The Rogue Not Taken (5 page)

Sophie couldn’t help her little huff of indignation. Of course, Marcella was criticized for her actions as the marquess was lauded by his brawny, boorish brethren.

Eversley cut her a look at the sound. “I hope my boot is inside that carriage.”

She resisted the urge to tell him precisely what he could do with the boot in question, instead playing the perfect servant. “Unfortunately not, my lord.”

He raised a brow. “No?”

She wished she could meet his gaze. Granted, his brilliant green eyes were unsettling in the extreme, but at least if she could see them, she would be able to glean something of his thoughts on the situation. Instead, she soldiered on, lifting her chin, and he noted the defiance in the gesture. “No.”

He lowered his voice. “Where is it, then?”

She lowered her voice to match his. “I imagine it is where I left it. In the Liverpool hedge.”

She rather enjoyed the way his throat worked in the moment of silence following her announcement. “You left my Hessian in a hedge.”

“You left
me
in a hedge,” she pointed out.

“I had no use for you.”

“Well, I had no use for your boot.”

He considered her for a long moment, and changed the topic. “You look ridiculous.”

Of course she did. She lifted one shoulder, let it drop. “It’s
your
livery.”

“It’s for a footman! Not some spoiled girl looking for a lark.”

Anger flared at the words. “You know nothing about me. I am not spoiled. And it was not a lark.”

“Oh? I suppose you have a perfectly reasonable explanation for why you stole my footman’s livery and stowed away in my carriage.”

“I do, as a matter of fact. And I was not in your carriage. I was on it.”

“Along with my blind coachman, it seems. Why were you up there?”

She smirked. “Footmen don’t ride inside carriages, my lord. And even if they did, the carriage in question is filled with wheels. Why is that?”

“In case I need a replacement,” he said without hesitation. “Where is my footman, anyway? Did you knock him unconscious and leave him naked in the hedge alongside my boot?”

“Of course I didn’t. Matthew is perfectly well.”

“Is he wearing your dress?”

She blushed. “No. He bought a set of clothes from one of the Liverpool stableboys.”

He did not pause in his questions. “And you? Did you strip in front of all London?”

“Of course not!” She was growing indignant. “I’m not mad.”

“Oh, no,” he said, “Of course not.”

“I’m not!” she insisted, hissing the words so as not to draw attention to them. “I changed clothes in my family’s carriage. And I paid Matthew for his livery before sending him to my father for another position.”

He stilled. “You stole my footman.”

“It wasn’t stealing.”

“I had a footman this morning. And now I don’t have one. How is that not stealing?”

“It was not stealing,” she insisted. “It’s not as though you owned him.”

“I paid him!”

“It seems I paid him better.”

He went quiet, and she could see the frustration in his gaze before he offered a single, perfunctory nod and said, “Fair enough.”

He turned away.

Well. That was unexpected. And not at all ideal, as she had no money, and he was the only person in the place who might be inclined to help her get home, assuming it meant that she was gone from his life.

She ignored the fact that stowing away on his carriage might have worked against her.

Sophie sighed. He was insufferable, but she was intelligent enough to know when she needed someone. “Wait!” she called, drawing the attention of the coachman and several of his companions from earlier in the evening, but not the man in question.

He was ignoring her. Deliberately.

She scurried after him, ignoring the pain of the gravel on her slippered feet. “My lord,” she called, all nervousness. “There is one more thing.” He stopped and turned to face her. She drew close to him, suddenly keenly aware of his height, of the way her forehead aligned with his firm, straight, unyielding lips.

“It doesn’t fit you.”

She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“The livery. It’s too tight.”

First he described her as unfun and now as plump. She knew it of course, but he didn’t have to point out the
fact that she wasn’t the most lithe of women. She swallowed around the tightness in her throat and brazened on. “Excuse me, Lord Perfection, I did not have time to visit a modiste on the way.” He did not apologize for his rudeness—not that she was surprised—but neither did he leave, so she pressed on. “I require conveyance home.”

