The Rogue Not Taken by Sarah MacLean Page B

will take.”
    Sophie had never met two more fatalistic children in her life.
    Though, she had to admit, she wasn’t exactly telling the truth. She wasn’t simply curious about when they might arrive at the next stop along the mail coach’s route—she was calculating the distance between her and the Marquess of Eversley, who would no doubt be furious when he discovered that she’d sold his carriage wheels for coach fare north.
    She highly doubted that he would believe that he deserved it.
    Nor would he care that it was not theft, per se. She fully intended to pay him back.
    But she had to get north, first.
    North.
    The decision had been made in the dead of the previous night, as she’d tried to sleep in the too-bright hayloft, beneath old newsprint that had been left for a makeshift blanket. Unable to find slumber, she’d sat up to find that the newspaper was a scandal sheet from several months earlier. D ANGEROUS D AUGHTER D ISCOVERED WITH D RURY’S D EREK shouted one headline, the story recounting a particularly scandalous moment in which Sesily wasspeculated to have been in the rafters at Derek Hawkins’s theater. S ESILY S ECRETLY S CANDALIZING S TAR OF THE S TAGE? questioned a second story. As though there were enough to say about the afternoon.
    Which there wasn’t.
    Sesily had been doing nothing scandalous that day. Sophie knew it, because she had been there as chaperone, listening to Derek Hawkins’s endless droning about his unparalleled talent, alternating between declaring himself “the greatest artist of our time” and “a genius for the ages.” At one point, the awful man had actually suggested he might be well considered for the role of Prime Minister. And he’d been serious.
    The most brazen thing Sesily had done was to ask if Hawkins considered her his muse. To which he’d replied that he was beyond need of a muse; indeed, his muse came from within. He was his own odious, insufferable muse.
    If there had been scandal that afternoon, Sophie might have found the whole experience more palatable.
    But the gossip columns didn’t care for truth. They cared for T ALBOT T ATTLING, as the papers referred to the headlines about her sisters. And her sisters adored it. She recalled Sesily reading this particular article aloud.
    Sophie, however, did not adore it. Instead, she had crumpled the paper with fervor and considered the options that lay before her. Not options. Option. Singular. Because the truth was that women in Britain in 1833 did not have options. They had the path upon which they tread. Upon which they were forced to tread. Upon which they were made to feel grateful they were forced to tread.
    There she had stood in the pebbled drive of the Fox and Falcon, watching the Marquess of Eversley, portrait of superciliousness, march away from her, somehow impeccable even while missing a boot. And that man—aman so arrogant he called himself King—had made her decision for her.
    She wasn’t returning to that path. She was forging her own.
    North.
    To the place where she had never been judged, where she had lived far from the threat of insult or injury or ruination. To the place she’d been allowed to be herself, not the plainest, least interesting, unfun Talbot sister, but simply Sophie, a little girl with dreams of being the proprietress of a bookshop.
    She’d live out her days far from the glitter and gossip of London’s ballrooms, far from the scandal sheets, far from the aristocracy. And she would do so happily. Without men like the odious Marquess of Eversley setting the standard of right and proper.
    She’d apprise her family of the decision and settle in Cumbria. Happily. Her father would send her funds and she’d begin her life, free from Society.
    Happily.
    She leaned back against a particularly uncomfortable case, the corner of which gouged into the back of her neck. Not that she cared. She was too busy imagining this new, fresh life. Away from the cold, uncaring eyes of