by Daria Vernon
Beth’s aunt straightened, but she had no retort. With a sleepy husband in tow, she went off to collect her daughter.
Mr. Clarke kissed Beth softly on the cheek and nodded to Rhys. There was a lot in that nod—a whole male communication there that she could only vaguely sense. And then her father walked away too.
“You know,” Rhys took Beth’s hand. “I always imagined that even if all else between us were to be sorted, we’d never have the blessing to marry. Never had I imagined it would be outright demanded.”
“Oh sir, clearly you are unacquainted with the absurdity of the ton.”
“So . . .”
“Yes?”
His pause struck her in the chest like a little pebble.
He took her hand. “Are the other things still there? Does the barrier to spending my days with you still contain so many bricks?”
She looked down at his thumb where it rubbed along the back of her hand as he held it. Could she pull her hand away even if she tried? Or had the Fates already woven them together?
She thought back to Emily’s words: ’Haps your heart and your head can both have what they want.
One stolen glance into his eyes felt like a journey into the future. There she saw love and loyalty, freedom and laughter. There was anxiety there too, as he hung on this moment.
Beth shook her head. “No, Rhys. I am certain the wall has fallen.”
He inhaled through a smile that looked ready to split his face in two. She knew that he was going to kiss her, but she put a hand to his chest and whispered to him as he bent over her.
“Come to the Continent with me.”
He nodded against her nose. He might have assented to anything in that moment, so happy he seemed, but she knew that he would want to go. For all her fears that he might spoil her autonomy, she felt her heart falling into a new realization—that he was a party to her independence. In him, she exercised her freedom to love.
She pulled away from his lips to make certain that he knew it.
“I love you, Rhys. The trust I have in you—it is a vivid and frightening thing.”
Rhys wished there were a way to taste a dream in the air because he feared he might be in one. Yet the longer the moment stretched on, the more convincingly real it became.
It stretched on through their walk from the stables. It stretched on as they held hands, white-knuckled, waiting for the hired hack that would temporarily part them. It stretched on in their dramatically long goodbye at the inn.
Rhys passed Beth up into the conveyance in a daze. A slap on his shoulder finally drew his attention elsewhere from the woman who would be his forever—
“Well, she has flattened her reputation, and I’ve no doubt that it pleases her,” said Mr. Clarke.
Rhys tried to smother his pleasure at that, particularly because the man before him had grown suddenly sullen. “After your tour together, will you be taking her away from me to London?”
“Mr. Clarke, I will not dare take her so far if she does not wish it.”
The old man nodded. Rhys took his cane and helped him up into the hack that would see them the short distance back to the Weldons’ manse.
No. I won’t take her far.
Epilogue
Every tree was increasingly familiar. Every bird sang a song of the past. Beth was no fool. She knew precisely where they were riding to, and her heart kicked up a beat every minute they drew nearer.
Husband. That word. She was still rolling it on her tongue, getting used to it. Never had she seen that in her future. Rhys rode alongside her, occasionally pulling his horse ahead as though boyish excitement were getting the better of him.
She liked how the back of his coat splayed out on the horse’s backside. Liked how Rhys looked in the sunshine.
They were staying at an inn on their way to set sail for the Continent. An inn of his choosing, a strategic choice, no doubt, for a day trip insisted upon just as strategically.
Toying with him, she’d feigned drowsiness in the bed that morning.
“I don’t feel like riding.” She always felt like riding.
“You rode just fine last night,” he winked.
Wicked man. Then he pushed his face into her naked side, using his days-unshaven chin to make her squirm. “Perhaps we should do some more indoor riding if you’re not feeling fond of the out-of-doors today.”
“I find that agreeable.” She awed at his tossed hair in the morning. How the waves of deep brown spilled into his eyes. Having him in a bed, a bed with sheets, no less! How novel for them. Lovely as he must have found her suggestion, it didn’t satisfy him to play into her bluff. He sat on his heels seriously and pulled the cover from her.
“No, we must ride. You need air.”
She laughed, knowing full well what her lack of cooperation was doing to him. To his surprise.
And so they rode.
And she thought she would pretend to be surprised.
Then she laid eyes on it, and no performance was required.
The folly.
Their folly.
Just as she’d expected, yet . . . not.
It rose up before her, somehow grand and quaint, at once. But something had changed. The menace and mystery it once was cloaked with had changed. The place seemed somehow recast, and it wasn’t simply for a lack of fog.
She rode forward to investigate. Lumber dotted the yard, which had otherwise been landscaped in a simple fashion. Exploring the side of the house, her jaw went slack.
“It’s . . . intact?”
She threw the look of astonishment over her shoulder. Then looked back to the once-missing wall of the downstairs.
“It’s yours. If you wish to return to it after our tour.”
“But your job is in London.”
