Page 17 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

For a breath, she did not look away. The party went on between them, silk and laughter, the thin scraping of the quartet, but none of it reached the narrow line drawn taut from her eyes to his. Then color bloomed up her throat and into her cheeks, the same tide he had watched rise at the musicale, and she dropped her gaze to the untouched glass in her hand and would not lift it.

Magnus was still looking when Leo returned and pressed a cold glass into his hand.

“You have that expression again,” Leo noted. “The lightning-struck one. I do wish you would tell me what causes it. I should like to bottle it and sell it.” He followed Magnus’s gaze to the hedge and the still figure beside it.

“Ah. That is your harpist-ignoring mystery from the Pemberton musicale. I made some enquiries after you spent an entire evening staring a hole in the side of her head.” Leo looked insufferably pleased with himself. “Lady Rosaline.”

“Ye went and found out?”

“Of course, I went and found out. You were never going to.” Leo drank. “Eldest of the Darton sisters. The old Earl died some years back and left the title to his son, Samuel, and not a great deal else to go with it. Three girls to see settled and a name that’s slipped a rung or two since the father’s death. The brother means to marry them up and back into consequence, starting with that one, only she’s shy to the point of injury, and it’s her third Season without an offer, and the ton has started to talk. They call her the Darton statue when they’re being unkind. Which is always.” He glanced at Magnus. “Why do you ask? You have the look of a man asking for reasons.”

Magnus lowered his voice until it would carry no further than the two of them. “Because I met her before, Leo. A year past. In a hedge maze, at a certain house, on the night of a certain hunt.” He watched the understanding dawn on Leo’s face. “She is the fox.”

Leo choked for the second time in an hour, this time on champagne, and had to cover it with a cough behind his hand.

“No.” He recovered, his eyes very bright. “The fox? The one you crossed half of London hunting for? That is her? The Darton statue?”

“She’s no statue.” Magnus heard how it sounded but did not take it back. “That’s the trouble of it. She’s a lady, Leo. A proper one, guarded like the crown jewels by a brother who I’m sure already warned her off me. And she has two younger sisters whose futures depend on the match she makes. There’s nothin’ simple about her. Nothin’ at all.” He turned the cold glass in his hand. “It’s a great deal more complicated than a mask in a garden.”

“Or a great deal simpler.” Leo was watching him with open, dangerous interest now. “A proper lady in her third Season, a desperate brother, three sisters to settle. Do you know what that is, Magnus? That is a woman in the market for a husband, whether she’ll say it aloud or not. And you, God help both of us, are a duke.”

“Marriage isnae what I came south for.” Magnus heard the words come out of him flat and certain, the way he’d said them a hundred times. “I’ve a faither to answer for. That’s the whole of me business here, and a wife’s nae part of it.”

“Of course it isn’t,” Leo said pleasantly.

“It isnae.”

“I heard you the first time.” Leo sipped his champagne and said nothing more, which was somehow worse than anything he might have said.

Magnus meant to let it end there. He meant to turn his attention back to the lawn, to Draycott and Sedgwick and Thursdays, to the small cold work that had cost him a father and brought him across a border and would not be finished by mooning over a woman he had no business wanting.

He meant to. But his eyes had already drifted back to the hedge and the quiet figure in its shade of their own accord before he had decided a single thing, and he could not for the life of him tear them away.

CHAPTER 8

“To Lord Ackerley and his bride! A love match, they tell me. Who would have guessed it?”

The toast went up across the lawn in a warm scatter of applause, glasses lifting, heads turning to find the happy pair. There stood Lord Ackerley, flushed and pleased, and on his arm was the Dunmore girl, whom the whole of London had written off two Seasons past as too plain and too poor to trouble anyone.

She was beaming. He was beaming. It was, by all accounts, a genuine match.

Rosaline clapped with the rest, because that was the proper thing to do.

“Well.” Beatrice leaned close, under the noise. “There is hope for the overlooked yet. Perhaps they mean to marry us off in reverse order of likelihood, and you and I shall be duchesses by Michaelmas.”

Rosaline almost smiled.

Then Samuel was at her shoulder, and the smile died before it formed.

“Do you see?” He kept his voice low, pleasant for any passing eye, and it pricked her like a needle. “Do you see her, Rosaline? Honoria Dunmore, who has neither your face, your name, nor a shilling to bless herself with, has landed a baron, while you stand at the edge of the lawn collecting dust. Two Seasons ago, that girl was a joke. Two. And she has managed in a summer what you cannot manage in three years of my time and my money.”

“That is grotesquely unfair.” Beatrice lifted her chin. “Rosaline is worth ten of the Dunmore girl, and if the men in this garden are too witless to⁠—”

“Did I ask you?” Samuel did not so much as glance at her. “When I want the opinion of an eighteen-year-old who cannot keep a civil tongue in her head, I shall write to you for it. Be quiet.”

Beatrice went white, then red, and shut her mouth.

Samuel turned back to Rosaline. His hand found the small of her back, and it was not gentle. “You have wasted enough of this Season sulking in corners. There.” He steered her about and pushed her toward a cluster of gentlemen gathered near the rose walk. “That is Lord Fenwick’s set. Every man in it has land and none of them a wife. Go and be charming. Secure someone’s interest before the afternoon is out, or so help me, Rosaline, we shall have words at home that you will not enjoy. Go.”