Page 40 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

He had handed her only a corner of something large and dark, and chosen not to show the rest. She found she did not need it. It was enough to see that under the temper and the teasing, there was a man carrying a grief he had turned into a purpose, walking into rooms full of people he hated because someone he loved was owed a thing only he would fight for.

“That is a good reason,” she said quietly. “A better reason than most men in those rooms have for anything they do.”

His face relaxed, as though he had been braced for mocking laughter.

“Aye. Well…” He cleared his throat, and the shutter came down again. “Enough of that. Ye didnae risk yer reputation to hear a Scot feel sorry for himself. Come here. It’s time ye earned the fun half of the evenin’.”

He pulled her to the middle of the floor and took his position before her, and even that, the simple architecture of it, undid some of her composure.

“Posture first.” His hand came to the small of her back, warm through the thin muslin, the other lifting her right hand into his. “Ye stand up out of the top of yer head, like there’s a thread pullin’ ye toward the ceilin’. Aye. Chin level. Now, ye’re nae fallin’ into me, and ye’re nae holdin’ me off. Ye’re just here, easy, breathin’.” He drew her the smallest degree closer. “And ye look at me the way I taught ye, like there’s nae another soul in the world.”

Rosaline lifted her eyes to his and tried.

Magnus waited a moment, then sighed. “Ye’re stiff as a fence post, lass.”

“I am concentrating.”

“That’s the whole trouble. Ye’re up in that clever head of yers, workin’ out the angles, and yer body’s standing down here forgotten like luggage on a platform. A man dancin’ with ye can feel ye thinkin’.” He guided her through a slow turn, and she went through it exactly, correctly, wrongly. “There. Every step right and nae a scrap of life in it. Again.”

They tried again.

She counted the steps and executed them flawlessly and felt him feel her do it. Again. And again. Each time he told her, not unkindly, that she was somewhere above her shoulders, watching herself dance. And each time she reached for the thing he wanted and could not find where in herself it lived.

At last, he stopped. He did not let her go. He leaned in close to her, so close that his breath stirred the hair at her temple, and lowered his voice until it was almost nothing.

“Ye have to come down out of yer mind, Rosaline. Just for a while. Live in the body ye’re standin’ in. Feel the floor through yer slippers, feel my hand on yer back, feel the air on yer skin. Be here, in it, and stop watchin’ it from a shelf.”

“I like being in my mind.” It came out smaller than she meant. “It is safe up there. Nothing can reach me.”

“I daenae doubt it.” His thumb moved once against the small of her back, and she felt it in places other than her spine. “But ye have every right to experience the pleasures of the body too, lass. Ye’ve spent twenty-one years bein’ told the body’s a thing to be managed and hidden and married off tidy, and no one once told ye that it’s yers. To live in. To enjoy.”

“You should not say such things to me.”

“Someone should.” He drew back just far enough to see her face, and there was no teasing in his now, only a steady frankness that was somehow far more dangerous. “Ye’re a grown woman, Rosaline, nae a girl. Ye ken the heat I mean. It rises in ye when ye least want it, at a dinner table, on a balcony, and ye push it down and call it improper and go back to countin’ the panes in the window. Aye?” He held her eyes. “It doesnae have to drive ye to distraction. Ye can answer it. Alone, in yer own room, in the dark. Ye can learn yer own body and what it wants, and there’s no shame in it, whatever they’ve told ye. It’s yers. It has always been yers.”

The heat he described flooded her face and her throat and, mortifyingly, a good deal lower, and she knew he could see every scrap of it.

“You are a scoundrel, Your Grace,” she managed, but there was no bite in it.

“So I’ve been told.” His gaze caught on the color burning in her face and stayed. He drew his lower lip slowly between his teeth. “God help me, but ye look so pretty when ye blush for me. Like that. Just like that.”

The hand on the small of her back spread wider, and his voice dropped to a low register.

“D’ye ken what ye do to a man, standin’ there with yer chin up, pretendin’ ye’re made of marble? There’s nae a woman in this town fit to stand in a room with ye, and nae one of them has ever had the wit to see it.” His thumb moved once along her spine. “I’ve thought about yer lips since that night in the maze, lass. Every night since. And I’m done bein’ a gentleman about it.”

And then, the thread that had held Rosaline above her own shoulders her whole careful life simply snapped.

His hand on her back closed and drew her in, the whole distance he had kept all evening gone between one breath and the next. She rose onto her toes with it, her free hand catching at the open collar of his shirt. His mouth came down on hers as though he had waited the whole hour for her to spend the last of her sense.

His lips were warm and unhurried, and for one suspended moment, the kiss was gentle, a question, the same careful question she remembered from a maze in the dark a year ago. Then she answered it, made a small sound against his mouth she would be scandalized by later, and everything careful in it burned away at once.

His hand slid from the small of her back to draw her fully against him, and she came, all thought abandoned, her body doing precisely what he had spent an hour begging it to do, present and alive and greedy at last.

His other hand cradled the back of her head, tilting her up to him, and she gripped his shirt in both fists as the floor tilted, the candlelight swam, and the whole careful world she had built dropped away beneath her.

He kissed her as though he had all night and meant to use every minute of it, slow and deep and thorough, and she felt it everywhere—in her mouth, in her throat, in the tips of her fingers, low in her belly where the heat he had named pooled and ached.

She had thought she understood what this was; she had a year of remembering to go on.