A Rogue by Any Other Name by Sarah MacLean Read Free Book Online

The land that was attached to her hand in marriage. The land that Tommy and any number of handsome young suitors would happily accept in exchange for plucking Penelope from her family fold and taking her to wife.
    How very romantic.
    She’d gone too many years hoping for more. Believing—even as she told herself not to—that she might be that lucky, too. That she might find something more, some one more.
    No. She wouldn’t think on it.
    Especially not now that she was headed straight for precisely the kind of marriage she’d always hoped to avoid. Now, she had no doubt that her father was committed to marrying off his eldest child this season—to Tommy or someone else. She considered the unmarried men of the ton who were desperate enough to marry a twenty-eight-year-old with a broken engagement in her past. Not a single one seemed like a husband she could care for.
    A husband she could love.
    So, it was Tommy.
    It would be Tommy.
    She braced herself against the cold, ducking her face into her cloak and pulling her hood low over her brow. Well-bred ladies did not take walks in the dead of night, she knew, but all of Surrey was asleep, it was miles to the nearest neighbor, and the bitter cold matched her bitter irritation at the events of the day.
    It was not fair that a broken engagement from the distant past made for such a challenging present. One would think that eight years would have made London forget the legendary autumn of 1823, but instead, Penelope was plagued with her history. In ballrooms, the whispers remained; in ladies’ salons, the fans still fluttered like hummingbird wings, hiding the quiet conversations of which she caught snippets now and then—hushed speculation about what she’d done to lose the interest of her duke, or about why she thought herself high enough to turn down the other offers.
    It wasn’t that she thought highly of herself, of course.
    It was that she thought highly of the promise of more.
    Of a life filled with more than the husband she’d been trained to expect would be fond of her but not love her, and the child or two who she’d always assumed would love her but not know her.
    Was that too much to ask?
    Apparently.
    She marched up a snowy rise, pausing briefly on the crest of the ridge, looking down toward the blackness of the lake below, the lake that marked the edge of Needham and Bourne lands . . . or, former Bourne lands. And, as she stood, staring into the darkness, thinking on her future, she realized just how little she wanted a quiet life of pastel colors and quadrilles and tepid lemonade.
    She wanted more.
    The word whispered through her thoughts on a wave of sadness.
    More.
    More than she would have, it turned out.
    More than she ever should have dreamed.
    It wasn’t that she was unhappy with her existence. It was luxurious, really. She was well kept and well fed and wanted for very little. She had a family that was, for the most part, tolerable, and friends with whom she could spend an afternoon now and then. And, when it came right down to it, her days weren’t that much different now than they would be if she were married to Tommy.
    Why did it make her so sad to think of marrying Tommy, then?
    After all, he was kind, generous, had a modicum of good humor and a warm smile. He was not so handsome as to attract attention and not so clever as to intimidate.
    Those all seemed like suitable characteristics.
    She imagined taking his hand and allowing him to escort her to a ball, to the theatre, to dinner. She imagined dancing with him. Smiling up at him. She imagined the feel of his hand in hers.
    It was —
    It was clammy.
    There was no reason to believe that Tommy would have moist hands, of course, indeed, he likely had warm, perfectly dry hands. Penelope wiped her gloved palm on her skirts nonetheless. Weren’t husbands supposed to have strong, firm hands? Especially in fantasy?
    Why didn’t Tommy?
    He was a good friend. It wasn’t very kind of her to imagine