“Yes, you said as much this afternoon.”

When he’d refused to help and landed her in this mess.

He wasn’t alone in landing you in this mess.
She ignored the thought. “Yes, well, it remains the case.”

“And, as was the case this afternoon, it is not my problem.”

The words surprised her. “But . . .” She trailed off, not quite knowing what to say. “But I . . .”

He did not wait for her to find words. “You’ve stolen my boot and my footman in what I can only assume is a misguided attempt to gain my attention and my title, if the former actions of your family are any indication. I’m sure you’ll understand if I am less than amenable to providing you aid.” He paused, and when she did not speak, he added, “To put it plainly, you may be a
colossal
problem, Lady Sophie, but you are not
my
problem.”

The words stung quite harshly, and the way he turned his back on her, as though she were nothing, worth nothing—not even thought—delivered an unexpected blow, harsher than it might have been on another day, when all of Society and her family hadn’t turned their backs upon her in a similar fashion.

A memory flashed of the events of the afternoon, the aristocracy, en masse, disowning her, choosing their precious duke over the truth. Over the right.

Tears came, unbidden. Unwelcome.

She would not cry.

She sucked in a breath to keep them at bay.

Not in front of him.

They stung at the bridge of her nose, and she sniffed, all unladylike.

He turned back sharply. “If you are attempting to prey upon my kindness, don’t. I haven’t much of it.”

“Do not worry,” she replied. “I would never dream of thinking you kind.”

He watched her for a long, silent moment before the coachman spoke from above, where he was disconnecting the reins from the driving block. “My lord, is the boy bothering you?”

The marquess did not take his eyes from her. “He is, rather.”

The other man scowled at her. “Get to the stables and find the horses some food and water. That should be something you cannot muck up.”

“I—”

Eversley interrupted her. “I should do as John Coachman says,” he cut her off. “You don’t want to suffer his wrath.”

Her wide eyes flickered from one man to the other.

“After you’re done with that, find your bed, boy,” the coachman said. “Perhaps a good sleep will return the brain to your head.”

“My bed,” she repeated, looking to the marquess, hating the way his lips twitched.

“They’ve space in the hayloft.” The coachman’s exasperation was unmistakable as he spoke to her—as though she were an imbecile—before returning to his four-legged charges, leaping down and unhitching them to bring them to the stables, leaving Sophie and Eversley in the center of the quickly emptying courtyard.

“The hayloft sounds quite cozy,” the marquess said.

Sophie wondered if the marquess would find a blow to the side of his head cozy, but she refrained from asking.

“So cozy,” he continued, “that I think I shall find my own bed. It seems that one of my feet is quite cold. I should like to go in and warm it up by the fire.”

Her feet were also cold and aching. Silk slippers were not designed for coach-top rides through Britain or the work of footmen, after all. She thought of the warm fire that was no doubt burning inside the inn.

She wasn’t certain what would be in the hayloft, but if she had to imagine, she’d say hay . . . and that meant there wouldn’t be a warm fire there.

She could reveal herself. Now was the time. She could take off her hat and point out her own ridiculous footwear. She could announce herself Lady Sophie Talbot, rely upon the kindness of one of the other men who had barreled into the Fox and Falcon atop their strange-looking curricles, and beg for conveyance home.

Eversley seemed to understand her intentions even before they were fully formed. “An excellent idea. Saddle yourself to another. Warnick is a duke.”

She did not pretend to misunderstand. “I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man in Christendom.”

“You only say that because I’ve thwarted your idiot plan.”

“This was never my plan.”

“Of course not, why would I think it from a Dangerous Daughter?” he scoffed, and she hated him then. Hated him for invoking the ridiculous moniker. For being just like all the others. For believing that she wanted the life into which she’d been thrust.

For believing that life worth something. Worth more than the life she’d been born into. For refusing to see—just as the rest of London refused to see—that Sophie was
different. And that she had been perfectly happy before. Before titles and town houses and teas and trappings of the
ton
.

