A Rogue of One's Own (A League of Extraordinary Women, #2)

by Evie Dunmore

A powerful ache welled from his core, an anxious urgency, a dread, of sorts—this was a rare, precious opportunity and he was woefully unprepared to grasp it. He had not known girls like her existed, outside the fairy books and the princesses of the Nordic sagas he had to read in secret . . .

There were things a woman could do just because she was a woman, such as fainting dead away over some minor chagrin, and there were things a woman could not do because she was a woman.

Mary Wollstonecraft: I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves.

“Have you not read your Darwin? The male flaunts himself, the female chooses, it has ever been thus. Beware the determinedly chasing male—he is hoping you won’t notice his plumage is subpar.”

I’m afraid the idea that a woman is a person, whether married or not, is so inherently radical no matter which way I present it I shall be considered a nuisance.”

A dithering leader was about as useful as a wet blanket. Besides, the whole movement depended on women acting before they felt ready.

I understand how being pleasant can keep the peace, but how will it win a war?”

“A hero and a pest, a man can be both.”

However, the trouble with words was that putting them onto paper was a bloody slog even at the height of inspiration.

Fight, she had wanted to tell her mother after the fateful morning in the library. Fight! when Wycliffe’s indiscretions and belittling comments, relentlessly sprinkled over their daily lives, continued. But her mother never fought. She had pressed her lips together, and become thinner, and paler, and haughtier, until she had haunted Wycliffe Hall like a wronged wraith, and the more martyred and quieter she had become, the louder Lucie had wanted to yell.

She had not yet truly comprehended power then, and how treacherously easy it was to side with it, and to ask that the downtrodden ones change before one demanded the tyrant change.

A loathsome thing, an unchained mind, so very uncontrollable.

“It’s quite the same,” Tristan said. “Idealism, cynicism. Two sides of the same coin.” “And the coin, what would it be?” He waved his hand with the cigarette. “A yearning to control our fickle destinies.” His tone was faintly dramatic. “The cynic is but an idealist who preempts the shock of disappointment by deriding everything himself.

“At least tell me why?” He raised his brows. “Who knows. Perhaps I am trying to get into your good graces, so you will give in to your attraction at last and come to me.” His resonant voice had gone deeper and scratchy on the edges when he said come to me, and it sent a hot jolt of emotions from her middle down into her toes. For a beat, she was back in the stables, on top of him, possessed by the dark need to feel his mouth on hers.

“Society is dumber but stronger than you,” he murmured. “Be devious. Be subtle. If you can.”

And the truth was, she felt drawn to Tristan in all his wicked glory. It was why her skin prickled as if she were floating in champagne when he put his hand on her waist, it was why sometimes she felt hot when thinking of all the ways she disliked him. It was a sick desire outside the bounds of reason, which was perhaps why it appealed. A good woman was not even supposed to have words for the parts of her body that ached when he looked at her like this, his gaze reaching deep as though he wanted her secrets. But she had long been deemed a shameless woman.

There had been a world of humiliation in your shrieking and pleading for a scrap of your husband’s love while he flaunted his mistresses for all to see. Could there be a humiliation greater than begging for love?

Annabelle looked as though she had always been destined to be someone. Poise and pride were in her marrow. It was just a bitter pill to swallow that it had taken the money and the protection of a man to help her achieve her destiny. But that was how it was. And perhaps, she, Lucie, was turning into a bitter old crone before her time.

Besides, even to her bitter crone eyes, it was obvious that the duke was besotted with Annabelle. He wasn’t an expressive man but inevitably, his attention shifted and settled on his wife, wherever she happened to be in the room. In terms of affection, their union appeared balanced. It was hardly degrading to fawn over a man who was fawning right back.

Lord help whoever got between Hattie and her quest for her next project.

She watched his gaze fill with an unholy light.

An entrancing sensation, to be fragile and to be handled with care.

He would do whatever she asked of him, she understood. She looked down at him, glorious in his nudity, and briefly, she felt drunk on the possibilities that came with having a lover of few principles. It felt peculiarly close to freedom.

Her detractors had classed her correctly all along, that she was not made right as a woman, that she was wicked. She knew because she felt right, lying sated on his chest, on a mattress that creaked, when she should have felt horrid. There was no honor in what they were doing, and yet she became alive in his arms in ways she had not expected to be possible; it was as though she were fully growing into her skin under his touch, stretching herself, in fact, when she had believed herself fully formed.

Until now, she had not been entirely certain whether he would fall victim to the peculiar, selective blindness which afflicted so many otherwise perfectly sensible people when confronted with something ugly; whether he would claw for explanations, no matter how ludicrous, or would try to belittle away what unnerved him rather than face inconvenient truths. She should have trusted him. His mind was fluid and fast, it resented the rigidness of conventions rather than find comfort in their constraints.

She was an inch from becoming his creature. So close to becoming someone who’d plead with their husband when he did not come home at night, who made excuses when they lied, who lied to themselves only so they could carry on orbiting around the fickle creature that was man. She was so close, when Tristan was neither the source of the food she ate, nor the roof that sheltered her, nor the name protecting her.

She must have held a hope deep down that despite what the world told her every day, she was just as deserving to be handled with care as the next woman.

“Then for your sake, I hope there won’t be a child,” he murmured. “Because if there is, I give you my word now: I shall drag you to the altar, bodily, if I must, and you shall say I do, and politics can go hang.”

He had listened. During their argument at Wycliffe Hall, at the height of his own emotions, he had listened. And he was addressing her worries, rather than judging her bitterly, as was the common, if not only, reaction when a woman questioned her ordained role as mother and wife. She was rather certain she loved him then.

Love, she was learning, was needing someone even when he offered nothing but himself.