The Rogue Not Taken

“Who is Marcella?”

“Lady Marcella Latham.”

“Ah.” Memory returned. Lady Marcella from the Liverpool party. “No.”

She scowled at him then. “You really should remember the women you ruin, you know.”

He drank. “If anything worthy of ruination had happened between Lady Marcella and me, I would remember her.”

“You escaped her via rose trellis!”

“Precisely as she asked me to.”

“I highly doubt that’s the case.”

“It’s true. The lady and I had an arrangement.”

“All the more reason for you to remember her. It’s common courtesy.” She reached into the basket. “There are pasties in here!” Extracting a pasty, she tore it in half and offered it to him. “Pasties are a glorious food. One I never get in London.”

“Why not? You have a cook, don’t you?”

She nodded and spoke around her food. King resisted the urge to smile. Her manners had fled as the sun had set. “But she’s French. And pasties aren’t good for the waistline.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your waistline,” he replied without thinking. She paused mid-chew. He likely should not have an opinion on her waistline. He shrugged a shoulder. “It’s perfectly ordinary.”

She began chewing again. Swallowed. “Thank you? I suppose?”

“You are welcome.”

She washed down her pasty with more wine. “So, you do not love Lady Marcella.”

She’d had enough wine to be nosy, and not nearly enough to forget the conversations they’d been having. “I do not.”

“But you are aware of the emotion. In a personal sense.”

Enough to know I never want it again.

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you marry the poor girl?”

He’d tried. He’d wanted to.

He remembered bringing her to meet his father. To show her off. To prove to the great Duke of Lyne that love was not an impossibility. He’d been young and stupid. And his father had ruined it.

I’d rather you never marry at all than marry some cheap trollop in it only for the title, the duke had sneered. And Lorna had run.

He remembered the way his heart had pounded as he’d chased after her, to find her, to marry her. To love her enough to spit in his father’s face. And then he stopped remembering, before he could remember the rest. He looked up at Sophie, fairly invisible. Night had fully fallen. “I can’t marry her.”

“Why not?” It was strange, the way her voice curled around him in the darkness. Curious. Comforting.

“Because she is dead.”

She shot forward at the words, and though it was too dark to see, he could hear the movement of her skirts against her legs, feel the heat of her in the small space. “Dear God,” she whispered, and then her hands were on him, clumsily searching in the darkness. Landing on his thigh before she snatched them back, as though she’d been burned. He caught them, wishing he could see her face. Grateful that he could not see her face when she repeated the words. “Dear God. King. I am so sorry.”

She is dead, and my father killed her.

She is dead, and I killed her.

He shook his head, the darkness making the story easier to tell. “Don’t be. It was a long time ago. Truthfully, the only reason why I told you was because you asked why I’d never returned.”

“But you return now.”

“My father—” he started, then stopped. Instead, he laughed humorlessly. “Suffice to say, I want him to know that his precious line died with her.”

There was silence. “Did he—” She did not finish the question.

He answered it anyway. “As though he’d put a pistol to her head.”

She paused, considering the horrifying words. “And your happiness? You shall never take it?”

She was a fool, Sophie Talbot. A beautiful fool. A man could have money, a title, or happiness. Never all three. “There is no happiness for men like me,” he said.

“Were you ever happy?” she whispered.

Memory flashed, summoned from God knew where by this woman who had a remarkable way of winning his secrets. “I remember a day when I was a child—I’d just been given my first mount, and my father and I rode out to visit the blacksmith.” He could have stopped there, but somehow, it was easy to tell the story in the darkness, and once it had begun, he couldn’t stop it. “He was hammering out horseshoes in his little workshop, which was hot as hell.

“My father talked to him for a long while—longer than any young man wants to listen—and I wandered out into the yard, to discover a metal stake in the ground and a half-dozen horseshoes wrapped around it.”

“It’s a game,” she said.

“I knew instinctively that whatever it was, it was not for future dukes.”

“I shall show you how it is done,” she said fervently in the darkness, making him want to pull her onto his lap and kiss her mad. “Hang rules for future dukes.”

“No need. I know how to play.”

A pause. “The blacksmith taught you?”

“My father did.” Silence followed the pronouncement, until King added, “I was happy that day.”

She shifted, and the sound of her skirts brought him out of the memory, back to this place, no longer the boy at the blacksmith’s. Now a man who had seen the truth of what his father could do if his expectations weren’t met.

Another image flashed, a carriage much like this one, on its side, in the road, and King wanted desperately to be on his curricle, careening up the road with wind whipping around him, drowning out the thoughts that seemed to grow louder as he drew north.