Before those trappings had trapped her.

She swallowed back her frustration. “I thought you were heading to Mayfair,” she said, hating the smallness in her voice.

He pointed to the road without hesitation. “Thirty miles to the south. Perhaps you’ll be lucky and a mail coach will happen by.”

The words reminded her of her current circumstances. “I haven’t any money for a mail coach.”

“It is unfortunate, then, that you gave it all to my footman.”

“Not unfortunate for the boy, I imagine,” she replied, unable to keep the tartness from her voice. “After all, I saved him from having to serve you for the rest of his days.”

He smirked. “It looks like you’ve quite a walk ahead of you, then. If you start now, you’ll be there by tomorrow evening.”

He was horrible. Not that she’d been the most genteel of characters, but still. He was worse. “What they say about you is right.”

“Which part?”

“You are no gentleman.”

His gaze raked down her body, taking in her ill-fitting, too-tight livery, reminding her with every lingering inch that she’d made a terrible mistake. “Forgive me, love, but you don’t seem much a lady tonight.”

And he disappeared into the inn, leaving her considering her next action—the stables, or the road.

The frying pan, or the fire.

S
everal hours later, after the inn had gone dark and quiet, Kingscote, Marquess of Eversley, future Duke of Lyne, notorious rogue who took great pride in his reputation as a scoundrel, lay in bed, awake.

Awake, and very, very irritated.

She’d ruined his win.

And of all the things in the world that King enjoyed, there was nothing he enjoyed so very much as winning. It did not matter what he won—women, fights, road races, cards. It mattered only that the win was his.

It was not a simple thing, King’s relationship with victory. It was not for mere pleasure, though many thought it such. It had little to do with diversion, or recreation. Where other men enjoyed winning, King required it. The thrill of victory was as essential as food and air to him. In victory, he was most free.

In the win, he forgot what he had lost.

And he had won the curricle race, roundly beating the half-dozen other men, each a better driver than the next, careening up the Great North Road with breathless speed,
horses tearing up the hard pack of the road, exhilaration and thrill coursing through him, clearing his mind of this northward journey’s purpose. Of what would greet him when he reached his final destination.

Of the past.

The win had been hard-fought. The other men had driven with impressive skill, threatening his victory, teasing him with the possibility of loss. But King had won, and it had been sweet and deeply satisfying. It was the taste of freedom, elusive and fleeting.

As he’d caught his breath high atop the curricle that would require new wheels before he started again the next day, he had experienced the keen pleasure of knowing that he’d sleep well that evening, before the light of day reminded him of truth and duty.

Except he did not get the evening.

He did not even get the hour.

Because the first thing he’d seen after coming to a stop in the drive of the Fox and Falcon was Lady Sophie Talbot, pressed up against his coach, looking ridiculous in Eversley livery.

And, like that, she’d ruined his win.

At first, he told himself it couldn’t be. After all, of all the outrageously foolish things he’d seen women do in his life, this one had to be the most foolish. But he knew better. He knew how desperate girls could get. The lengths to which they would go for what they wanted.

He knew it better than anyone.

So, of course, it was she. Lady Sophie, youngest of the Soiled S’s, to whom he had expressly refused conveyance, had refused to leave well enough alone.

And she’d stowed away.

As she was dressed as a footman, he imagined that she
had not ridden inside the carriage, where she would have been safest. Instead, she’d likely ridden atop the vehicle, next to the driver. Christ. She could have fallen off.

She could have been killed, and it would have been on his head.

He closed his eyes, and an image flashed, a girl, broken and lifeless, flaxen hair spread out in a halo against the packed dirt of the road.

Except, it wasn’t Sophie Talbot he saw lifeless and broken. It was another girl, another time.

He cursed, low and dark in the quiet room, and threw the heavy duvet back, coming to his feet and crossing the room to find something to drink, to push the memory away. He poured his scotch, ignoring the tremor in his hands, and drank deep, turning to the window, looking down at the inn’s courtyard, empty.

