Page 50 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

Rosaline smoothed the drawing flat on her knee—the crooked castle, the dog-shaped stag, the mountains drawn taller than the sky. Something turned over painfully in her chest.

“It is beautiful, sweetheart,” she praised. “Truly. The finest stag I have ever seen.”

Ivy beamed and tucked herself in closer, satisfied, and began telling a long-involved story about a fairy who lived in a loch and granted wishes only to children who were kind to frogs.

Rosaline let the small warm weight of her sister settle against her side, stroked her hair, and asked, “And then what happened?” in all the right places.

“When you are married,” Ivy said sleepily, arriving by her own crooked logic at the one thing Rosaline wished to think of the least, “will you live in a castle like that? With the mountains? And will there be a stag?”

“I do not know, dearest.” Rosaline kept her voice even. “No one has decided anything about my marrying at all.”

“I hope it is a beautiful castle.” Ivy was half asleep by now. “I would like to visit somewhere that might have dragons in it.” And then she was out, breathing slow and even, one small fist curled tight in the fringe of Rosaline’s shawl.

Over the top of Ivy’s head, Beatrice was watching her.

“She misses you,” she said quietly. “When you shut your door for days, she thinks she has done something. I tell her you are only tired. I have told her that a great many times now.”

“I am sorry.” The words came out thick. “I did not mean for her to. I would never want her to think that.”

“I know.” Beatrice reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind Ivy’s ear. For a moment, the sharpness went out of her entirely, and she looked younger than her eighteen years and older than them at once. “That is the trouble with you, Rosaline. You would set yourself on fire to keep the two of us warm and call it nothing, and never once notice you were the one burning.”

Rosaline said nothing. She did not trust her voice.

For a while, neither of them spoke. The lamp hissed. Somewhere below, a door closed on the last of Samuel’s guests.

Rosaline thought of all the things she could not say: the unmarked carriage in the dark, the cleared room, the wine-red gown, the library and the door at her back. A whole reckless architecture of secrets she had built without once meaning to, and how very tired she had become of holding it up alone.

Beatrice let the quiet sit for a moment. Then she rose, carefully gathered the sleeping Ivy up into her arms with the ease of long practice, and paused at the door with the little girl’s head tucked against her shoulder.

“You can lie to Samuel,” she said, not unkindly. “You are very good at it, and he deserves it. But you cannot lie to me, because I have shared a wall with you my entire life, and I have never once heard you cry into your pillow until these past eleven days.” Her eyes held her sister’s, steady and certain in the lamplight. “So, you will tell me when you are ready. But you will tell me.”

CHAPTER 22

“Ye’ve let it go stone cold again, and that’s the third cup. Cook’s threatenin’ to poison the fourth, and I’ll nae lift a finger to stop her.” Ross set the fresh coffee down with the faint, weary disgust of a Highlander who had crossed the border under protest and never forgiven it. “Ye asked for kippers. Ye’ve glowered at the kippers. The kippers have given up hope, Yer Grace, and so have I.”

Magnus looked down at the plate as though it had arrived there by witchcraft. “I was thinkin’.”

“Aye. Ye’ve been thinkin’ since Tuesday. It’s a terrible habit, and it’s ruinin’ good fish.” Ross gathered the cold cup and squinted at him. “Ye were never this keen to think when there was work in front of ye. Ye’d think in the saddle, ye’d think over a blade. Now ye think at the breakfast table like some poet with a chill. What’s her name?”

“There’s no her.”

“There’s always a her when a grown man forgets how to eat,” Ross said it to the ceiling, as though appealing to a higher authority who had failed them both, and then stumped out toward the kitchen with the air of a martyr bearing the whole house on his back.

He was not wrong, and that was the worst of it.

Eleven days. Eleven days since the kiss in the library, since the dark, the door, the sound Rosaline had made against his mouth, and in every one of them, she had not once appeared.

Magnus had gone to the Ashfords’ and endured three hours of a dinner he despised for the single purpose of seeing her, and she had not come.

Ill, they had said. A headache. A fever.

He had heard it repeated with the small, satisfied cluck the ton kept for a wallflower who had finally had the decency to wilt, and it had taken the whole of his self-command not to overturn the table.

Rosaline was not ill. He knew it the way he knew weather. She was hiding, and he understood exactly from what, because he was hiding from the same thing and doing it a great deal worse.

A soft knock, and the door opened on the smaller of the two footmen, a reedy boy with ears like jug handles who still went white every time he had to address a duke.

“Begging your pardon, Your Grace. The, ah… the second post.” He held out the salver at the full stretch of his arm, as though Magnus might bite the near end off it.