Page 36 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

Rosaline stood near the window with a cup of coffee she did not want, trying to feel clean. It was a strange and unpleasant sensation, and she turned it over with distaste.

She had performed for Denby, and Denby had flushed and stammered and looked at her mouth as though he owned it. The whole of it had left her feeling as though she wanted a wash.

And yet in the sweet shop, with the identical lesson and a very different man, she had felt nothing of the kind. She had felt looked at, yes, but warm with it, seen rather than devoured, and she despised herself thoroughly for noticing the difference.

It is for my family, she reminded herself—every bit of it. Denby earns four thousand pounds a year, and his mother likes quiet girls. That is what matters.

It did not help nearly as much as it ought to have.

“All right.” Beatrice appeared at her elbow with two glasses of ratafia and handed one over. “I have been watching you for a fortnight now, and I am no longer able to hold my tongue, so out with it. Who are you, and what have you done with my sister?”

“I have not the faintest idea what you mean.”

“You know precisely what I mean. Three weeks ago, you could not order a lemonade without rehearsing it. Tonight, you took Lord Denby apart and put him back together grateful for the experience, and you did something with a syllabub that I am frankly too young to have witnessed.” Beatrice’s eyes were bright and searching. “People do not change like this in a fortnight, Rosaline. Not without a reason. What is the reason?”

Rosaline sipped her ratafia to buy herself a moment.

“The reason,” she said carefully, “is that I have decided to secure a match this Season—a real one. And a woman who means to be chosen must first learn how to be seen. That is all it is, Bea. Motivation. It sharpens the mind wonderfully.”

Beatrice narrowed her eyes. She did not believe it, that much was plain, and for a dreadful moment, Rosaline thought she would say so.

“And why the sudden appetite for matrimony,” Beatrice said instead, “from the girl who spent three Seasons treating every proposal like a summons to the gallows?”

That, at least, Rosaline could answer honestly, and the honesty steadied her voice.

“Because I would like to be my own mistress.” She looked down into her glass. “I am one-and-twenty, Bea, and I have spent every one of those years under the roof and the thumb of one man or another. If I marry, and marry sensibly, I might at last run my own house, keep my own hours, have my sisters over whenever I please, without asking anyone’s leave. I might find a husband who is a great many things Samuel is not.” She allowed herself the smallest wicked pause. “A shade less discerning, for a start.”

Beatrice snorted so loudly that she had to press her glass to her lips to smother it.

“Discerning,” she repeated, delighted. “Oh, that is generous. That is the understatement of the year. Discerning. Our brother, who last week returned a whole ham to the kitchens because he did not care for the angle at which it had been sliced.”

“He did not.”

“He did. Cook told Ivy, and Ivy told me, and now I am telling you, and none of us shall ever unknow it.” Beatrice was laughing properly now behind her hand.

Rosaline found herself laughing with her, the tight unclean feeling in her chest loosening at last into something warm and ordinary and good. For a moment, they were simply two sisters laughing at a window, and it was the best she had felt all evening.

Then, out of the corner of her eye, she caught movement across the drawing room. It was the Duke of Greythorne, crossing unhurriedly toward the tall glass doors at the far end that opened onto a balcony, a dark shape against the candlelight. Just before he stepped through them, he turned his head, and for the briefest instant, his eyes found hers across the crowded room. They held, then moved once, deliberately, into the dark beyond the doors.

Then he was gone, out into the night air, and the invitation hung behind him plain as anything.

Rosaline’s pulse did the unforgivable thing it did only for him.

“Bea.” She set down her cup, not meeting her sister’s knowing eyes. “It is dreadfully packed in here. I would like a breath of fresh air for only a few minutes. If Samuel comes looking, would you⁠—”

“Tell him you have gone to repair a torn hem and will be an age?”

Rosaline risked a look up and wished she had not. Beatrice was watching her with an expression that saw a great deal more than Rosaline would have liked.

But she nodded and stepped smoothly sideways to block their brother’s view. “Go on. A few minutes. I have never in my life seen a hem so stubbornly torn.”

Rosaline squeezed her sister’s hand once, in gratitude and in warning both, before slipping away through the crowd toward the open doors, the dark, and the man waiting in it.

CHAPTER 16

“We cannot stay out here long. Someone will notice we are both gone at the same moment, and then it will not matter how many syllabubs I ruined myself over tonight.”

Rosaline stopped an arm’s length onto the balcony, her arms folded against the cold, the blue silk catching the light from the room behind her.