All The Ways To Ruin A Rogue(101)

            His life . . . his future was rushing away from him and it was his fault. He had to get it back. He had to get her back.

            Aurelia. She’d always been there. Larger than life.

            Desperation hummed inside him, an anxious energy that propelled him, coating his mouth with bitter panic.

            He loved her. He was in love with her. He’d loved her for a long time, but recently that love had changed, grown into something so fierce and consuming. Elation swelled inside him. Fear was there, coupled with the memory of his family—his father, but for the first time the prospect did not cripple him.

            Loss was a part of life. An undeniable absolute. There was no escaping it. Only learning to accept the inevitability of it—and live well and fully in the interim—that was reaching contentment and happiness. Finding someone, joy, love . . . that was never a guarantee. But he had found it. He’d found it with Aurelia. And he turned his back on it. On her.

            Never again. No more.

            He nudged his heels and urged his mount faster.

            The wind howled. Several branches snapped off trees and littered the road. He stayed alert, watching the ground ahead of him, making sure his mount avoided some of the bigger branches that could trip him. He was so busy studying the ground immediately before him that he wasn’t looking into the far distance. Not until he heard the wild whinny of a horse.

            His gaze snapped up, spotting the mangled corpse of a carriage ahead. He pulled up on his reins, everything in him clamping down hard as he recognized his own carriage. Bile surged in his throat. One of the doors was ripped from its moors, hanging askew. The sight of his family’s crest was a slap in the face. A haunting reminder. Nearly two decades ago another carriage bearing his family’s crest had met such a fate. His mother and sister had died inside it.

            “Aurelia,” he choked, digging in his heels and launching his mount forward.

            He jumped from the horse before it came to a full stop. “Aurelia!” He ran to the carriage and grabbed hold of the door, ducking his head to look within. Empty.

            “My lord!”

            He turned to face Thomas, the coachman. The man looked hale except for the gash in his forehead. Blood welled up from the wound before the rain washed it clean.

            He grabbed the man by the shoulders. “Where is she? My wife—”

            The coachman looked over his shoulder and gestured toward the tree line.

            Max turned. The moment seemed to drag on into infinity as his eyes searched for his wife, dreading what he would find, what he would see. He begged to God to spare her and thereby him. To give him this.

            To not take her, too.

            Aurelia stared at Max through a gray wash of rain. She blinked, convinced her eyes deceived her. Why was he here?

            He bounded across the distance and reached for her, his hands gentle on her arms, as though she were some fragile piece of crystal. “Are you hurt?”

            He’d come for her.

            She shook her head, trying to shake sense into herself. Her knee ached where she had banged it into the side paneling of the carriage, but she was otherwise unharmed. “I banged my knee and scraped my elbow . . . nothing more.” She motioned to Cecily where she sat at the base of the tree. “Cecily hurt her ankle.”

            Cecily waved her hand. “It’s nothing.”

            Before Aurelia could speak again, Max scooped her up in his arms and lowered her to the ground beneath the tree. They had taken shelter under it, the thick canopy of branches and leaves blocking most of the rain.

            Her hand fluttered to his shoulder. “I’m not hurt, Max.”