The Rogue Not Taken (Scandal & Scoundrel 1)

“I had my reasons for staying away.”

“I’m sure they were excellent,” King scoffed.

“Some better than others.” The duke inhaled. “I should never have left you alone for so long.”

King raised a brow. “Left me?”

The duke fisted his hands on his knees. “You were young and insolent and you knew nothing of the world. Every time I returned, you refused to see me. A single, petulant message. The line ends with me. I should never have allowed it.”

“I enjoy the way you think you have allowed me to do anything I’ve done since the night you exiled me.”

Lyne leveled him with a cool green gaze that King had used on countless others. He did not like being in its path. “I have allowed you everything. I filled your coffers with funds, I gave you horses, the Mayfair town house, the curricle you drove hell-for-leather for a year before you crashed it, the coach you never used.”

King sat forward, loathing the way his father seemed to claim his successes for himself. “That money is now worth twelve times its original value. The house sits empty, right there on Park Lane, entailed to you. The horses are dead. And yes, the carriage is crashed. Just as the coach here was.” He narrowed his gaze on his father. “I lived by your hand until I could live by my own. And I have never asked you for another shilling. One would think you would not have kept such a ledger. One would have thought you would count those funds as penance for killing a girl so far beneath you that you thought her expendable.”

“And so we get to it.”

“So we do.”

The duke sat back in his chair. “I was not the instrument of her death.”

It was a strange phrasing, one that King imagined his father used to eschew his responsibility. “No, I was, and thank you very much for clarifying the situation as though I wasn’t there.”

“You weren’t, either.”

King held up a hand. “I carried the reins, Your Grace. I heard her scream. I was there when she fell silent. I held her in my arms.”

“And that will be your cross to bear. All men have them.”

King ran a hand through his hair, barely able to contain his fury and frustration. “Why am I here?”

“I offered her money,” the duke said. “The milkmaid.”

“To leave me.” Lorna had never said so, but it was not an enormous surprise.

“I am not proud of it, but I had no other way of ensuring that she wasn’t after your title. Your money. That she wasn’t trying to climb.”

King laughed at that. “I am supposed to believe that you were, what . . . making certain she loved me?”

The duke’s gaze flickered over King’s shoulder. “Believe it or not, it’s the truth.”

“It’s bollocks and you know it. You’ve done nothing for your entire life but espouse the importance of blue blood and good name and strong breeding. If you offered her money, you did it to ensure she would leave me. I assume you offered her father the same.”

The duke nodded. “I did.”

“And he accepted. And she ran to me. Because she loved me. And money wasn’t enough to end that.”

“Neither accepted it,” the duke said, “And money was not enough, you are right. You’d tempted them with something else. Something far more valuable. Something they thought they’d never get, and then . . . it seemed as though they might.”

The words unsettled. She’d wanted to run away from the start. Across the border. Into Scotland. King had pushed her to marry in a church. In Britain. In front of all the world. She’d agreed. Hadn’t she?

“She didn’t tell you about the money,” his father said, “because she knew that if she did, you’d come to me, angry. And I’d tell you the truth. She worried you’d believe it. So she told you something else.”

King did not believe it.

He shook his head. “It’s not true.”

“It’s true.” The words came from the door, where Agnes had apparently stayed, sentinel.

“He even has you lying for him?” he said, betrayal hot and unpleasant in his chest.

“She’s not lying,” the duke said.

“Her father came to the castle after her death, Aloysius,” Agnes said. “After you’d disappeared. He was destroyed. And he told the truth—that they’d been after a title from the start. Together.”

King shook his head. “No. She was afraid of him. She told me her father was coming. That he’d kill her if he found her. That he was afraid of you.”

“That man wasn’t afraid of me,” the duke said. “He had visions of being a Boleyn. He spat in my face and tore her gown. Backhanded her—and well. Split her lip. And vowed to me that she’d be the next Marchioness of Eversley by sunup.”

King could still see the gown, torn at the neck. He could see her lip, bleeding. He pushed memory aside. His father lied. It was what he did.

