Page 28 of My Lord Rogue (Wicked Widows’ League #34)

The words—the admission, the offer—did something to her that neither anger nor desire nor grief had managed. They disarmed 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.

“I have been hiding behind memories,” she said.

The words came out in a hush, but the quietness only made them more certain.

“I invented you—Baron Teddington—because I was afraid to feel again. But now—” She shook her head, a tremor passing through her entire body. “Now I am more afraid of losing you.”

A murmur swept the line of onlookers, a dowager, pearl-stranded and mummified with scandal, gasped so hard her fan nearly snapped.

A young debutante, cheeks painted the impossible pink of a meringue, pressed her hand to her mouth in horror or envy or both.

Even one of the squire’s sons, still fox-eyed from the night before, raised his eyebrows in unalloyed delight at the prospect of disaster.

Teddy stepped into the space between them, as if he had been waiting all his life for this invitation. “Then don’t,” he said.

He did not wait for her to move, nor for the permission of the world.

He reached for her—both hands, this time—and drew her in, not with the caution of a suitor but with the urgency of a man who had spent too long starving for touch.

His mouth found hers, and the world, which had always been so cold and watchful, exploded into heat.

It was not a chaste kiss. It was a conflagration, the kind that made the house and its guests and the impossible expectations of history vanish in a rush of want.

His hands, broad and hot, circled her waist and pulled her close.

She felt the fine tremor of his arms, the slight catch in his breath, the certainty with which he held her—anchored her—against the possibility of retreat.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and surrendered, not with shame, but with something like pride. She kissed him back, as if the act might rewire her from the inside out. She tasted salt and sweetness, and the faint residue of brandy, and a hope so keen it bordered on pain.

The carriage stood open behind her, its interior a yawning mouth of velvet and promise, but she no longer needed it. The only journey worth making was here, on the uneven ground, where desire and memory and future collided in a single, impossible present.

They broke apart only when the air itself seemed to demand it.

He rested his forehead against hers. “Come home with me instead,” he whispered, the words a benediction against the shell of her ear.

She nodded, unable to speak. Her face was wet, though she did not know whether it was from tears or mist or the sheer relief of being seen.

On the terrace, Verity raised her teacup in silent toast, her smile so wide it threatened to split her face.

The coachman, flabbergasted, stood with one boot on the wheel and waited for orders that would never come.

From the crowd, a half-hearted ripple of applause began—tentative, then swelling, as if the entire company had been holding its breath and now, in the aftermath of scandal, found itself unburdened.

The dowager collapsed against her companion, murmuring about the end of civilization.

The debutante, lips parted, looked on with the rapacious hunger of a girl who had just learned what it meant to want.

And Theo, no longer Lady Pattishall, no longer anyone’s widow or invention, laughed—a bright, reckless sound that cut through the fog and the memory and the ache of old wounds. She let Teddy’s arms wrap her again, this time not as a rescue, but as a promise.

The world would write its own stories, the world always did.

But for now, she had chosen this one.

And she would see how it ended.