The Rogue Not Taken (7 page)

He should not care what this plain, unimportant girl thought of him.

He did not care.

Indeed, it was best if they went their separate ways, and never met again. He had a dying father to worry about. A future heaped with responsibilities he did not want. A past he’d hoped never to have to face. He should leave her here. Forget they’d ever met. And he would, just as soon as he had the last word. “You’re damn lucky I came after you, or you’d be walking south all night.”

She narrowed her gaze on him. “Oh, yes. You’ve been a glorious gift of good luck from the moment you nearly dropped a boot on my head.”

If he weren’t so furious, he might have found the words—spoken in a tone dry as sand—amusing. Instead, he raked one long look down her body, his gaze lingering on her feet. “You will wish that you had accepted my help when I was in the mood to offer it.”

“I wouldn’t accept your help if I were starving to death and you happened by with a cartful of tea and cakes.”

He turned on his heel then, leaving the damn woman alone on the damn road to her own damn devices. She wasn’t his problem. How many times did he have to remind himself of that? If she wanted to be left behind, he would leave her behind. With pleasure.

With no money.

With no clothes.

With no damn shoes.

He hesitated, hating himself as he did. Hating himself even more as he turned back to the ungrateful woman and, without pausing, said, “How are you getting there?”

“I imagine the ordinary way,” she replied, all calm. “Coach.”

“Then you’ve forgotten that you require funds to procure passage by coach?” She’d have to ask him for the money. And he’d give it to her. But not before he made her grovel.

Instead of surprise or disappointment, however, Lady Sophie Talbot smiled, teeth flashing white in the moonlight. “I require no such thing.”

The smile unsettled him. He blinked. “Six hours ago, you hadn’t a ha’penny to your name.”

She shrugged. “Things change.”

Dread whispered through him. “What did you do?”

“I might not be as tempting as my sisters, my lord,” she replied, and he did not miss the echo of his earlier insult. “But I make do.”

What in hell did that mean?

She lifted her chin in the direction of the posting inn. “Sleep well.”

He washed his hands of her then, leaving her for good, telling himself for one, final time that she was not his problem.

It was not until the following morning that King discovered just how much of a problem she was, when he exited the inn, frustrated and unrested, and headed past the half-dozen other racers, seeing to their curricles in preparation for the day’s race. His plan was simple: replace his broken wheel, hitch his horses, and hie north, away from this place, the night he had spent here, and the woman who had somehow worked her way under his skin like an unseen bramble.

When he opened the coach door, however, he did not find the pile of spare curricle wheels he’d expected. Instead, he found a wide, yawning, empty space. Every one of the wheels gone.

Dread pooling in his stomach, he turned back to find the Duke of Warnick across the yard, leaning against his own, pristine curricle, a wide grin on his face. “Missing something, Eversley?”

King narrowed his gaze on the Scot. “Where are they?”

The duke feigned ignorance. “Where are what?”

“You know what, you highland imbecile. What did you do with my wheels?”

“I believe you mean
my
wheels.” Warnick smiled. “I bought them.”

“That’s impossible, as I didn’t sell them.”

“That’s not what your footman said.” The duke paused. “Do we call her a footman? Or something else? Footwoman doesn’t seem right.” Another pause and a wicked smile. “Seems filthy, if you ask me.”

Goddammit.

“You don’t call her anything,” he said, fury rising in his throat. “Give me the wheels.”

The duke shook his head. “No. I paid for them. A pretty penny.”

“Enough to get her on the next mail coach out, I imagine.”

Warnick laughed. “Enough to get her on the next hundred mail coaches out. The woman drove a hard bargain.”

King shook his head. “They weren’t the lady’s to sell and you know it.”

“Lady, is she?” King felt a keen desire to hit something as the duke climbed into his curricle seat. “Either way, it seems as though it is your problem, Eversley. Not mine. I
exchanged coin for carriage wheels, and that is where the transaction begins and ends for me.”