He seemed unbothered. “I am in discussions for a new position. We won’t be able to be here the whole year, but trust me that it will work out.”
She scrambled from her saddle and ran for him as he dropped much more elegantly from his own seat. She collided with him fully, and a puff of air escaped them both before he laughed and buried his pine-smelling face in her hair.
She examined the yard again from his embrace. The lumber, the plantings . . .
“Rhys, how long have you been working at this?”
“Three years. Any time I could escape London.”
Three years.
The entire—
Beth looked up at him, knowing that her eyes glistened, ready to spill over. She didn’t care.
“Rhys,” she whispered.
“Yes, love?”
“Might we ascend those stairs again, right now, and be happier this time? Like we imagined.”
He pushed a hair from her eye, one that he’d just displaced.
“We can.”
He placed her hand in his arm and together they walked to the door—intact and grand but still surrounded with lush ivy. Nothing could steal the magic from such a place.
Her heart lifted, ready to leap through the doors as they opened. The floors were still water-stained but the ruined furniture gone. And there at the base of the staircase was someone to greet them home . . .
The marble maenad, holding their long-kept secrets and spilling her wine in honor of their union.
Acknowledgments
Almost as soon as I committed to writing this book, my mom was there at my side (as much as one can be from 500 miles away). Thank you for all of our little plotting conferences, for being my first reader, and most of all, for coming up with the perfect name for this book!
I was fortunate to grow up with another writer in the family—my dad. His poetry helped instill a love of writing in me from my earliest memory. Thank you for all of your inspiration and encouragement.
It’s atypical of me to conclude that
anything in life is a sign, but meeting my amazing critique group sure felt like one and I don’t know if I could have done this without them. Thank you Genevieve Kersten, Brianne Gillen, Amanda Pereira, and Jillian Graves for all of the ways that you helped shape these pages. And thank you to The Ripped Bodice for bringing us all together.
Julie Ganis, I already love talking about ice skating with you, but then I find out you love romance? It’s almost too much. Thank you endlessly for your friendship and all of your advice.
Thank you, Lauren Smith, for your generosity with publishing pointers. I will gladly indulge in shoptalk anytime.
Romayne Putna, our “research” day may have devolved mostly into wine-drinking and laughter, but it relieved so much anxiety. Thanks.
To my editor, Melanie Cossey, thank you for all of your hard work and great communication.
Lastly, I was already aware that I have some amazing friends, but this summer just made it really sink in how warm, unique and supportive you all are. I’m so fortunate to have you as my chosen family. Thank you.
Bio
DARIA VERNON grew up in the Southwest in houses brimming with antiques. Playing dress-up in old clothes, reading old books . . . is it any wonder she developed a passion for the historical?
Graduating into a recession and a writer’s strike with a screenwriting degree didn’t get her too far, but it led to the slew of odd jobs that would fuel her imagination for a lifetime, and for that she is grateful.
She writes from her well-nested (but woefully cat-less) introvert’s cocoon, emerging mostly to twirl around at the local ice rink.
www.DariaVernon.com
Instagram: @daria.vernon.romance
Twitter: @AuthorDariaV
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The Rogue’s Last Letter
London, 1787
. . . If anticipation were food, I would not be a starving man. Your promise of a kiss tumbles around my head every minute of the day. Whatever alley we need slip into, whatever carriage we need duck behind, I am ready for that kiss. If I were a king, I’d have you fetched to London sooner. If I were a bird, I’d fly to you myself. That it is yet three months ’til our paths will cross—I cannot bear. Time seeks to destroy me, but I will be patient, Primrose, because the rewards are so great . . .
Lady Allison Weldon refolded the letter and dragged her pinched fingers along its well worn crease. The parchment crinkled as she tucked it behind the top of her stomacher.
Oh, Harry.
So young, so raw, so earnest. She could pass judgment on not one of those traits because she shared them all. So how then, had such a seemingly honest man broken her heart?
. . . three months ’til our paths will cross . . .
. . . three months . . .
It was three months now. It was London now. And still not a word from her distant lover. She’d responded to his letter. Had shared her dreams of where and how they might conceal their kisses. She’d told him of the notches she had daily carved into her windowsill with a paper knife. A notch to mark each of the seven-and-eighty days until they would find one another’s arms. And now she blushed at such girlish folly, because no response had ever come back from 8 Dryden Street, London.
Perhaps some trouble with the post, she thought. Perhaps—
She sent another letter. Nothing.
To think of it brought on an irritating queasiness, and she pressed a hand over her stomach. There was some strange comfort to be found in the sharpness of the silver spangles that adorned the embroidered stomacher. She’d done the piece herself. Decorated it with evening primroses. Golden and bright, like you, Harry had said.
“Allison, darling!”
Her mother’s voice always cracked when she shouted. Allison didn’t bother answering, but followed the call down to the foyer.
