Page 37 of My Lord Rogue
He stared at her, stunned. His hair dripped rain onto his forehead, and a single drop found its way down his nose and over his lips. It made him look wounded, almost childlike.
“You can’t what?” he asked, the words so soft they barely registered above the hiss of the rain.
She pressed her hands to her face, but the tears came through anyway, mixing with the water already on her skin.
“I can’t betray him,” she whispered. “Not for you. Not for anyone.”
Teddy’s face went blank, then hard. He stood, and for a moment they were nose to nose, two animals in a trap.
“He’s dead, Theo,” Teddy said, and there was no softness in his voice. “He’s dead and you’re using him like a shield. Is that what you want? To be a widow forever, to spend the rest of your life hiding behind a ghost?”
The words struck her like blows. She recoiled, her hands clutching at the locket and the ring at her throat.
“You don’t understand,” she said, her voice ragged.
He shook his head, and now the water ran freely down his cheeks, indistinguishable from tears. “I understand better than you think. I know what it is to lose someone. But I’m still here. I’m alive. And I want you—God help me, I want you more than my own life.”
There it was. The naked, brutal truth. The confession that made all other words seem cheap.
Theo sagged, her back finding the support of a cold, wet bench. The orchids loomed over her, obscene in their abundance, their petals shining with rain. She wanted to disappear into the earth, to let the plants claim her and grow up through her bones.
She looked up at him, and for the first time, she saw what it cost him to be vulnerable. To want and be denied, again and again. “I’m sorry,” she said. The words were hollow, but they were all she had.
He stared at her, his face a ruin. Then, without another word, he turned and strode to the door. He wrenched it open, and the storm rushed in—wind and rain and the sound of thunder, a chaos that threatened to swallow everything.
He vanished into the downpour. The door swung on its hinges, and for a moment the whole conservatory felt as if it might be torn from its foundations.
Theo collapsed, her head in her hands. The heat, the wet, the smell of bruised leaves and her own skin—they overwhelmed her, made her feel animal and raw.
She sobbed, not for Teddy, not even for Charles, but for herself. For the woman she had been, and the one she could never be.
She curled on the stone bench, the locket clutched in one fist, the wedding band digging into her palm.
Outside, the storm raged on. Inside, the glasshouse filled with the sound of her weeping, and the orchids—bloody, waxy, obscene—nodded in silent agreement.
The world was stripped down to its essentials, water, heat, flesh, and want. There was no comfort to be found, only the certainty that the future would hurt as much as the present.
Theo rocked herself, back and forth, until the worst of it passed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The first invitation came in envelope, as if she wasn’t already at Verity’s house. “You are cordially summoned to a Night of Masques and Misrule,” was penned in Verity’s spidery, delirious hand. She wrote that she had costumes at the ready, the most extravagant disguises, so no one could claim to be unprepared.
By the appointed hour, the St. Ervan ballroom had been transformed into a fever dream, the walls draped in tapestries of indigo and carmine, the floor polished to a mirror finish, and the very air spiked with the narcotic sweetness of night-blooming jasmine. Here, shadows pooled in the corners, waiting for confidences and betrayals, while the center of the room burned with lantern-light and the laughter of the ungoverned. Somewhere, a string quartet wrestled at the edge of audibility, bowing their instruments as if each note were a secret worth dying for.
Theo lingered inside the doorway, half-shrouded by a velvet curtain, her heart in open revolt. She was dressed, as Verity had provided, in the guise of a Greek goddess. The gown was a confection of ivory chiffon, its folds cascading from shoulderto floor in a series of deliberate accidents. The bodice clung indecently close, a single gilded rope cinching it at the waist and giving way to the suggestion of scandal with every movement. On her face, a delicate gold laurel mask hid her from the world, or so she told herself, in truth, it only seemed to heighten her every flaw, her every tremor.
Annie had arranged her hair in braids and ringlets that glimmered under the lanterns, and the pale column of her throat—so recently flushed with tears—now looked cold and smooth as marble. She had not worn jewelry, save for a pair of earrings that caught the light like droplets of frozen honey.
She would rather have died than walk into that room, but death was not on offer, only spectacle.
The first faces she recognized belonged to Lord and Lady Jennington, disguised as Antony and Cleopatra, their postures imperial and their voices thick with too much punch. A handful of men had gone as devils, their horns gilded, their eyes rimmed with kohl, the women were mostly queens and enchantresses, each competing for maximum drama in the minimum of fabric. Here and there, a mask of plain white, the traditional symbol of the untouched, but the blank faces only made the revelers beneath more desperate for attention.
Theo skirted the edge of the floor, careful not to brush too close to the clusters of laughter and rumor. She caught a flash of Verity at the far end—dressed as some pagan priestess, her arms painted with winding snakes and her hair crowned with a garland of narcissus. Verity’s eyes met Theo’s, and for a moment she saw not a hostess but a child plotting some spectacular mischief. Theo pressed onward, keeping to the shadows, feeling the pulse of the music through the soles of her slippers.
She did not look for Teddy. She told herself she did not care if he came, if he stayed locked in his rooms, if he drowned himself in the lake. But she knew—by the charged quiver in her chest, bythe way every burst of laughter sounded like a dare—that he was here somewhere, watching. She would feel him before she saw him, that was his way.
The first hour passed in a haze. She sipped a cordial from a glass shaped like a flower, and let the taste linger on her tongue, sharp and bitter. She allowed herself to be drawn into conversation with Lady Amelia, disguised as a peacock, the train of her feathers so prodigious it required a footman to steer it. They exchanged the usual barbed compliments and feigned surprise at each other’s daring, but every phrase was a move in a game they had played too often.