“You can’t even use them,” King argued. “They are custom to my curricle.” Every inch of the damn carriage was made to his exact specifications. Warnick couldn’t do a thing with the wheels without the whole vehicle.

“That’s incidental, really. Indeed, we’ll call it money well spent to keep you out of the race,” Warnick replied before turning to look at the other riders. “All right, lads?”

A chorus of approval sounded.

“You aren’t seriously going to leave me here without wheels.”

“Oh, but I am,” The duke nodded and gathered his reins. “You’ve a lovely coach that will get you to the next posting inn.”

Dread pooled in King’s stomach at the words. At the thought of the dark, cavernous coach. He blustered. “You’re afraid I’ll win again. That’s why you refuse to help me.”

Warnick shrugged one large shoulder. “No one ever said we were required to play fair.” And with a mighty “Hyah!” he was in motion, leaving the posting inn like a shot, a half-dozen other racers following him, leaving King in a cloud of dust. With nothing but a broken-down curricle, an empty carriage, and a seething desire for revenge.

Turning on one heel, King went looking for his coachman.

As it turned out, he was not through with Lady Sophie Talbot.

M
ail coaches were decidedly uncomfortable.

Sophie shifted in her seat, doing her best to avoid eye contact with the legions of others piled around her in the once massive, now all-too-small conveyance. Unfortunately, there was very little room to shift, and even less to avoid eye contact.

The space was filled with women and children, none of whom seemed particularly interested in making conversation, despite the close quarters. Sophie met the gaze of a young woman across the small space between the benches of the coach. The woman looked down at her lap instantly.

“Oi!” a boy cried out as Sophie accidentally elbowed him, extracting a watch from the inside pocket of her livery.

“I do apologize,” she said.

He blinked up at her, then down at her watch. “Wot’s that?”

She looked down at him, surprised. “It’s a timepiece.”

“Wot’s it for?”

She wasn’t quite certain how to answer. “To tell the time?”

“Why?” This was from a small girl on the floor by Sophie’s feet. She craned to look at the watch face.

“To know how long it’s been since we left.”

“Why?”

Sophie returned her attention to the boy. “To know how close we are to our destination.”

The girl on the floor looked perplexed. “But won’t we get there when we get there?”

“Aye,” the boy said, crossing his arms and leaning back in his seat. “Seems a waste of time to think about how long it will take.”

Sophie had never met two more fatalistic children in her life.

Though, she had to admit, she wasn’t exactly telling the truth. She wasn’t simply curious about when they might arrive at the next stop along the mail coach’s route—she was calculating the distance between her and the Marquess of Eversley, who would no doubt be furious when he discovered that she’d sold his carriage wheels for coach fare north.

She highly doubted that he would believe that he deserved it.

Nor would he care that it was not theft, per se. She fully intended to pay him back.

But she had to get north, first.

North.

The decision had been made in the dead of the previous night, as she’d tried to sleep in the too-bright hayloft, beneath old newsprint that had been left for a makeshift blanket. Unable to find slumber, she’d sat up to find that the newspaper was a scandal sheet from several months earlier.
D
ANGEROUS
D
AUGHTER
D
ISCOVERED WITH
D
RURY’S
D
EREK
shouted one headline, the story recounting a particularly scandalous moment in which Sesily was
speculated to have been in the rafters at Derek Hawkins’s theater.
S
ESILY
S
ECRETLY
S
CANDALIZING
S
TAR OF THE
S
TAGE?
questioned a second story. As though there were enough to say about the afternoon.

Which there wasn’t.

Sesily had been doing nothing scandalous that day. Sophie knew it, because she had been there as chaperone, listening to Derek Hawkins’s endless droning about his unparalleled talent, alternating between declaring himself “the greatest artist of our time” and “a genius for the ages.” At one point, the awful man had actually suggested he might be well considered for the role of Prime Minister. And he’d been serious.

The most brazen thing Sesily had done was to ask if Hawkins considered her his muse. To which he’d replied that he was beyond need of a muse; indeed, his muse came from within. He was his own odious, insufferable muse.

