Page 44 of My Lord Rogue
Verity looked at her with a new gravity. “He does not hate you. No man who looks at you like that could.”
“I’ve been unkind,” Theo said, “and I’ve lied to him. To everyone.”
Verity cocked an eyebrow. “Do tell.”
Theo tried to smile, failed. “I invented the baron months ago as a shield. So people would stop pressing me to remarry. So I could just—breathe.”
Verity’s eyes widened, then she burst out laughing. “That’s the most Theo thing I’ve ever heard. And then he showed up?”
“Yes. In person. And he agreed to go along with it, just until the house party ended. But last night he—” She broke off, the tears threatening again. “Last night, he made it clear that the charade is no longer a charade for him.”
Verity was silent for a long moment, weighing the words. “Did you want it to be a charade?”
Theo’s throat hurt. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think I want nothing more than to disappear into the past. Sometimes I think—” She pressed the locket to her lips, eyes squeezed shut. “I still wear Charles’s locket every day, or I did until I came here. How can I accept another man when I promised to love only him?”
Verity’s voice was soft, but adamant. “You don’t have to stop loving Charles. You can’t. But you are not dead, Theo, and he would not want you to live like you are.”
“I’m afraid,” Theo said. “Of what it will mean. Of what I’ll lose.”
Verity reached across the bed, gathered her close, and let her cry against her shoulder. “You’ll lose the illusion that you can remain unchanged. That’s all.”
They sat in silence, the morning sun creeping slowly across the counterpane, the dust swirling in lazy, indifferent orbits.
At last, Verity said, “So what will you do about the baron?”
Theo wiped her eyes, the handkerchief now a sodden knot. “I don’t know. What should I do?”
Verity smiled, brushed a tear from Theo’s cheek. “I think you should decide what you want, and then go take it. The rest—” she shrugged, “—will sort itself.”
Theo lay back, the words echoing in her mind. She stared at the ceiling, at the cracks and the slow drift of sunlight. For the first time in a year, she considered that there might be a future. That it might even belong to her.
She held the locket, but she did not close it.
She breathed, just once, and let herself want.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The last evening of the house party sprawled itself over the drawing room like a fever. The windows, thrown open against the thick midsummer dark, admitted only the slow, mineral ache of the lake. Every lamp was lit, every candle pressed into service, but the glow was a sickly haze—the world as seen through the yellowed lens of an old tooth. The guests, gorged on lamb and syllabub and enough sherry to float a sloop, bled across the divans and brocade chairs in loose, asymmetrical formations. The women fanned themselves in desultory synchrony, their wrists limp with the effort of maintaining appearances, the men gathered in knots at the edges, collars loosened, the air between them sticky with tobacco and secrets.
Theo sat with Verity on the periphery of the conversation pit, her mourning locket a dark and uncompromising punctuation at her throat. The night was hot enough to wilt the starch in her gown. The house itself seemed to sweat, every stick of furniture exhaling generations of distress through the damp plaster. At her left, Verity had fixed her gaze on the game of cards unfolding at the central table, but her hands betrayed her. They worked ata lace handkerchief with the intensity of a surgeon prepping for a messy operation.
Across the room, Teddy was holding court among a small group of gentlemen, the Captain, whose laugh fell always a beat too late, Lord Jennington, with his brittle halo of white hair, and the youngest, a fox-eyed scion of the local village. Teddy’s posture was impeccable—lounging, but with the tension of a coiled spring. He wore his evening black as if it were a dare, and the open collar suggested a disregard for both decency and the damp. Whenever he smiled, the room seemed to list toward him, as if every conversation, every glass, was magnetized by the prospect of disaster.
Theo tried not to watch him. She failed. Each time his head tipped back in laughter, each time his hand swept the air in some rhetorical feint, she felt the echo of that morning’s humiliation in her bones.
Lady Amelia sat perched on a stool near the fireplace, her fan held like a dueling pistol. The feathers trailed in a slow arc, catching the candlelight and returning it with a blue-green vengeance. She’d said little since supper, but her eyes took in everything, filing each exchange for later deployment. The other women orbited her, their conversation a steady drip of anecdote and speculation.
The air was thick with the premonition of storm, whether from the weather or from the collective mood, Theo could not say. She drew a shallow breath and focused on the small rituals of survival, the angle of her fan, the position of her feet beneath her hem, the feel of the locket’s chain biting at her collarbone. She rehearsed, in her mind, every possible conversational gambit she might be called upon to make. The odds of success, she calculated, hovered somewhere between catastrophe and farce.
It was during a lull, an infinitesimal hiccup in the flow of card play, laughter, and the plink of glass, that Lady Amelia made her move.
She rose, slowly, as if the effort might snap some hidden tendon. Her chair scraped against the wood with a noise just piercing enough to clear the fog of conversation. Her fan snapped open with a crack. The room stilled, in the way of a pond suddenly deprived of wind.
“My dear Lady St. Ervan,” she began, her voice pitched for the full circumference of the room, “I wonder if you might permit me an impertinence.”
A dozen heads swiveled in her direction. Even Verity, who had been constructing an elaborate pile of lace knots in her lap, looked up, eyebrows slightly arched.
“Always, Lady Amelia,” said Verity, with a tight smile. “What would a house party be without a dash of impertinence?”