Page 38 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“There’s a ball next week,” he said quickly. “The Hartwell ball. Ye’ll attend it.”

“I expect so. Samuel lives for such things.”

“Then ye’ll want a lesson before it.” He held her eyes. “Dancin’.”

That startled a short laugh out of her. “I know how to dance, Your Grace. I have known how since I was nine. I can manage a quadrille without disgracing anyone.”

“I’ve no doubt ye can dance. I’m nae offerin’ to teach ye to dance. I’m offerin’ to teach ye to dance with a man, so he leaves the floor unable to recall his own name, let alone the figure. That’s a different thing entirely.”

“And how,” she asked, “is that different from ordinary dancing?”

“The difference is what he’s thinkin’ about when the music stops.” He let her make of it what she would, and watched her make rather a lot of it.

“I see,” she said, though she plainly did not, and the not-quite-knowing had her breath shallowing again.

“Now.” He stepped back half a pace, because he needed her clear-headed for what came next. “Have ye a maid ye can trust? One who’d hold her tongue against her own mother if it came to it.”

Rosaline blinked. “I… yes. Sarah. She has been with me since I came out. She would never—why are you asking me that?”

“Because a lesson like this cannae be had in five stolen minutes on a balcony.” He kept his voice quiet and even. “Come to my house. Tomorrow night. Alone.”

The color drained from her face and then flooded back. “Your house. At night. Have you the faintest notion what would become of me if⁠—”

“No one will see ye.” He did not move toward her, only let the certainty of it sit between them. “An unmarked carriage. A garden door that opens on a mews, not a street. Staff paid well enough and long enough to have gone blind and deaf. Ye’d come after midnight and be home before the birds, and no one alive would ever ken ye’d left yer bed.” He held her gaze. “Ye said at the start that when ye trusted me enough for the rest, the door would be there. It’s there. Yers to walk through or nae. I’ll nae say another word to persuade ye.”

She stood very still, and he watched the conflict move across her face, everything sensible in her pulling hard for the safety of the drawing room and the life she knew.

And then something else came behind it, and he knew before she said it what had turned the scale, because it was the only thing that ever turned it for her.

She was thinking of her sisters. Beatrice, and Ivy asleep at home, and the whole freight of futures she had decided years ago were hers alone to carry.

“If I am caught,” she murmured, “it is not only me. It is all of them.”

“I ken. That’s why ye’ll nae be caught.” He let a beat pass. “I’d sooner cut off my own hand than be the thing that harms those girls. Ye have that too, for whatever a Scot’s word is worth to ye by now.”

It was worth something. He saw that it was in the way her shoulders lowered.

“After midnight,” she agreed at last, so quietly that he nearly lost it under the music. “Tomorrow.”

“After midnight.” Something eased in his chest that he did not examine. “I’ll send the carriage. Black, no crest. The driver will say nothin’ to ye but the one word, Greythorne, so ye ken it’s mine and nae some other devil’s.”

“Greythorne,” she repeated, and the sound of his title in her mouth did something to him he chose to ignore.

“Go in now.” He stepped aside, clearing her path. “Ye’ve been gone long enough to mend three hems. Go and be seen bein’ proper, and let no one guess ye’ve just agreed to something ye shouldnae do.”

She went.

At the door, she paused, one hand on the frame. She looked over her bare shoulder back at him and did the thing he’d taught her: the lashes and the slow lift of her eyes and the beat held too long. He could not tell whether she meant it as a lesson well learned or something else entirely.

Then she disappeared into the light and the noise.

Magnus stood alone on the balcony, his heart pounding like a green boy’s, and understood that he had just invited a great deal of trouble into his house.

Still, he could not bring himself to regret a moment of it.

CHAPTER 17

“You are certain, My Lady? Truly certain? Because once you are in that carriage, I cannot help you out of it.”