Page 27 of My Lord Rogue (Wicked Widows’ League #34)

T he world had scoured itself clean by morning. It was the hour when only the desperate, the guilty, or the chronically disappointed found themselves awake, and yet the house already vibrated with the rumor of departure.

Theo stood at the base of the grand staircase, one gloved hand at her throat.

She wore her traveling gown—the sober blue wool, fitted to the waist and buttoned up with military severity—and felt the eyes of the company upon her.

She did not look at them, she looked only at the tall windows, where light splintered on the floor in stripes of bone-white, and at the door, which separated her from the world she had so recently decided to survive.

Outside, on the gravel sweep, her trunk had already been lashed to the top of the waiting carriage. The coachman—his face a geometry of windburn and boredom—clucked to the horses, who answered with the slow steam of their breath, clouding the air like the ghosts of forgotten guests.

Inside, the house was all noise and movement.

The staff, eager for the resumption of order, whisked away the debris of last night’s excess.

A pair of giggling debutantes, their hair still lacquered into impossible sculptures, clung together and whispered about the “scandal.” The men, their faces shaved raw and pink, shook hands with varying degrees of sincerity, promising to correspond and not believing a word of it.

Theo’s gaze searched for a sign of him, for the angular cut of his profile, the dark corona of his hair, the burn of his eyes.

But Teddy was nowhere—neither among the men at the doors, nor the footmen clustered like crows in the corners.

Even the air, which so often seemed to bend itself toward him, gave no hint.

Verity found her at the threshold, moving with the swift, silent energy of a woman who would not be denied a scene.

“Theo,” she said, catching her arm. “You’ll write, of course.”

“Of course,” Theo managed. Her voice was thin, unfinished.

Verity drew her closer, wrapped her in a quick, fierce embrace. It smelled of bergamot and the sharp undertone of panic. “He’ll come,” she whispered, lips barely moving. “He always does, in the end.”

Theo smiled, but her teeth would not unclench. “That is not in the cards, I think.”

Verity pulled back, searching her face with an intensity that bordered on invasive. “Let him make the first move,” she advised, as if it were a game of chess and not the architecture of her future at stake. “It is the only way men know how to win.”

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 the provinces, 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 for something—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.”

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.”