Page 48 of My Lord Rogue
Theo let her own hand drop to her side. She wanted to say something clever, something final, but her tongue felt wooden, her mouth full of last night’s unsaid words. So she nodded, the gesture stiff and a little pitiful.
It was then, at the last, that Lady Amelia appeared. She drifted toward Theo, fan flicking the air, lips pursed in the universal sign of imminent gossip.
“I do hope,” Amelia murmured, pitching her voice for maximum reach, “that you find London more congenial than theprovinces, Lady Pattishall. Some spirits are too fine for country air.”
Theo considered a retort, found it unnecessary, and instead bent her head in the shallowest of bows. “Thank you, Lady Amelia. I hope your travels are… safe.”
The words hung in the air—unspoken things, the memory of accusation and defeat—but the etiquette of departure would not allow more. Amelia retreated, her perfume trailing behind her like the ghost of her ambitions.
At the doorway, a servant waited with Theo’s valise, eyes lowered in a posture of perfect servility, but Theo caught the quick, nervous glance upward—the curiosity, the hope for something more dramatic, some final scene to justify the hours spent in attendance. She gave him the smallest nod and stepped outside, the house closing behind her with a click that might have been relief, or regret, or both.
On the drive, the morning was a universe apart from the night before. The gravel was rimed with frost, the mist climbing in slow curls from the river, swallowing the world beyond the iron gates. Theo stood a moment, letting the cold bite at her cheeks and the light burn through her eyelids. She felt herself crystallize—sharpen, harden—until she was a thing entirely of this moment, raw and impossible to break.
The coachman coughed into his glove. “Miss?”
She started. “Yes. Thank you.”
He opened the door for her, and she placed one foot on the carriage step, her boot heel loud as a shot against the frozen metal.
She hesitated, gaze caught by the symmetry of the house—its windows blank with anticipation, its doors already forgetting her. In the uppermost window, she thought she saw a shape, a movement, but it might have been nothing. She lingered, heart beating so loud it threatened to shake her apart, and waited forsomething—a sound, a sign, the impossible presence of the one person she had not been able to say goodbye to.
But the air was silent, the gravel unbroken.
She drew in one last lungful of the world, then exhaled, letting it freeze her from the inside out. She braced herself on the carriage rail, the metal shocking against her palm, and turned to face the horizon, the future, the blank and infinite road.
Inside the carriage, it would be warm, safe, anonymous. Outside, the world held its breath.
Theo did not climb inside, not yet.
She stood, suspended, as if the act of leaving required her to be both present and absent at once.
And in that space—in the stillness between the leaving and the being gone—she let herself want.
She was halfway up the carriage step—a single boot on the threshold of exile—when the sound found her, a rupture in the morning’s hush. Not the whistle of the coachman, not the metallic clatter of harness or the shiver of horses waiting for orders. It was softer, but inexorable, the whisper of boots on dew-wet gravel, the kind of sound that meant pursuit, or flight, or the last desperate play of a man who had run out of games.
She turned, slow as ice melting in a glass, and saw him at the edge of the garden path.
Teddy. There, in the raw dawn, with his hair in damp disarray and his greatcoat slung over his arm, the collar undone so the world could see the pulse leaping in his throat. He looked both younger and older, more alive than anyone had a right to be at this hour. He moved with a velocity that made the air shudder, the fog parted for him, then folded closed behind, as if the world itself had decided to conspire in his favor.
The small crowd gathered at the periphery—the maids, the footmen, the last of the revelers lingering in half-buttoned coats—stilled at his approach. The atmosphere was that of a public duel, the hush before a blow.
He stopped a foot shy of the carriage. His eyes—those improbable, shifting golds—fixed on Theo with a focus that felt like physical heat.
“You’re leaving,” he said, voice pitched so low it vibrated through the soles of her boots, “without saying goodbye.”
A dozen unspoken answers burned on her tongue, each more useless than the last. She settled for the truth, which was itself a kind of weapon. “I thought it best,” she said, and her fingers, blue with cold and nerves, curled tighter around the rail of the carriage.
He looked at the hand, then at her face. “You are not a coward. Don’t become one now.”
Theo laughed, a bitter, small sound. “If you knew?—”
“But I do know,” he cut in, the words knife-sharp. “I know what it costs you. I know the way you close your eyes when you’re about to lie, and the way you reach for the locket when you’re about to run.” His own hand, free of the coat now, traced the air between them. “I know because I do the same thing. I have spent my entire life running from the people I want most. I am tired of it.”
From the terrace, Verity watched, arms folded, a slight smile playing at the corners of her mouth—a satisfied conjurer seeing her trick pay off at last.
Teddy stepped closer, and now the space between them was measured in inches, not in years or wounds or secrets. He lowered his voice, so that only she could hear.
“I meant what I said yesterday,” he said. “Every word.”