“Why didn’t you stop them?”

“I went to Rivendel.” The neighboring earl, master of the estate where Lorna and her father lived. The duke laughed at his stupidity. “I actually thought he would be able to help. But your girl and her father had been promised a dukedom. And they were willing to risk all. By the time I returned home, you were gone. With her. And the coach.” The duke paused. “That’s when I learned that against human will, the aristocracy had no power.”

King’s mind reeled with the images of that night, burned into his memory. Her tears, her begs, her eyes filled with fear. Those eyes. She’d have to be the best actress in Britain. Or want something badly enough to do anything.

But the idea that she’d lied—that everything he’d thought about that summer, that girl, the life they could have had, was imagined—it was devastating. And impossible to believe. It did not matter that the doubt was there now, seeded. Growing. What if the only love he’d ever believed was a lie?

What if the darkest pain he’d ever felt was the product of betrayal instead of love?

Who was he if not the man made by that night?

King stood, desperate to leave the room. To be rid of his father. To be rid of Agnes, whom he’d never thought would betray him. He leveled his accusation at her. “You’re both lying to me.”

“Call her a liar again, and you will no longer be welcome in this house,” the duke said, cold fury in his tone. “I will take your insults, but Agnes has been nothing but your champion since the day you were born, and you will not speak ill of her.”

At another time, the anger in his father’s words would have shocked him, but King hadn’t the patience for it now. He rounded on the duke. “This changes nothing. This place still made monsters of us both. The line will end with me, as I have always promised.”

“And the wife you presented to me? What of her desires?”

Sophie.

“Don’t tell me you believe she loves me. She’s a Dangerous Daughter.”

The duke’s gaze did not waver. “After witnessing last night, I think the girl might well care for you. Your milkmaid would never have left you the way the Talbot girl did.”

Perfect, untouched Sophie, who wanted a home full of happiness and honesty. Sophie, whom he would return to the life she desired as soon as possible. King hated the thought of her here, in this place, with this man and his revelations.

There had been a time when he’d believed in love. When he’d desired it. But he’d lost the only thing he ever loved, and now even that truth was clouded with lies. “Then her desires shall suffer along with mine.”

There was only one thing he could ensure remained true.

This place. This line. It ended with him.

Even if it meant leaving Sophie.

Even if leaving Sophie had somehow become the last thing in the world he wanted to do.

His jaw clenched with anger and disbelief and something far more complicated. “Why am I here?” he asked a final time, the words harsh and unpleasant on his tongue.

“You’re my son,” the duke said, simply, something in his eyes t

hat King did not wish to identify. “You’re my son, and there was a time when you were my joy. You deserve to know the truth. And more than that, you deserve to know happiness.” The duke paused, looking older. “Pride be damned.”

The words were the worst kind of blow, and King responded the only way he could. He left the room without a word, going to the only place he could think of to find solace. The labyrinth.

Anger and frustration propelled him through the complex maze, every turn bringing back another memory of his youth, of his mistakes. Of the past he’d been escaping for a dozen years. He followed the path without hesitation, the memory of the route to the center innate. He was Theseus, headed for the Minotaur, the battle already raging in his mind and heart.

But at the center of the labyrinth, he did not find a monster.

He found Sophie.

The Lyne labyrinth was as magnificent as she remembered.

Sophie sat on the edge of the extravagant marble fountain at the heart of the maze, book forgotten in her lap, shoring up her courage to leave the estate.

She’d spent much of the day exploring its twists and turns, the search for the fountain at the center occupying her thoughts just enough to keep her from going mad thinking of King. Of course, she thought plenty of King, of his childhood here, in what he’d confessed was his favorite place on the estate. Of the things he must have avoided when he was hidden away inside this labyrinth.

As one who was avoiding things herself, she could attest to the benefits of this particular location.

He’d escorted her to her bedchamber the previous evening, separated from his own by a wall and an adjoining door, and she’d kept herself from protesting his decision to leave her untouched. She had been masterful at hiding her emotions from him, if she were to offer her own opinion on the matter.