Unlike earlier, when he’d found his footman missing and Sophie Talbot in his place, eyes wide, shocked that he’d recognized her. He’d have to be dead not to recognize her.

Christ. How had no one else recognized her?

And where had she gone?

He didn’t care. Sophie Talbot wasn’t his problem. He’d told her as much.

And she’d cried.

He ignored the thought. The way the tears had somehow made the blue of her eyes, lined with those thick, sooty lashes, even more blue in the yellow lantern light outside the inn. She’d done it to manipulate him. After all, wasn’t that what the Talbot sisters did? Trap unsuspecting aristocrats into marriage?

It had made a duchess of the eldest, why not a future duchess of the youngest?

Well, she had chosen the wrong mark.

She’d landed herself here, buying off a footman, surviving the carriage ride. Sophie Talbot was no simpering wallflower, whatever her reputation. He knew little about the girl—only that she was the most serious of the five Talbot sisters—not a difficult task considering the tittering vanity and disdain for propriety that marked the others in the family.

Her actions did not bear out her seriousness, however. Indeed, they made her seem positively foolish.

Well. She might be a fool, but he wasn’t.

He wasn’t getting anywhere near her.

She wasn’t his problem.

She’d found her way here; she could find her way home.

He had other things to worry about. Like finding his way back to Cumbria before his father made good on his promise and died. King drank again, unable to wrap his head around the idea of his father dying. Dying was for creatures with beating hearts, after all, and the Duke of Lyne was too stern and unmoving to have blood in his veins. Surely.

     
Come quickly. Your father ails.

A simple missive, in the neat script of Agnes Graycote, housekeeper of Lyne Castle since King was a child. The woman had served the duke for decades without hesitation. She’d stayed on after King left, after the duke had stopped traveling to London, after he’d given up his attempts to reconcile with King.

As though reconciliation might ever be possible. As though he hadn’t ruined King’s life with his bitter aristocratic pride. As though King hadn’t replied to every request for audience with the same five words—the only honest punishment he could mete out.

King almost hadn’t heeded Agnes’s call.

Almost.

But here he was, at an inn on the Great North Road, thirty miles from London, headed to the Scottish border, to look his dying father in the eye and say the words aloud.

The line ends with me.

He cursed again in the darkness before finishing the scotch, setting the glass on the windowsill and returning to bed, closing his eyes and willing himself to sleep. Instead of heavy slumber; however, King found the cacophony of his mind. He resisted thoughts of his childhood and his father, knowing that they would take him down a dark path he had no interest in exploring, and instead turned to a safer memory. The day. The race. His win. And the ruination of that win.

No.

He tried not to think of her. Of her request earlier in the day, of her appearance. Of the way she filled out the livery in all the wrong ways—trousers too tight, the buttons on her jacket pulling tight across her ample breasts, and the lovely swell of her midriff. Christ. She was still wearing silk slippers.

His footman’s boots hadn’t been included in his price, clearly.

He rolled to his back, one large hand coming to rest on his bare chest. Why hadn’t she been wearing proper footwear? And how was it that his coachman hadn’t noticed the ridiculous yellow slippers?

His coachman was a fool as well, obviously.

Not that King cared about the improper footwear. Indeed, she deserved that, didn’t she? She was the one who had left him with only one boot.

Her feet must hurt.

Her feet, like the woman herself, were not his problem.

Neither was the bed where she slept.

Not his problem.

If
she was sleeping. In a hayloft. Surrounded by all manner of men, at least some of who would notice immediately that their companion was decidedly not a man.

If
the men
were sleeping.

Emotion threaded through him, sharp and unwelcome.

Guilt. Fear.
Panic.

“Goddammit.” He came to his feet, reaching for his leather breeches before the echo of the curse disappeared from the room.

She might not be his problem, but he couldn’t stand by and allow her to suffer God knew what at the hands of God knew whom. He pulled his shirt on, leaving the hem untucked and the laces untied as he tore open the door to the chamber and went searching for the girl.

