Page 5 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“Aye.” He said it without a scrap of shame, grinning under the black mask, and turned right. “And ye didnae. Right, it is.”

They went on, and the words kept coming without her deciding to speak them, which never happened, not across a dinner table, not in a drawing room, not once in three Seasons of being looked at.

The next plaque stopped them both.

“Trust the path the moon forgets,” she read aloud.

“Then we’ve been wrong the whole way.” He nodded back down the corridor of hedge. “The moon’s been our guide. Now it says forget it.”

“It says trust the path the moon forgets. The fork with no moon on it. There.” She pointed into the unmarked dark. “It changes the rule the moment we’ve learned to lean on the old one.”

“Or the moons were never the key at all, and we’ve been lucky.”

“Lucky. Five turns running.”

He considered her a moment in the thin light. “Aye, fair.”

The two small words landed warmer than any compliment she had been handed across a supper table.

“Ye argue better than half the men in that house,” he said, ducking under a low arch of hedge.

“That is a very small mountain to be the king of.”

His laugh came again, genuine this time, unguarded. “Aye, it is.”

“You do not care for them either.” She said it before she weighed it. “The house. The masks. I watched you decline to bow to anyone the whole way in.”

“I bowed to ye,” He said easily, the plain black mask giving nothing away.

“You did not. You tilted your head at me as though I were a horse you were deciding whether to buy.”

“A fine horse.” She knew he was smiling. “Sound of leg. Sharp of eye. Bit of a temper, which I like in a mount.”

Her cheeks heated. “I am not a mount. I’m a woman. That’s a rather brutish comparison.”

“So I’ve been told. Often. By many.” He held a branch aside so she could pass, and she passed close, closer than she meant to.

The space where the two of them stood shrank down to the width of a held breath before she moved on.

The paths were narrowing now. The hedges pressed higher and blacker, the torches farther apart, whole lengths of the maze lit by nothing but a thin wash of moon. The plaques changed, too. Their verses coiled in on themselves, becoming harder to unknot. Twice she stopped and read a clue three times before its meaning became clear. Each time she solved one, the corridor beyond it seemed to draw them tighter together, until she could no longer walk beside him without her shoulder brushing his arm.

“We’re close,” she said. “The turns are coming faster. Whoever wins reaches the center within the next few.”

“Then read me the last one.”

She crouched to the plaque, he crouched with her, and their heads bent to the same small square of brass. For a moment, the maze had gone silent around them. No laughter drifted over the hedge. No music. Only the hiss of a distant torch and the sound of his breathing, near enough that she felt the warmth of it stir the loose hair at her temple.

She read the words twice and did not take in a single one.

When she turned her face toward his to speak, he had already turned his toward hers, and the distance she had been so careful to keep all this while was simply gone.

He leaned in a fraction. Enough.

She did not move away.

“I’ve watched men cleverer than me lose that whole house tonight,” he said, his voice low, “and none of them once looked as bonnie doing it as ye do losing a maze.” His gaze moved over the fox mask, to the eyes behind it, and held there. “Ye should ken that. Whatever else ye ken.”

Heat climbed her neck. She was glad of the mask, glad of the dark, glad of a hundred things that let her stay in this narrow corridor a moment longer than sense allowed.