The Rogue Not Taken (Scandal & Scoundrel #1)(101)

She swallowed around the thought. “I must leave. Now,” she said. “Today.”

He watched her for a long moment, and she thought he might kiss her again. She wanted him to kiss her again. She loathed the idea of him kissing her again.

Instead, he reached out, offering her his hand, warm and bronzed from the sun.

She stared at that hand for a long moment, unable to keep the tears from brimming over, hating them and then somehow loving them when he lifted that strong, perfect hand to brush them away. She let him touch her, adoring the feel of him, memorizing it until she couldn’t bear it and she moved to push him away.

The moment she touched him, however, he captured her, threading her fingers in his. She tugged at her hand, quite desperate for him to release her even as she reveled in the feel of him.

He refused to give her up, instead leading her through the maze, his warm hand wrapped around hers. They walked in silence, through the twists and turns, to the exit, where he stopped, just inside the hedge, and turned to her, pulling her close, holding her face in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry I cannot be the man you wish me to be.”

Tears threatened again and she shook her head. No more of that. “It’s you who don’t see. I only ever wished you to be the man you are.”

He did kiss her then, one final, lush moment, and she clung to him, pouring all her emotion into the caress. Desire, sorrow, passion.

Love.

But he’d never know that.

He lifted his lips from hers and gestured to the exit, letting her leave the maze first. Letting her choose real life instead of this magic, mythic place.

She did, stepping out into the world once more, King at her back, already threatening to become a long-ago memory.

The only memory that would matter.

She heard the horses almost immediately, the wicked thunder that came from a coach and six tearing up the main drive to the castle at full gallop. Together, she and King turned to face the new arrivals, hands shielding their eyes from the gleam of the late-afternoon sun on the carriage.

On the gilded carriage.

On the gilded carriage with cherub outriders.

“Bollocks,” Sophie whispered, filled with desolation and no small amount of uncertainty.

The conveyance stopped in the round drive of Lyne Castle, and an outrider immediately leapt down to open the door and release the inhabitants, who piled out like lambs released into pasture.

Exceedingly well-appointed lambs. In lovely silk dresses and outrageous coifs festooned with arrows and feathers and—was that a birdcage? The last of them cried out, “Let me through!” and rushed to a nearby rosebush to promptly cast up her accounts.

“Let me guess,” he said, in a tone dry as sand. Only a fool would see the outrageous carriage and not divine its inhabitants. “That one is Sesily.”

“It’s all ruined!”

Sophie had barely closed the door to the receiving room at Lyne Castle when her mother’s dramatic pronouncement loosed a tide of panicked cries.

“Every invitation to the country has been rescinded!” the countess announced.

“Derek won’t even speak to me,” Sesily said matter-of-factly, opening her reticule and extracting a tube of smelling salts. “He disappeared before the end of the Liverpool garden party, the bastard.”

“Sesily! Language! You see? Everything is ruined!” the Countess of Wight cried, falling into a chair. Sesily passed the salts to the countess, who inhaled deeply. “Literally everything!”

“We’ve been exiled!” Seleste collapsed into a nearby chair, her elaborate pink skirts cascading over the arms. “We’re in Cumbria, for heaven’s sake! Could there be anything worse?” She leaned back, only to catch one of the arrows in her coif in the gold brocade of the seat. She snapped forward with a little squeak, and yanked the arrow out of her hair, tossing it to her feet.

Remarkably, not even stowing away in a footman’s livery, being shot on the Great North Road, and faking an engagement with a man who would never marry her was as fraught with difficulty as an afternoon with the Talbot ladies.

And it hadn’t even been an afternoon. It had been thirty seconds.

“And let’s not even discuss what’s happened to Seraphina,” Sesily said, unstrapping her birdcage hat from atop her head.

Sophie might have questioned the millinery if not for the pronouncement, and instead turned to her older sister, the only arrival who had remained silent. Seraphina stood by the large window, staring out at the estate beyond. “What’s happened with you?”

Sera waved a hand. “Nothing more than you already know.”

“Of course more!” their mother cried, standing once more. “The duke won’t even allow her in the house! He says that after your actions, he wants nothing to do with her or with any of us! And she’s to have his child!”

Sophie did not look away from her sister. “Is this true? Bollocks.”

“Sophie, language!”

Sera waved that hand again. “It’s not you, Sophie. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been something else.” She met Sophie’s gaze. “What of you? Are you well?”

“I am,” she lied. She might be heartbroken, but she was not exiled by her husband and increasing, so there was that, was there not?

Sera watched her for a long moment, seeing more than the others did. She always could see Sophie’s truth. “You mustn’t worry, Sophie. This is not on you.”