Page 4 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

Rosaline stared at it.

A low sound came from behind her. She realized, with heat climbing her throat, that the great brute was laughing at her.

“Oh, aye,” he managed. “A fine hunter ye are. Ye’ve cornered yerself twice now, and the fox is meant to be the one who kens the ground.”

“I am tired.” She rounded on him. “I am tired, and it is dark, and the man who designed this clearly bears a grudge against anyone with sense.”

“Or against anyone too proud to accept a hand when it’s offered.” He canted his head again, and the torchlight slid along his jaw. “Ye’ve the look of a lass who’d walk into the same wall a third time before she’d say the word.”

“And what word is that?”

“Help.” He let it sit between them, unbothered. “It doesnae bite. I’ve said it once or twice meself and lived.”

Rosaline pressed her lips together. She thought of Abigail somewhere in this maze, of the carriage that would carry her into Kent by dusk tomorrow, of every hour of every day back home spent doing precisely what was expected of her and precisely nothing else.

Here, in the dark, behind a fox mask, with a man who did not know her name and could not carry it home, the calculation ran differently.

“If I agree,” she said, “it is only because two heads will find the exit faster than one, and I have a friend to reach.”

“A ringing endorsement.” He swept an arm toward the fork mock-courtly, and the size of him made the gesture absurd. “Lead on, then. Ye’re clearly the brains of this partnership. I’m only here for the muscle.”

“Do try not to sound so pleased about it.”

“I cannae promise ye that.”

She should have found him tiresome. She had spent three Seasons perfecting the art of finding men tiresome, of nodding through their opinions and offering nothing of her own for fear of being thought odd. Yet as she led him back to the last plaque she trusted and crouched to read it, something in her had gone quiet and quick at the same time.

“Where two roads argue, follow the elder.” She frowned at the two paths ahead, then at the hedges themselves. “There. The left wall is older; the growth is darker and thicker at the base. The right was planted after, to fool the eye. We go left.”

“How d’ye ken the left’s the elder?”

She had opened her mouth to answer before she considered whether she should. “The gardener trains new hedge flat against a frame, so it fills in even. Old hedge grows wild at the bottom, no matter how you cut the top. Look at the roots, and the maze will tell you its age.”

He was quiet a moment. Rosaline braced for the usual thing—the small laugh, the change of subject, the way men reached for a topic they preferred whenever a woman knew something they did not.

“Huh.” He crouched beside her, close enough that she felt the warmth radiating from him, and studied the base of the left wall. “So it does. Where’d a fox learn to read a hedge?”

“Books.” She stood up, brushing her skirts. “It is remarkable what one can learn from books when one is left alone with them often enough.”

“And are ye? Left alone often?”

“Left.” She took the older path. “The alone part, I have arranged for myself.”

He did not push it. He came up beside her, and for a while, there was only the crunch of gravel and the two of them reading the dark.

“Here.” She stopped at a fork where a plaque showed a hare mid-leap. “Every third marker is a moon, and the moons have turned us right every time. This one’s a hare. We ignore it and count on.”

“Left, then.” He stepped toward the left fork.

“No. Right.”

He stopped and did not move, and she caught the small trap in it a beat too late.

“You did that on purpose.”

“Did I?” Nothing gave him away but the corner of his mouth. “Prove me wrong, then.”

“The last moon sent us right, the pattern holds every third turn, and you know it does, because I said so not thirty feet back and you were listening to my every word.” She folded her arms. “You wanted to see whether I’d follow you off a cliff because you happen to be tall and sure of yourself.”