If there had been scandal that afternoon, Sophie might have found the whole experience more palatable.

But the gossip columns didn’t care for truth. They cared for
T
ALBOT
T
ATTLING,
as the papers referred to the headlines about her sisters. And her sisters adored it. She recalled Sesily reading this particular article aloud.

Sophie, however, did not adore it. Instead, she had crumpled the paper with fervor and considered the options that lay before her. Not options. Option. Singular. Because the truth was that women in Britain in 1833 did not have options. They had the path upon which they tread. Upon which they were forced to tread. Upon which they were made to feel grateful they were forced to tread.

There she had stood in the pebbled drive of the Fox and Falcon, watching the Marquess of Eversley, portrait of superciliousness, march away from her, somehow impeccable even while missing a boot. And that man—a
man so arrogant he called himself King—had made her decision for her.

She wasn’t returning to that path. She was forging her own.

North.

To the place where she had never been judged, where she had lived far from the threat of insult or injury or ruination. To the place she’d been allowed to be herself, not the plainest, least interesting,
unfun
Talbot sister, but simply Sophie, a little girl with dreams of being the proprietress of a bookshop.

She’d live out her days far from the glitter and gossip of London’s ballrooms, far from the scandal sheets, far from the aristocracy. And she would do so happily. Without men like the odious Marquess of Eversley setting the standard of right and proper.

She’d apprise her family of the decision and settle in Cumbria. Happily. Her father would send her funds and she’d begin her life, free from Society.

Happily.

She leaned back against a particularly uncomfortable case, the corner of which gouged into the back of her neck. Not that she cared. She was too busy imagining this new, fresh life. Away from the cold, uncaring eyes of Society.

She’d rent the rooms above one of the shops on the high road in Mossband. They would remember her there—they’d welcome her home. The haberdasher, the butcher, the baker. She wondered if Mr. and Mrs. Lander were still at the bakery—he with his wide smile and she with her wide hips—and if they still made breakfast buns laden with cinnamon and honey.

She wondered if Robbie was still there.

The baker’s son had been long and lean, with a win
ning smile and a teasing gleam in his eye. He’d been two years older than she, and her playmate in the afternoons, when he’d stolen away from the bakery with one of those buns, sticky and sweet, and they’d licked sugar from their fingers and whiled away the hours until supper with plans for the future.

They would marry, Robbie had promised her when they were too young to understand the meaning in the word. One day, he would be the Mossband baker, and she the woman who ran the bookshop. And they would rise before the sun and work a full, happy day, the smell of those buns clinging to hair and clothes and books.

It had taken Sophie no time to decide that without the yoke of London and the
ton
, she would have that bookshop. Her father would send her funds, and she would make Mossband the most lettered town in the North Country. There wasn’t a bookshop for miles—books had arrived by post from London when she was a child, or had been purchased in bulk when her father traveled to Newcastle to negotiate coal prices. He’d always remembered “his girlies,” as he liked to refer to his daughters, and he’d returned with gifts for them all—hair ribbons for Seraphina, elaborate clothes for Seleste’s dolls, silk threads in every possible color for Sesily, sweets for Seline. But for Sophie, it was books.

Her father wasn’t a reader—he’d never learned how, despite having an uncanny head for numbers—so the crate of books he brought home with him was always eclectic: texts on animal husbandry, economic dissertations, travelogues, hunting manuals, four separate versions of the Book of Common Prayer. Once, he’d come home with an obscure collection of etchings from India that her governess had promptly snatched away and never returned.

To any other young girl, her father’s boxes would have been boring. But to Sophie, they’d been magic. The books had been leather-bound adventures, pages and pages of distant worlds and remarkable people and learning. And simple, unadulterated happiness. They’d piled up in her bedchamber, first on shelves, and then on the floor, and then, finally, in the armoires her mother had installed so the books could be hidden. But the book shipments had never stopped, so Sophie had always imagined that her mother hadn’t minded her opinions so very much. Until the Liverpool summer soiree, when her mother had been horrified by her opinions. Just as the rest of London had been.

