land—no, it’s great land—and it’s prosperous. I’m what some would call a warm man.’

‘A warm man...’

‘Wealthy, if you will.’

‘You’ve had to pay to come here,’ she said cautiously. ‘And lawyers...’

‘Believe it or not, it hasn’t dented my income.’

She was still staring at the stars, her body rigid. She couldn’t trust, he thought, and his heart twisted. This woman...she seemed so alone.

‘I could pay your debts,’ he told her and he watched the rigidity increase, the way her face closed and he knew there was more than one reason why he couldn’t go down that road. But he repeated the sensible one. ‘My lawyers tell me, however, that if I pay one lot of Thomas’s debts then I set a precedent.

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