Lucinda, Countess of Weldon, was a tall woman, but could not resist the most towering modes of hairstyle that made her taller yet. Tonight her gray blonde locks were covered accordingly by a creamy abomination whose topmost curls might be clipped by any doorway. Allison’s nose itched as she reached the foot of the stairs. Had Mother doused herself with every perfume on the dressing table? The overpowering miasma struck Allison like a whiff of hartshorn salts and did nothing for her anxious nausea.
Mother stood in the front entry with their first footman, Hayden, who patiently held open the door. Allison was reluctant to draw any nearer, repelled as she was by her mother’s scent.
“My Allison, aren’t you done early? I worry that your hair might wilt before you reach the doors of the assembly room.”
“I promise to leave here looking as fresh as you see me now.”
Lady Weldon’s powdered brow arced in a skeptical way that her daughter knew too well. The grand woman turned to Hayden who was nearly pushed aside by the breadth of her maroon skirts. Outside, a pair of men were lowering a sedan to the street and opening its top and front. “It’s time for me to go and meet Lord Weldon. Hayden, you will call a sedan chair for her at nine.”
“Yes, your ladyship.”
A moment later, the door clunked shut behind Lady Weldon’s little train of taffeta. Hayden was swift to avoid Allison’s gaze, but she swooped down the final step and blocked his egress. “Hayden.”
“Lady Allison?”
Allison was already palming a fat handful of shillings in the pocket that hung beneath her hoops. She withdrew them and pressed them into Hayden’s already waiting hand.
“You will call a sedan chair for me at half past seven.”
His fingers curled around the fistful. His pale blue eyes lowered to hers. Hayden had been born with a split in his lip and it’d been repaired in a crooked, but serviceable manner when he was but an adolescent. Allison had only been a tot when she’d heard him crying out under the knife of the family surgeon. It’d given her nightmares. Yet, once he’d healed up, she’d decided that he had the most charming smile, even as no one else seemed to agree. It was a smile that he wore now as he dutifully acquiesced to another of her habitual bribes.
He sighed. “I will call a sedan chair for you at half past seven.”
He bowed overly deeply to her, and she curtsied back in jest. As she rushed back up the stairs, she heard the jangle of the shillings as they dropped into his livery pocket.
What a blessing it was that their stodgy butler had been left at Tallyside to look after it for the season. With Hayden helming the townhouse, Allison had a backdoor to freedoms that she might not otherwise enjoy. He’d been with the household for all of Allison’s memory, first as a young groom, then as a lower footman. His father had been first footman before him and with great sadness, it was his father’s own early passing that saw him elevated to the station.
He was ever Allison’s friend and conspirator and their brief exchange had diverted her thoughts momentarily from the stirring in her stomach. Now it was back.
The extra hour and a half would grant her time enough to visit Dryden Street. Time enough to find Harry’s apartment—to gaze upon him and discover what emotion he should elicit now that her passion for him had become so tainted by confusion and ire.
Ire was not a common sentiment to her. Not least in the eyes of others. But when she felt it, she felt it deeply and turned it in on herself until it boiled. Such boiling was likely to blame for the present state of her stomach.
Of course, she wished it to be different. She hoped this might instead all be some misunderstanding. She hoped that one, and then two letters had been lost in the
post. She wished that Harry might share her confusion about a lack of correspondence. Wished that his eyes might light up when they fall upon her and that hers might light up too, when she hears his lips move around the word Primrose for the very first time.
Dash it. To give credit to her hopes for even a moment already saw them running away from her. They must be quashed.
Harry had the recommendation of Allison’s closest friend, but it was a friend that she’d had little access to for the last year. Her cousin Beth’s name could not be spoken in the hallowed halls of Tallyside, not in the aftermath of what had so far been a well-kept scandal. Allison had sought to correspond with her, but the aforementioned butler clearly had directions to not let a single note reach Allison’s letter tray.
With her new freedoms at the townhouse, she might now succeed in writing Beth, but her cousin’s advisement could not reach her tonight. No, tonight she would be crossing uncharted waters alone and seeking out her answers from the source.
She looked to her dressing table mirror from where she perched daintily on the bed’s edge. Her mother was right, her hair would wilt. She replaced a yellow tendril into the strand of pearls that wove through her hair and she confronted the girl in the mirror—
Here she was, taking the matter into her own, inexperienced hands—it’s precisely what Beth would’ve encouraged.
The thin cushioning of the sedan chair’s box did little to prevent bruises as another rough jostle saw Allison’s head banging into the side.
“Have a care!”
The men carrying the box either didn’t hear or ignored her. What had gotten into her? She sounded like her mother.
They were almost to Bow Street. Dryden was not far. Allison’s stomach tightened. The inside of the little box was suffocating, yet she found herself equally disturbed by the prospect of being free of it—of being alone in a strange place.