The Rogue Not Taken (31 page)

She’d planned to be happy, yes. To marry, to have a family, to live a quiet, peaceful life. But she’d never planned to want someone so much that his refusal actually pained her.

She’d never planned for a single, inaccessible path to be the only one she could imagine having.

She’d never planned to love.

Vaguely, it occurred to her that other people found love to be a pleasurable experience, filled with roses and doves and sweets and whatever else. Those people were obviously cabbageheads. Because she loved the Marquess of Eversley quite desperately, and there wasn’t anything remotely pleasurable about it.

She cleared her throat and straightened, pushing her skirts down her legs, trapping his hands beneath them for one excruciating moment as she tried to escape his touch. “I see.”

His fingers trailed along her ankle and she shot to her feet at the sensation, the touch breaking something inside her, making her at once wish to leap into the fountain to wash it from her and toss herself into his arms and beg him to continue. She did neither, thankfully, stepping away from him as though the events of the afternoon were perfectly ordinary. As though she weren’t rushing to protect herself from the pain he seemed to be able to exact without so much as a thought. “I see,” she said again, hating the repetition. Willing herself to remain silent.

She backed away from him. Why was he still kneeling on the ground? Why wasn’t he on his feet? Why was he still here?

Why hadn’t the statue of the Minotaur sprung to life and gobbled them both up?

He rose, spreading his hands wide and coming toward her. She put one hand up. Oh, dear. He on his feet was worse by far. “Sophie, let me explain.”

Dear God. The very last thing she wanted him to do was explain why he did not wish to make love to her. She backed away from him, eyeing the exit to the maze, beyond his shoulder.

And then he was close enough to block it from her view, forcing her to consider that shoulder in entirety. That broad, beautiful shoulder.

Enough
, she admonished herself. Normal women do not care about gentlemen’s shoulders.

Normal women were in the wrong.

“Sophie, I won’t ruin you,” he said, approaching, giving her nowhere to go but backward.

“I see,” she said, fairly tripping over herself to get away from him. “I see.”

Good Lord. Could she say nothing else?

“I don’t think you do see,” he said. “You don’t see that you deserve more.” Her back came up against the hedge, prickly and uncomfortable and damn inconvenient. And still he drew closer. Close enough to raise his hand and tuck a lock of her hair behind her ear and make her quite desperate for him when he spoke, soft and lovely. “You don’t see that you deserve someone who will marry you.”

She closed her eyes at the words, as though if she couldn’t see him, he hadn’t said them. She’d known he wouldn’t marry her. She wasn’t a fool. But still, the words smarted.

He didn’t have to point it out. Did he?

“I see,” she said.

Apparently, that was all she would ever say again. Excellent. He’d turned her into an imbecile.

He swore roundly, making her wish that she’d been left with a fouler phrase than the one she seemed doomed to repeat for eternity. “Christ, Sophie. Stop saying that. You deserve someone who can love you.”

She had to leave this labyrinth. This estate. This man.

Now.

Before she said, “I see” one more time.

Or worse, before she couldn’t even say that anymore.

She nodded, crossing her arms, and pushed past him, heading for the path of the maze without a word. At another time, she might have been proud of her straight shoulders and purposeful walk. At this time, however, she couldn’t see past the tears to think about such trivial matters as posture.

He swore again, this time at her back.

She stopped, but did not turn back. She couldn’t. Not without risking telling him everything and making a wretched fool of herself. So she gathered the last shred of her pride and said, “I should like to return to Mossband.”

There was a long pause before he spoke. “When?”

“As soon as possible,” she said.

He nodded. “We shall purchase your bookshop tomorrow. I’ll connect you with my father’s solicitor. You’ll have all the money you require to live happily here.”

She didn’t care about the bookshop. She didn’t care about Mossband. Indeed, Mossband was absolutely not her future. She couldn’t be so near to this place and its memories. She couldn’t be so near to him. She took a deep breath. “I don’t think I can wait until tomorrow.”

“Sophie,” he said softly, closer than she would like, and she hated the sound of her name on his lips. “Look at me.”

She turned to face him, unable to deny him. He was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, his dark hair and his green eyes and his lips, firm and magnificent. He was far too beautiful for her. Far too perfect.

She swallowed around the thought. “I must leave. Now,” she said. “Today.”

He watched her for a long moment, and she thought he might kiss her again. She wanted him to kiss her again. She loathed the idea of him kissing her again.

Instead, he reached out, offering her his hand, warm and bronzed from the sun.

She stared at that hand for a long moment, unable to keep the tears from brimming over, hating them and then somehow loving them when he lifted that strong, perfect hand to brush them away. She let him touch her, adoring the feel of him, memorizing it until she couldn’t bear it and she moved to push him away.

The moment she touched him, however, he captured her, threading her fingers in his. She tugged at her hand, quite desperate for him to release her even as she reveled in the feel of him.

He refused to give her up, instead leading her through the maze, his warm hand wrapped around hers. They walked in silence, through the twists and turns, to the exit, where he stopped, just inside the hedge, and turned to her, pulling her close, holding her face in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry I cannot be the man you wish me to be.”

Tears threatened again and she shook her head. No more of that. “It’s you who don’t see. I only ever wished you to be the man you are.”

He did kiss her then, one final, lush moment, and she clung to him, pouring all her emotion into the caress. Desire, sorrow, passion.

Love.

But he’d never know that.

He lifted his lips from hers and gestured to the exit, letting her leave the maze first. Letting her choose real life instead of this magic, mythic place.

She did, stepping out into the world once more, King at her back, already threatening to become a long-ago memory.

