“Fifteen.”
He looked over at her in surprise. He was positive he knew every one of them, she’d kept him very well informed over the years.
Charlotte blushed slightly but met his eyes. “I still count yours.”
Nothing could have prepared him for that. After all these years, they had never once discussed that day. He’d never forgotten his folly, but she had never reminded him of it.
She counted it? Why would she tell him that? Why now? Why ever?
“Serious proposals, Charlotte,” he recovered with a snort he hoped would hide his shock. “Legitimate ones.”
She held up her hands, smiling at some private joke. “Fair enough.” But she quickly sobered and became markedly interested in the nails of her fingers. “It may not make sense to anyone else, Michael, including you, but I’ve made the decision to do this. Edith said something to me some time ago, and it has haunted me ever since.”
“Edith did?” Michael repeated. “I find that hard to believe.”
Charlotte immediately shook her head. “It wasn’t cruel, that isn’t in Edith’s nature. It was simple candor, and I can neither forget it, nor deny it.”
Michael blinked at that, the raw honesty in Charlotte’s voice, without the amusement or fire so in her nature, taking him as off guard as her suggestion had. “What was it?”
A sad smile appeared on her full lips. “She told me that she did not think I had really tried all that hard to find a husband.”
The words hung in the air between them, and Michael scrambled within himself for the correct response to the statement. He wanted to tell her it wasn’t true, that Edith was mistaken in her well-meaning words, that he had seen Charlotte entertaining suitors and the like. But Michael had never lied to Charlotte, and he wouldn’t start now.
“I can see that,” he said after a moment, careful not to look at Charlotte as he did so. “She’s not wrong.”
“I know.”
He glanced at her then, unable to resist. “You do?”
Charlotte nodded, the dark falls of her half-bound hair concealing most of her face as she continued her study of the tip of each finger. “I have entertained suitors, it is true, and an outsider would think these my efforts, and perhaps they would seem sufficient. Despite my wit, intelligence, and influence, I could not give you half of the names of those who have admired me over the years. I barely remember their faces.”
“You never were very good at that,” Michael admitted with a rueful chuckle. “That was one of the reasons I lingered at the edges of your circle.”
“Yes, you were vastly helpful there.” She lifted her chin, and Michael caught a glimpse of a whimsical smile. “Entertained would be the best word to describe what I have been and what I have done with my time. I have been entertained, and I have entertained. I’m an heiress, so what need had I to give effort?”
There were no words for any of this in Michael’s view. Charlotte had clarity of vision where her life and behavior were concerned, and always had, but this? This was an unburdening of the deepest secrets, and the overturning of every stone within the fortress of her soul.
And for what? Out of loneliness? Envy? Regret? None of those things would have suited Charlotte Wright, and he knew it well. It had to be something else. Something stronger than them altogether.
“Why didn’t I even look?” Charlotte whispered harshly, and he thought for a moment there might have been tears in her voice, though he’d never be sure. “What if he was there all along and I wasn’t seeing him?”
The irony in that statement would have made him laugh had it not chilled him.
“Charlotte…” He paused, wetting his lips, willing the tingling in his fingers to subside. “Are you afraid?”
Slowly, she looked over at him, her eyes wide. “Don’t tell,” she rasped, looking and sounding very young.
He rose and was to her in an instant, crouching before her and taking her hands. “Of course not!” He gave her what he hoped was a consoling smile. “Who would I have to tell, anyway?”
Charlotte giggled softly. “True. I am your only friend.”
That wasn’t exactly accurate, but it might as well have been. He’d devoted enough of himself to her to make it so.
“I thought,” he began, returning to the subject with as much tenderness and tact as he could, “that you were looking for love. A great, sweeping love that sent you to your knees.”
“I am,” she replied with a firm nod.
He shrugged as if that should have been her answer.
She frowned at his gesture. “I’m afraid that I missed it, Michael.”
“I don’t think that sort of thing is easily missed,” he retorted, scrunching up his face for effect. “You’d have to be really thick to miss the lightning bolts and singing angels and feelings of imminent death.”
A sharp thump across his chest nearly set him off balance, but he recovered swiftly enough, pushing to his feet and moving back a safe distance.
Charlotte skewered him with a dark look. “You are hopelessly unromantic.”
“I’ve heard.” He smiled blandly and folded his arms.
She watched him for a long moment, then slumped on a resigned sigh. “I wanted love to find me, Michael. I don’t need marriage, not in the way others do, but that doesn’t mean I wanted to be alone with my money.”
It sounded so cold when she put it that way, but the reality was that she’d summed it up neatly there. Unpleasantly, but neatly.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she went on. “Love was supposed to happen to me, not be hunted for. Did I miss it?”
“No,” he said before he could stop himself. “No, you didn’t miss it.”
She didn’t reply, but her attention was on him still. As though he hadn’t finished. As though he had more of an answer or explanation.
He could have. He had answers aplenty, and he’d waited years to give them. He could end all of this
