Page 1 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

CHAPTER 1

“If you turn back now, Rosaline, I will never forgive you. And neither will my grandmother.”

Abigail’s gloved fingers closed around her wrist and pulled toward the door.

Rosaline planted her feet in the gravel. Every window of the great house burned gold, and music threaded out from somewhere deep within, low and strange, unlike any quadrille she had ever stood up for.

“Your grandmother would forgive me anything,” she replied. “She once forgave a footman for setting the topiary alight.”

“She said the peacock looked improved afterward.” Abigail laughed and tugged again. “Which is exactly why I adore her, and exactly why she is the only soul in London who could have gotten us past that door. Do you know what she said when she pressed the card into my hand? ‘A girl turns nineteen but once, my dove. Go and be a little wicked while it still becomes you.’”

“And you took that as instruction.”

“I took it as a birthday gift, and I intend to unwrap it.” Abigail’s eyes shone brightly. “One night, Rosaline. One. The Season is over. Tomorrow, your brother will pack you and both your sisters into a carriage and shut the three of you in Kent until spring, and I shall not see your face for half a year. Grant me this before he does.”

Rosaline drew her cloak tighter. Two more carriages had rolled up behind theirs, masked faces at the windows.

“I told Samuel I would sleep under your roof tonight,” she said. “Under your roof. Not on the outskirts of London, at a house whose name I do not even know.”

“You are sleeping under my roof. After.” Abigail caught both her hands now. “You told your brother the truth, more or less, and you may scold me the whole way home in the morning. But if you make me walk in there alone on my birthday, I shall weep on the step, and then someone truly will recognize us.”

A footman passed with a tray of something that steamed and smelled of cloves. Beyond the doors, a woman’s laughter climbed high and broke off into hush.

“Half a year,” Rosaline murmured.

“Half a year of your brother deciding which dull baron gets to bore you into the grave.” Abigail squeezed her hands. “Come, and be no one for a single evening. Then go home and be Lady Rosaline again, dutiful to the bone.”

Rosaline looked once more at the drive, at the safe dark road that led back toward everything expected of her, and let her friend drag her up the steps.

The moment they crossed the threshold, a butler in deep green livery bowed and lifted a tray toward them. Not glasses, but masks.

“The house asks that no guest go unmasked,” he said, as though this were the most ordinary request in England. “And that no guest go by a name that belongs to them.”

Rosaline’s hand hovered. Silk and papier-mâché, gilded and feathered, a dozen faces staring up from black velvet. A swan. A cat with jeweled eyes. A stag.

Her fingers settled on a fox, russet and sharp-nosed, its edges lined with gold.

“Oh, that one.” Abigail plucked a white dove mask for herself and tied it in place before Rosaline could think better of any of it. “You see? Already the cleverest choice in the room. Tonight you are the Fox, and I am the Dove, and neither of us has ever heard of a Rosaline or an Abigail in our lives.”

“Abigail—”

“Dove.” She pressed the fox mask to Rosaline’s face and knotted the ribbon at the back of her head, gentle where her words were not. “Say it. If you slip and use my name in here, someone will carry it out by morning, and we will both be ruined before the banns are ever read. So, who am I?”

Rosaline breathed in the faint smell of paint and glue. Behind the mask, the crowded hall tilted into something less real, and the tight knot in her chest loosened a fraction.

She was nobody. For a few hours, she owed no one anything.

“You are the Dove.”

“There she is.” Abigail beamed. “Now, come and be wicked with me.”

The house had not been arranged for a party so much as staged for one. Mirrors doubled every candle until the corridors ran on in gold forever. A quartet played behind a screen painted with a forest at night, and the guests drifting between the rooms wore the faces of beasts, birds, and half-remembered gods.

No one curtsied. No one announced anyone.

One man moved through the crush without offering so much as a nod, tall and unhurried, a plain, black mask across the upper half of his face.

A dowager in peacock feathers posed herself as he passed and got nothing for it, not the smallest tilt of his head. Then his gaze found Rosaline alone against the wall, and he stopped, and he bowed to her. Then he was gone again into the candlelight, before she had gathered her wits enough to do more than stare after him. “There.” Abigail seized her arm and steered her toward a set of open glass doors, where footmen were funneling the guests out into the darkened gardens.