Cold memory pooled inside her—London’s most powerful members simply turning their backs on her, as though she didn’t exist. Exiling her. Worse. Disappearing her.

She couldn’t go back; so she would go forward. And she would forge her own future by returning to the dearest memories of her past.

And if Robbie was still there, perhaps he’d make good on that long-ago promise. Perhaps he’d marry her. An ache began in her chest at the thought—at the idea of being married. Of being loved. Robbie had had a lovely smile. And he’d always listened when she told him about her books and her ideas.

If they married—well, there were worse things than marrying an old friend.

And if they didn’t—she’d have her bookshop. And there were much worse things than that.

She opened her eyes, meeting the gaze of the young mother in the seat opposite. Instead of looking away in embarrassment this time, however, the young woman tilted her head slightly, revealing her curiosity. The
woman’s gaze slid down Sophie’s face and throat, stilling on the place where her coat buttons strained against her breasts, and Sophie couldn’t help but look down as well, following the perusal.

Discovering the button that had come undone, revealing a white chambray shirt and a swell that was decidedly unfootmanlike.

Sophie snatched the coat together, fastening the button once more, and met the woman’s eyes again. She nodded in the direction of Sophie’s cap. “You’re coming loose.”

Sophie reached up to find a long brown curl escaped from its moorings.

Sophie opened her mouth to explain, then closed it when she could not find the words. She shrugged.

The woman smiled, let in on her secret, then leaned forward to whisper, “I wondered why a fancy servant was riding by mail.”

It hadn’t occurred to her that the livery might draw attention to her in this world, when it made her so invisible in the world from which she’d come. “I suppose it’s obvious that I’m not a servant.”

“Only to someone who is looking. Most people don’t look,” the young woman said, before looking at the boy on the seat next to Sophie. “Give it back, John.”

Sophie looked down at the boy, who was grinning up at her, dangling her watch from his fingers. “I weren’t really going to take it.”

“No one knew that,” the woman said. “And you promised no more pocketing.”

“Yer not my mum, you know.”

The woman scowled at him. “Just the closest thing you’ve got to one.”

The boy returned the watch.

“Thank you,” Sophie said, belatedly realizing that she
really shouldn’t be grateful for the return of her rightful possession.

“You’re welcome,” John responded with a smile before leaning forward and adding, “If I were going to steal something, I’d vie for your satchel.”

Sophie reached down and lifted the satchel between her feet to her lap. “Thank you for the warning.”

John tipped his cap.

The woman across the coach pushed one of her curls back behind her ear and laughed, the sound short and barely there, reminding Sophie that there wasn’t much humor to be had in a crowded mail coach. Meeting Sophie’s gaze, the other woman said, “I’m called Mary.” She extended her chin at the girl on the floor. “That’s Bess.” Bess smiled, and Mary indicated the boy. “And you’ve met John.”

Sophie nodded and opened her mouth to introduce herself before the other woman raised a hand and said, “And you’re a fancy servant.”

It was a reminder that to the rest of the coach, she looked the part of a footman. Sophie nodded. “Matthew,” she said, with a silent apology to the footman whose identity she was quietly appropriating.

Mary leaned back against her seat. “Pleased to meet you.”

Smell and crowd aside, the mail coach was not so bad as she’d imagined.
Perhaps things would go smoothly, after all.

The moment the thought floated through her mind, the carriage began to slow. The girl at her feet sat up. “We’re there!”

“You don’t even know where ‘there’ is,” John snapped.

She scowled. “I know that if we’re stopping, we must be
somewhere
,” the girl said smartly.

“Shush, both of you,” Mary whispered, craning to look over the two sleeping women obstructing the view out the carriage window. Sophie followed her gaze, the trees at the edge of the road coming to a stop. “We’re nowhere.”