Page 61 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

His hand paused on her spine. When he spoke, the teasing had gone out of his voice.

“Then yer braither has a great deal to answer for.” His arm tightened around her, drawing her closer against his side. “Ye’ll be held every night if ye’ll let me, Rosaline. And a good many mornings besides. Ye neednae earn a moment of it. That’s the whole of what I’ve been tryin’ to tell ye since the dinner table, and doin’ it very badly. I expect I’ll go on doin’ it badly for a while yet. Ye can be patient with me while I learn.”

She turned her face up to his in the dark and found him already watching her.

For a moment, neither of them spoke, and that was somehow more intimate than anything else that had passed between them that night.

Something rose in her chest at that, warm, soft, and safe.

“You are not doing it badly,” she said, and felt him huff a quiet laugh.

“High praise, from ye. I’ll have it carved over the door in letters a foot high, so the whole of Greythorne kens that their duke did one thing right.”

His chest shook with a low laugh beneath her cheek, and then his fingers found her hair, sifting through it slowly, as though he had all the nights in the world to do it and meant to use every one.

“Sleep, wife. Ye’ve had a long day. Married, moved, ruined thoroughly twice over. Ye’ve earned yer rest, and I’ll be here when ye wake up, which ye may find ye have to grow used to.”

She should not have been able to sleep. She was in a new bed, in a new house, beside a husband she had truly known for less than a season, bound to him now past any undoing.

By every measure she had ever been given, she ought to have lain awake till dawn, cataloging her fears. Instead, she listened to his heartbeat, and felt his hand grow heavy in her hair, and breathed in the warm, unfamiliar dark of the first place that had asked nothing of her at all.

CHAPTER 27

“Heels down. Hands soft. Ye’re haulin’ on the poor beast’s mouth like ye mean to steer a boat.”

Magnus walked backward across the paddock, both hands raised, watching his wife sit the placid gray mare with the rigid determination of a woman facing a firing squad.

“She’s nae goin’ to bolt, Rosaline. She’s fifteen years old, and her chief ambition in life is the next carrot. Loosen yer grip, and she’ll loosen hers.”

“It is perfectly loose.”

“It’s loose the way a fence post is loose.”

“You said that to me once before. Under very different circumstances.” The words were out of her before she seemed to have decided to say them, and then the color climbed her throat.

Magnus stopped walking and grinned at her like a fool across the whole width of the paddock. “Aye, I did. And I’ll tell ye what I told ye then, Duchess.”

He came to the mare’s head and set a hand on the warm neck, and looked up at her where she sat flushed and windblown and unlike any wallflower who had ever counted a windowpane.

“Get out of yer head. Feel the animal under ye. Stop managin’ it and start ridin’ it.”

He clicked his tongue, and the mare ambled forward. Rosaline swayed, caught herself, found the rhythm of it, and for three whole strides forgot to be afraid.

He watched it happen. He watched the exact moment her spine gave up its fight, and her body remembered it knew how to move, and the laugh that broke out of her then—startled, bright, wholly unguarded—did something to his chest he had no intention of examining in a paddock before the grooms.

They had been married for a week, and he had already begun to suspect he would never in his life have enough of that laugh.

It rained that evening, a soft Highland kind of rain that made Magnus homesick, and made the great honey-colored house feel small, close, and theirs.

They took their supper by the fire in her sitting room because neither of them could be troubled with the long cold dining hall, and afterward, they did not move.

Rosaline sat curled against him on the low couch with her stockinged feet tucked beneath her and her head on his shoulder.

For a long while they did not speak at all, only the fire ticking and the rain going on against the glass.

“My mother loved rain like this,” Rosaline said at last, drowsy against his shoulder. “On wet afternoons, she used to send the governess away and gather Beatrice and me into her sitting room, and we would build a fort of the cushions, and she would tell us dreadful stories in all the wrong voices until the weather cleared. My father thought it frivolous, yet she did it anyway, every time it rained.” A small silence. “I have not sat by a fire in the rain since she died. I did not realize that until just now.”

Magnus turned his hand, so her fingers slid between his, and said nothing, because he had nothing that would not cost him to say.