Page 21 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

She gasped, an actual gasp, one hand going to her throat. “I never will.”

“Nay?” He took a slow step toward her, watching to see whether she would give ground.

She did not.

“That’s rather me point, ye ken.” He kept his voice low and easy, closing the distance by degrees. “Ye’re proper. Ye’re the most proper woman in London, and it’s done ye no good at all, because proper doesnae make a man lean in. Proper makes him look through ye to the next girl. It’s the other thing that snares them. A woman who kens exactly how proper she is and lets him see her set it down for half a breath, just for him, and then pick it up again before he can lay a hand on it. Tease. Promise nothin’. Leave him wantin’.”

He was close now, close enough to catch her mud-and-rosewater scent, close enough to hear her breath grow shallow.

“Ye already ken how. Ye did it to me in a hedge a year past, and I’ve nae been right since.”

She was looking up at him, not moving away. And there it was again, that same current that had run between them in the dark of the maze. Heavens, it was sharp enough to make even Magnus forget for a moment what he had come to this room, this city, this country to do.

Intriguing. That was the word for her—only that.

“You are standing extremely close, Your Grace,” Rosaline managed.

“I am.”

He did not move.

Neither did she, God help her.

She ought to have stepped back. Every principle she had shrieked at her to use it. Instead, she stayed exactly where she was, with her face tilted up to his and her heart thundering like a struck drum, and let herself be looked at by a man who plainly knew how to look.

It was appalling. It was also the most alive she had felt since a garden maze a year ago, and she was honest enough, at least with herself, to admit the two facts were the same fact.

He was trouble. She had known it the instant the mask came off in that corridor. A Scot under a cloud, a duke with a temper the whole of White’s was still whispering about, exactly the sort of man who could take everything she was trying to protect and burn it to the ground with one careless word. Every sensible thing in her said refuse him, walk away, never be alone with him again.

And yet…

Three Seasons she had spent shrinking against walls. Three Seasons of Samuel’s disappointment and her sisters’ futures riding on a talent she did not have and had never been taught.

Here was a man offering to teach it to her and, for the first time in her life, offering her a way to be the thing they needed her to be, a way to do something for Ivy, for Beatrice. If there was even a chance of that, a real chance, then perhaps she could hold her nose and take a lesson or two from the devil himself.

For them. Only for them.

“Suppose,” she heard herself say, her voice steadier than she had any right to expect, “purely as a matter of curiosity, that I did not refuse outright. How would such a thing even be conducted? We can hardly be seen with our heads bent together. One conversation too many and you will accomplish my ruin without any of the effort you claim not to want to make.”

The Duke’s eyes lit up, and she understood she had already lost the argument she had meant to win.

“We steal the moments.” He said it as though it were the simplest thing in the world. “A corridor here. A terrace there. A quiet room, five minutes at a time, and everyone is none the wiser.” His mouth curved. “And when ye’re ready for somethin’ more thorough than five stolen minutes, I’ve a very large house with a very discreet staff, and a garden door that opens without a sound.”

Rosaline stepped back at last, one hand pressed flat against her breastbone. “Your house. At night. Are you mad? If anyone so much as suspected I had been in your house after dark, unchaperoned, there would be no coming back from it. Not for me, and not for my sisters. That’s too great a risk.”

“It’s a risk I’d never let touch ye.” His voice dropped, and for once there was no tease in it. “Night meetings. Staff paid well enough to have seen nothin’ and remember less. I’ve kept bigger secrets than a lady comin’ to learn her letters, Rosaline. No one would ever ken.”

“I do not trust you, Your Grace.” She said it flatly because it was true, and because saying it steadied her.

“Naturally.” He inclined his head, granting her the point. “So, here’s how we’ll do it. We start where the risk is small. Stolen minutes at the events ye’re already attendin’, where ye can walk away from me at any moment ye please with a hundred people around to see ye do it. Ye learn what I’ve to teach and ye lose nothin’. And if the day comes when ye decide ye trust me enough for the rest, the garden door will be there. Nae before. Yer pace, from start to finish. I’ll nae push ye a step past it.”

It was, she thought, an alarmingly reasonable offer, and that alarmed her more than an unreasonable one would have.

She turned it over. She weighed the risk against the mud drying on her hand, the laughter still ringing in her ears, the look on Samuel’s face on the terrace, and she thought of Beatrice penned in that ring of bachelors with her chin up and her smile nailed on, and Ivy who wanted only to see the world and would never get the chance if the Tilcott name slipped one more rung.

She gulped, and hated herself a little, and made the decision anyway.

“Very well.” The words came out barely above a whisper. “The events only. For now. And the moment I say it ends, it ends, and you never speak of any of it to a living soul.”