The inn was quiet, kitchens dark, taps dry, fires in the main room banked. His gaze fell on a clock at the far end of the room. Two in the morning—an hour that brought nothing but trouble for those awake to witness it.

He exited the inn, the eerie silence of the English countryside at night unsettling him as he made his way to the nearby stables, imagining all the ways the hour could be bringing trouble down upon Sophie Talbot.

He entered the building at a near run when he heard the men. A half dozen of them, if the myriad voices were any indication, laughter and shouting and jeers—he stopped just beyond a fall of golden light, listening, attempting to get his bearings and make out the words.

As though the universe knew just what he was listening for, he heard her first, the words clear and curious over the cacophony of sound. “I just, take it down?”

King went utterly still as a man replied. “Exactly.”

“It doesn’t look like it would taste very good.”

Christ.

“You’d be surprised,” the man coaxed. “Take all of it. All at once. You’ll like it.”

“If you say so,” she said, and the skepticism in her voice was drowned out by a chorus of raucous cheers that set King in motion, no longer caring that one-on-six were terrible odds, particularly when the six in question were drunk and sex-starved.

“Step away from the lady,” he instructed, all menacing, as he stepped into the main room of the stables, shocking the hell out of not only the group of drunk but hardly nefarious-looking men sitting at a table at the center of the long corridor between the stalls, but also the lady in question, who was still wearing her livery.

At least, he assumed it was shock that made her choke on the pint of ale she was in the process of drinking in one long series of gulps. She pulled the mug from her lips, sloshing ale down her front as she set it to the table with enough force to knock it over and spill the rest of the drink across the tabletop, where piles of playing cards were spread out, as though a round of faro had just been finished.

She stood quickly, two other men shooting out of their chairs to avoid the liquid as a small glass rolled out of the mug and fell off the table, miraculously not breaking as it continued on its journey along the boards of the stable floor to stop, quite theatrically, at King’s foot.

He looked up from the glass, her earlier words echoing through him.
It doesn’t seem like it would taste very good.

They’d been teaching her how to drink—a shot of whiskey in a mug of ale—the drink of men who wished to sleep well, and quickly.

It hadn’t been the other thing at all.

King cleared his throat.

“I’m sure we didn’t hear you correctly, King,” the Duke of Warnick rumbled in his Scottish brogue. “I could have sworn you called the boy a lady.”

Of course Warnick was in the stables. The man had spent a lifetime away from polite company. If ever there were someone for whom a title was a burden, it was the duke. But, disdainful of Society or no, a duke was not the ideal witness of Lady Sophie’s mad disguise and misguided plan.

Why in hell hadn’t she found her bed as soon as she realized the duke was in the stables?

Sophie’s gaze snapped to his, cheeks already flush from her alcoholic experience turning red with obvious embarrassment. He could read the pleading in her wide blue eyes and ignored it. He’d had enough of this woman and her trouble. He wanted her far, far away from him. “You didn’t mishear. She’s a woman. Anyone with eyes can see it.”

From the jaws gaping around the table, it seemed that anyone with eyes could not, in fact, see such a thing.

But they heard it, he had no doubt, when she opened her mouth and tore into him. “How could you?” she said, frustration edging into fury as her hands fisted at her sides and she faced him, stiff as a board. “You’ve ruined everything!”

“
I’ve
ruined everything?” he repeated, more than a bit outraged himself. “You’re the one who thought you could get away with this idiocy.”

“Wait. He’s a girl?” one of the other men at the table asked.

“Good that you’re catching up,” the duke drawled, all amusement.

“But he’s wearing livery,” the drunken man insisted.

“Indeed he is,” Warnick said with a lingering inspection. “However, now that I take a good long look . . .”

“Enough!” Sophie cried, lifting a burlap bag from the floor, slinging it over her shoulder, and storming past King to the exit.

King turned to the duke. “No more long looks.”