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

by Evie Dunmore

at barely thirteen years of age, Lucie found she was too young to just decorously die of boredom. Her mother, on the other hand, would probably consider this quite a noble death.

Had she been born a man, none of this would be happening.

There was a black magic about a beautiful man who was easily intrigued and impossible to shake.

“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.”

Prove you are not altogether useless.” Useless. Another deep breath. Useless—Rochester’s favorite insult. Everyone who was not serving the earl’s plans in some capacity fell into this category, and yet, growing up, useless had always cut the deepest.

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.”

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

Some women never stopped believing. Up and down the land, in brothels and manor houses alike, women sat waiting for a man to rescue them. Were they aware that the cure they were hoping for could easily become their curse? Oh, they were. But ten years of glimpsing behind quiet, decorous façades had taught her that some never saw other options, and others never dared to seize them;

Only one gentleman of her acquaintance would read the Times like a pantomime villain.

Useless. Of all the insults she could have chosen, the little witch. She might as well have flown at him brandishing a scimitar.

She laid a finger against her collarbone. It felt hard and pronounced, beneath skin that was never touched, not by sunbeams, not by glances. Never by another’s hand.

How would it feel, if someone were to embrace her?

“There is an obvious line between frankness and insolence, Avi, and I’m impressed by how boldly you cross it.”

she had found something remarkable: a woman who had spoken in a loud, clear voice about ugly things.

A diffuse anger coursing round and round beneath her skin for years had finally found a direction.

Just like there was apparently a blade hidden in his silly cane, there was a mean, well-honed cutting edge to him, concealed by his glibness and his crimson waistcoat.

“It is a funny thing, shooting at a fellow man,” he said. “You go about it as the situation requires, but few people, if any, will tell you that a while later, you may turn morose at the oddest of times, and your nights may become haunted by peculiar dreams.”

There was a certain irony in that he could keep comrades safe under fire but not the women in his coddled life at Ashdown, not even the felines. Useless. Within these walls, he was that.

“I suppose I don’t rate truths that last only for a moment. Truth should be more durable. If you must put something in writing and make it rhyme, let it be timeless.

“You really should not have climbed to heights you can’t come down from again on your own. Believe me, I know.”

He had, until today, fancied himself a somewhat sophisticated hedonist. Apparently, it wasn’t so.

“A woman’s lack of voice is forever connected to the fact that she is a woman.”

“By your logic, only a flawless paragon of a man is entitled to create things of beauty,” he said. He smiled widely enough to show teeth. “There goes poetry, then. How about music? The composers were by and large insufferable.”

He’d mastered every variant of a seductive smile, but he never laughed.

I loved this sentence.

“The cynic is but an idealist who preempts the shock of disappointment by deriding everything himself.

and this.

Why don’t you try it yourself, sometime.” She looked down her nose at him. “Hiding in plain sight?” “No. Seduction.” She scoffed. “From what I observe, being female and breathing is enough to provoke interest in most men.” “Not men,” he said derisively. “A low standard by anyone’s imagination. No, try society. That ignorant, fickle, illiberal monolith.”

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

She had long assumed Tristan was careless and grew bored easily because his mind was lazy. She had been wrong. He grew bored easily because his mind was working entirely too fast.

“A long queue of women on Parliament Square, ready to cast their first vote,” Catriona added.

Foreshadowing the series finale <3

“Her name is Boudicca,” Lucie said, feeling Lady Salisbury’s prodding stare. “After a belligerent pagan queen,” Professor Marlow said. “How droll.”

She took Catriona’s hand and nodded at the players. “Will we have to feign ineptitude and miss all the goals?” “Of course,” Hattie said cheerfully. “At least if you wish for one of these gentlemen to ask you to dance tonight. A waltz, wasn’t it? I recommend Lord Palmer, he has light feet and a secure grip.” “I despise having to hit a croquet ball at just the wrong angle.” Catriona clasped her hand more tightly. “I shall win it for us,” she said softly. “I never dance.”

Oh these women <3

The voice was all but blaring inside his head. It was Wordsworth. He raised the tumbler to his lips, gulping down the contents. Wordsworth meant he had it bad. His stomach churned with an emotion he found difficult to endure while standing still.

An escort was nowhere in sight. She would enter a ballroom filled with people who regarded her as a freak, alone. In a bollocks contest with the men presently surrounding him, this woman would leave them all in the dust.

Could there be a humiliation greater than begging for love?

It was hardly degrading to fawn over a man who was fawning right back.

She was like a blade of grass, could be near flat one day, upright again the next.

He went down on his knees before her, his expression a commingling of apprehension and want. “Hell,” he said softly. “I cannot deny you when you say please.”

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

although one might as well lay claim to the wind, a feeling returned and returned: she is yours now. She is yours.

In his arms, she breathed so deeply, she went dizzy from it.

how did one go on living well and fully present, knowing that the brightest ecstasies lay already in the past?

“It was so ugly, you see.” She propped herself up on her elbow. “Ugly,” he said to the sky. “And senseless. The senselessness is the worst of it.”

one may well live and die for a worthy cause, but a senseless one?”

He was holding her face, and she felt his thumbs, very gently, touch her cheekbones. “Perhaps I have always liked and admired you, Lucie.”

He was rearranging her past one careless sentence at a time.

It seemed logical and natural that when there was a tender past, and a magical now, there would be a future as well.

“Of course.” Soft irony tinged his voice. “I should have known that politics would please you best.”

Did she know she was in love with him? He was painfully aware that he was.

He had not wanted to be good in half a lifetime, but now he did; he fair ached with it.

She slept as she lived: entangled in her work.