Page 11 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

The toast turned to ash in Rosaline’s mouth. She set it down. “I have not forgotten.”

“What did you discuss last night?” Beatrice looked between them, her flippancy gone. “Rosaline? What does he mean?”

“Nothing.” Rosaline reached for the teapot to give her hands something to do. “He means I ought to try harder at the next event, and he is right. More tea, Bea? You have that Alcott dinner to survive. You had better be fortified.”

Beatrice held her gaze for a moment, unconvinced.

Whatever this was, it was Rosaline’s to carry. Not Beatrice’s. Not little Ivy’s, who was asleep upstairs and blessedly ignorant of the arithmetic that governed their futures.

Rosaline poured the tea, steadied her hand, and said something light about the weather. Samuel returned to his letters, satisfied that the family's machine was running as he had built it to.

“He was there? The Scot? Your Scot from the maze, in the flesh?” Abigail seized both of Rosaline’s hands and very nearly upset the tea tray. “Tell me everything this instant. Leave nothing out. If you leave out even one word, I shall perish on this very settee and haunt you.”

“He is not my Scot.” Rosaline withdrew her hands and folded them in her lap, a bulwark against her friend’s delight. “He is a man I collided with in a corridor. That is the entire romance of it.”

“You collided with him. In a corridor. Alone.” Abigail pressed a hand to her chest. “Rosaline, do you understand what this is? A masked house, a hedge in the dark, a stolen kiss, and a year later the very same man walks out of a ballroom straight into your path, in an empty corridor? That is not a coincidence. That is Providence with a sense of theater! My grandmother would call it fate, surely.”

“Your grandmother would be wrong, and so are you.” Rosaline made herself say it plainly, the way one pressed a splinter out before it festered. “Abigail, think. What sort of man attends that house, that hunt, with that prize? A respectable one? He was scandalous enough to be there in the first place, the same as we were, only we had your mad darling grandmother’s invitation and the good sense to be ashamed of ourselves after.”

“I was not remotely ashamed.”

“You are the exception to every rule ever written.” Rosaline almost smiled. “But I cannot afford him, Abigail. Not a man like that. Whatever he is, however he makes me—” She stopped and started again. “I need a sensible match. A dull, safe, respectable man with a dull, safe name, one that lifts my sisters rather than dragging them into whatever storm follows a Scot who kisses strangers in gardens. Samuel has made the price of failure very clear.”

The mirth vanished from Abigail’s face. She reached over and took Rosaline’s hand again, gently this time.

“You always do that,” she noted. “Every time there is a door open in front of you, something for you, only for you, you look straight through it to see who else might be hurt if you walked through.” She squeezed. “When do you get to want a thing, Rosaline? Just because you want it, not because it is sensible, safe, or good for the girls. When is it your turn?”

“It is not about turns.” Rosaline looked down at their joined hands. “It is my duty. I am the eldest. Samuel is Samuel, and the girls have only me between them and him. If wanting a thing costs them their futures, then it is a thing I have no business wanting. That is all.”

“That is the saddest sensible thing I have ever heard.”

“It is only sensible. There is nothing sad about it.”

But even as she said it, even with her friend’s hand warm in hers and the argument neatly won, some traitorous part of her had slipped its leash and gone wandering back down a lamplit corridor, back further still to a hedge in the dark, to a warm unhurried mouth and a low voice calling her clever, to the one moment in three long Seasons when she had wanted something purely and for no one but herself.

She had kissed him back. A year after, and she still could not make herself sorry for it. That, she suspected, was the real trouble, and no amount of sense in the world had ever managed to talk her out of it.

CHAPTER 5

“You are never at home, Magnus. I called on you twice this week, and both times your man stood in the doorway swearing you’d only just stepped out. A house that grand, and you treat it like a coaching inn.”

“It doesnae feel like a house.” Magnus turned his glass on the table between them, watching the candlelight swim in the whisky. Around them White’s murmured on, low and moneyed, a hundred Englishmen at their leisure. “Every stick of furniture in it was chosen by an Englishman for an Englishman. The portraits on the wall are strangers. I walk the halls at night, and it’s like wearin’ another man’s coat. Too tight around the shoulders and smellin’ of him besides.”

“And White’s does feel like home.” Leo gestured at the paneled room, the liveried servants, the oil paintings of horses no one living had ever ridden. “The most English room in the most English city in the world. You come here every evening. I’m beginning to think you enjoy your own suffering.”

“I come here because ye’re here, and because the men I need are here.” Magnus set the glass down. He had not touched it. “That’s why I crossed the border, Leo. Nae the shootin’, nae the Season, nae the pleasure of bein’ asked whether we keep our cattle indoors. I came for the men who move things in this town. The ones who sat on their hands while me faither was taken and never once asked why.”

Leo’s easy manner cooled a degree, the way it always did when the conversation turned to this.

He leaned in. “Then you need to be strategic, not just present. Sitting in the corner glaring at earls will get you nowhere.” He lowered his voice. “You want to know who moved against your father. That knowledge lives in a very small number of rooms, and the men who hold the keys to those rooms are two or three at most. The Earl of Danvers, for one. He has sat on every committee worth the name for twenty years and forgets nothing. Viscount Sedgwick, for another. Nothing passes through the Lords that Sedgwick has not read, weighed, and filed away for the day it becomes useful.”

“Then I’ll speak to them.”

“You will not simply speak to them.” Leo shook his head. “You will earn the right to be spoken to. These are not men who answer the questions of strangers. They answer men they have decided are worth the trouble. You must be charming, McCormack. God help us all.” He drained his own glass and stood up. “Come. There is a cluster of the right sort by the fire, and no better time than now for a rehearsal. Say little. Smile more than is natural to you. And whatever you do, let the barbs land where they will and do not answer them.”

Magnus rose. “I can hold me tongue.”

“I have known you for three years,” Leo scoffed. “You cannot.”