Page 49 of My Lord Rogue

The words dredged up the memory of the ballroom, the public declaration, the risk and the aftermath. She remembered the eyes of the room, the way he had drawn all the cruelty to himself and left her only the possibility of mercy.

She remembered, too, the warmth of his mouth and the way he tasted of brandy and want.

Her resolve, such as it was, began to fail.

“I cannot be what you want,” she managed, though her voice had already begun to betray her.

“You already are,” he replied.

Silence pooled around them, a perfect negative of all the noise they had ever made. In that absence, every heartbeat was an accusation.

She looked at him, really looked, and saw the man he had tried so hard to keep hidden—the fear, the longing, the hope that had not yet learned to die. He stood, hatless and shivering, but did not move to cover himself or hide.

He was, for once, entirely unguarded.

“Why are you doing this?” she whispered.

He smiled, but it was not a victory. “Because I would rather be humiliated by you than adored by anyone else.”

Her grip on the rail loosened. The knuckles, so white a moment before, began to pink with the return of blood.

“I do not know how to let go,” she said.

“Start here,” he said, and reached out, not with the reckless certainty of the night before, but with the slow, deliberate gravity of a man who understood the cost of every inch.

His hand settled over hers, large and warm and impossibly gentle. He waited, giving her the chance to recoil, to run, to finish the act of leaving.

She did not.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said, eyes steady on her face. “But I know what it is to haunt yourself. You don’t have to do it alone.”

The words—the admission, the offer—did something to her that neither anger nor desire nor grief had managed. Theydisarmed her. The old, familiar defenses crumbled, not with a crash, but with the slow surrender of stone to water.

She inhaled, and the world seemed to rush in at once, the sweet rot of spent roses, the bite of frost, the distant, ridiculous laughter of men who thought themselves immortal.

She let the breath out, and with it, the last of her pretense. “I’m afraid. I don’t know if I can do this. Charles was a simple man, so easy to love. You… You are so much more. I don’t know if I’m capable of giving you what you deserve.”

“There’s only one way to learn.”

“I don’t want to leave,” she said, and the sentence, simple as it was, felt like a revolution.

“Then stay,” he said.

She looked past his shoulder at the house—the windows now alive with faces, each one a private drama of envy or relief or amusement. She saw Verity on the terrace, lifting her teacup in salute.

She looked at the world she was meant to want, the carriage and the future and the carefully rationed hours of safety.

And then she looked at him.

Her posture, rigid for so long, began to soften. The tension that had kept her upright dissolved, leaving her bare and unbalanced.

She stepped down from the carriage, her boots silent on the gravel.

The crowd, unprepared for this turn, drew back as if in deference to some unspoken law.

She reached for Teddy’s hand—not as a supplicant, not as a prize, but as a partner.

He took it, and the world, which had been so cold and certain only moments before, cracked open to let them through.