The only memory that would matter.

She heard the horses almost immediately, the wicked thunder that came from a coach and six tearing up the main drive to the castle at full gallop. Together, she and King turned to face the new arrivals, hands shielding their eyes from the gleam of the late-afternoon sun on the carriage.

On the
gilded
carriage.

On the gilded carriage with cherub outriders.

“Bollocks,” Sophie whispered, filled with desolation and no small amount of uncertainty.

The conveyance stopped in the round drive of Lyne Castle, and an outrider immediately leapt down to open
the door and release the inhabitants, who piled out like lambs released into pasture.

Exceedingly well-appointed lambs. In lovely silk dresses and outrageous coifs festooned with arrows and feathers and—was that a birdcage? The last of them cried out, “Let me through!” and rushed to a nearby rosebush to promptly cast up her accounts.

“Let me guess,” he said, in a tone dry as sand. Only a fool would see the outrageous carriage and not divine its inhabitants. “That one is Sesily.”

“I
t’s all ruined!”

Sophie had barely closed the door to the receiving room at Lyne Castle when her mother’s dramatic pronouncement loosed a tide of panicked cries.

“Every invitation to the country has been
rescinded
!” the countess announced.

“Derek won’t even speak to me,” Sesily said matter-of-factly, opening her reticule and extracting a tube of smelling salts. “He disappeared before the end of the Liverpool garden party, the bastard.”

“Sesily! Language! You see?
Everything is ruined!
” the Countess of Wight cried, falling into a chair. Sesily passed the salts to the countess, who inhaled deeply. “Literally
everything
!”

“We’ve been exiled!” Seleste collapsed into a nearby chair, her elaborate pink skirts cascading over the arms. “We’re in
Cumbria
, for heaven’s sake! Could there be anything worse?” She leaned back, only to catch one of the arrows in her coif in the gold brocade of the seat. She snapped forward with a little squeak, and yanked the arrow out of her hair, tossing it to her feet.

Remarkably, not even stowing away in a footman’s livery, being shot on the Great North Road, and faking
an engagement with a man who would never marry her was as fraught with difficulty as an afternoon with the Talbot ladies.

And it hadn’t even been an afternoon. It had been thirty seconds.

“And let’s not even
discuss
what’s happened to Seraphina,” Sesily said, unstrapping her birdcage hat from atop her head.

Sophie might have questioned the millinery if not for the pronouncement, and instead turned to her older sister, the only arrival who had remained silent. Seraphina stood by the large window, staring out at the estate beyond. “What’s happened with you?”

Sera waved a hand. “Nothing more than you already know.”

“Of course more!” their mother cried, standing once more. “The duke won’t even allow her in the house! He says that after
your
actions, he wants nothing to do with her or with any of us! And she’s to have his child!”

Sophie did not look away from her sister. “Is this true? Bollocks.”

“Sophie, language!”

Sera waved that hand again. “It’s not you, Sophie. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been something else.” She met Sophie’s gaze. “What of you? Are you well?”

“I am,” she lied. She might be heartbroken, but she was not exiled by her husband and increasing, so there was that, was there not?

Sera watched her for a long moment, seeing more than the others did. She always could see Sophie’s truth. “You mustn’t worry, Sophie. This is not on you.”

“It damn well is,” Sesily protested.

“Sesily,” their mother spoke up. “Language.”

“If ever there was a time to curse, Mother, it’s this!”
She turned on Sophie. “You certainly should worry about
the rest of us
. Derek won’t even speak to me! He says he requires the support of the aristocracy. And thanks to you, now he won’t get it.” She sighed. “He’ll never marry me.”

Sophie didn’t think a missed marriage to Derek Hawkins was such a trial, but she was attempting to be supportive.

“The same is true of Lord Clare—he hasn’t called in a week,” Seleste said, sounding quite desolate at the loss of her earl, reaching into her bosom to extract a well-folded square of paper. “We’ve resorted to love letters.” She paused. “It’s quite romantic, actually, assuming the situation will be rectified.”

“Consider the silver lining,” Seline teased. “It’s difficult for you to argue in print.”

Sesily snorted a laugh. “If anyone can find a way to argue in print, it’s Seleste and Clare.” She looked to their sister. “Have you ever gone more than twenty-four hours without an argument?”

“Of course,” Seleste said. “This week.”

Seline smirked. “And there is the proof. Perhaps you ought to avoid each other as a matter of course.”

“We can’t all have Landry scaling our trellises like weeds,” Seleste retorted.

Seline laughed at the mention of her paramour. “That’s Mark being careful,” she explained to Sophie, pouring scotch from a bottle on a nearby sideboard and passing the glasses around. “He won’t use the front door.”

“Why does he care what people think?” Sophie asked. Mark Landry had more money than most of London combined, and not an ounce of interest in Society. She would never have imagined he’d worry about reputation.

“Haven has power,” Sesily said, accepting the drink from Seline. “More than we would have imagined. And
he’s furious. The aristocracy is shunning Landry’s for Tattersall’s. They won’t buy horseflesh from anyone close to you. Presumably, Derek had similar threats, but unlike Landry, he’s a goddamn coward.”

“Sesily!” the countess barked.

“Well, he is,” Sesily said. “See if he gets back into my graces after this. What a betrayal.” She toasted Seline. “You should keep Mark, though. He’s a poppet.”

“I should like to,” Seline said before turning to Sophie, “but he’s waiting for you to fix it.”

“You must fix it!” their mother cried.

Sophie looked from one to the next. “How am I to do that?”

No one seemed to have an immediate answer.