Page 10 of My Lord Rogue
I am undone.
She stopped, staring at the words. Her hand trembled, a fine tremor, but visible enough that a drop of ink spilled, spreading like a bruise against the page.
Tonight he looked at me. Not as a man looks at a woman, not even as a hunter at prey, but as if I were a challenge he meant to break and remake in his own shape. I am terrified.
Beneath the terror, a tiny coil of exhilaration uncurled itself, spreading a blush from her throat to her cheeks. She wrote quickly, as if to outrun her own shame,
What have I done, to conjure a ghost and give it the face of a man so alive, so intractable? I could not have foreseen this—how could I? But now he is here, flesh and laughter and the relentless heat of his eyes, and I?—
The pen faltered. She flexed her fingers, massaged the cramp from her knuckles. The air had grown thick with candlewax and the acrid tang of ink.
She looked at the locket, glinting in the candlelight. Guilt pinched her, a physical ache behind her ribs. How many times had she whispered to Charles’s memory that she would never, could never, love another? How many nights had she lain awake, twisting the ring on her finger, promising fidelity to a man who could never hear her?
She returned to the page, forcing herself onward.
Is it betrayal, if the heart refuses to forget? If even in the presence of another, it is still the lost one who lingers in every breath? But the world demands so much of a widow—cheerfulness, fortitude, even the grace to pretend at moving on. I lied because it was easier than suffering their pity, and now the lie walks the earth, haunting me with every sly remark and every stolen glance.
She pressed her palm to her chest, the absence of the locket a raw, unfamiliar patch of skin.
He is so very real. More real than I am, sometimes.
She heard it then—the faint, unmistakable surge of laughter, far away but rising up through the floorboards, as if the entire house were a stage and she its only off-script player. Downstairs, the guests were still drinking, still telling stories, still living as if nothing in the world could trouble them but the lateness of the hour. Up here, she floated in a silence so complete it might never break.
She dated her entry, tore out and folded the sheet, and slipped it into the pocket sewn inside the journal’s cover. It was feeble protection. Anyone with a mind to look could find it, could read all her secrets in the black slope of her hand. Yet, the act of hiding it felt essential, an ultimate act of control in a world that had shifted beneath her feet.
Theo blew out the candle, plunging the room back into its natural blue shadows. With the ease of long habit, she lifted the locket to its place at her throat, then hesitated. If she were truly a woman falling for a new man, she wouldn’t be wearing another man’s image at her throat.
Her hands shook as she tugged open the strings of the bag that contained her jewelry. For some reason, letting go of the locket was even more difficult than leaving behind her wedding ring.
I’m sorry, Charles.
The necklace settled in the pile with a small chink, and she quickly tugged the strings to close the bag.
Crossing to the window, Theo pressed her forehead to the glass, and watched the moonlit gardens below. Somewhere out of sight, an owl cried once, twice, then fell silent.
She stood that way for a long time, unmoving, letting the cold seep through the pane and into her bones. She watched for signs of life in the darkness—a fox crossing the path, or the tremor of a branch in the wind—but the world outside remained as still as the secrets she held inside her own chest.
Josiah pouredhimself a third measure of brandy, the viscous amber running slow as honey into the heavy cut-glass tumbler. He stood with one hip braced against the footboard in his bedchamber, the other hand working at the knot of his cravat, methodically loosening it until the starched linen fell away from his throat. The relief was immediate. He tossed the cravat onto the nearest chair and shrugged out of his coat, casting it after with a twist of the wrist. The fire on the hearth spat and hissed, but the room was dominated by the scent of old books,leather, and the faint trace of tobacco from the cheroot he had abandoned earlier.
It was not a bad room—certainly not by the standards of English country hospitality—but the place bore the unmistakable mark of a guest rather than a master. The sheets on the bed were already in disarray, rumpled by his habit of reading late into the night.
He sipped. Let the brandy burn a slow, deliberate line from his lips to his belly.
Lady Pattishall.
He rolled the name in his mind, not tasting it so much as measuring its weight. Theodosia, Charles’s widow. It had been years since he’d thought of Charles—a stolid, faintly insufferable man with more virtue than imagination—but the memory of their university days flickered in fits and starts. Late-night arguments about the French Revolution, Charles’s baffled, almost pained reaction to the stories Josiah would tell of women he’d met in various candlelit corners of Europe.
He had never expected Charles’s bride to be anything but a mirror of the man himself, dull, pious, utterly without intrigue. But tonight at supper, the shock in her eyes—no, not shock, something more volatile—had nearly undone him. For a moment, he’d glimpsed her core, a hunger so pure it threatened to consume her.
He smiled, unguarded and wolfish. It was a rare thing to encounter a woman who wore her secrets on the surface and still kept them veiled.
He let the brandy settle and thought about the supper in detail. She had played her part well, the downcast lashes, the precise modulation of her tone, the impeccable self-control. But beneath all that, she was trembling, alive in a way none of the painted, lacquered ladies at the table could ever hope to be. It was not just the lie that excited him—though the lie was, in itself,a small work of genius—but the audacity required to pull it off. To invent a suitor, to draft his history and quirks, and then to walk into the world as if he were real.
Josiah admired the audacity.
He drank, holding the liquid in his mouth for a moment before swallowing. He closed his eyes, and in the dark behind his lids, he reconstructed the evening.
The way she’d entered the drawing room, gaze darting from corner to corner, as if searching for an escape route. The tension in her neck when he’d addressed her for the first time, the slight but unmistakable shudder in her shoulders. The flush that spread up her chest when he had invoked their “old favorites” for the table’s amusement.