Page 64 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“Your Grace, I confess the whole ton is in your debt. You have civilized the most interesting man in London.”

“You are too kind, My Lord.” Rosaline held his pale gaze and smiled her sweetest wallflower smile, the one that had hidden a clever mind for three full Seasons.

She felt Magnus’s arm twitch under her fingers and understood in that instant with a cold certainty that this was the man. She did not know how she knew. She simply knew, the way she knew a false clue in a maze.

“Though I hardly think him in need of civilizing. I find I rather prefer him wild.”

“Ha. Do you?” Something flickered in the old man’s eyes, assessing her anew, and she let him find nothing but a besotted wife. “How charming. We shall see you both at my little dinner, I hope. Do bring that clever tongue, Your Grace. I find I like it.”

With that, he bowed and walked off.

Rosaline let out a breath she had not known she was holding.

“That,” she murmured, “is a dreadful man.”

“Aye.” Magnus was looking at her with something new in his eyes. “And ye recognized it in under a minute. I married well.”

Then the horn sounded, high and bright across the lawn, and the master of the hunt called the chase, and there was no more time for dreadful men.

“Right.” Magnus tied her fox mask on for her, his fingers quick at the back of her hair, his mouth close to her ear. “Last year, I let ye lead me astray through this beast of a hedge for the sheer pleasure of yer company. This year, we win the wretched thing. Ye read it. I’ll run it. Point me, and I’ll go.”

The rules had not changed. A golden fox waited at the maze’s black heart, and the first couple to reach it and carry it out claimed it.

Last year, she and Abigail had blundered into three dead ends and given up laughing. This year, she stood at the mouth of the maze, closed her eyes for one breath, and let the shape of the thing unfold behind them the way shapes always did for her—the pattern, the logic, the single true path hidden under a hundred false ones.

“Left. Then the second right, not the first. The first doubles back.” She was already moving, and he was already with her, his hand on the small of her back steering her at a most unladylike run. “Trust me. Left again here.”

A branch tore at her sleeve. Behind them, a woman shrieked at a wrong turn. Magnus vaulted over a low hedge she would have gone round, then caught her by the waist and swung her bodily over it without once breaking stride, and she came down against his chest breathless and outraged.

“Did you just throw me over a hedge?”

“I conveyed ye over a hedge. Efficiently.”

“Efficiently.” She shoved her mask straight, laughing despite herself. “You may convey me anywhere you please, Your Grace, so long as you convey me to the right when I say right. You went left at the elder. I did tell you.”

“I’d trust ye through the gates of hell, lass, ye ken that, but must ye be right about it so smugly⁠—”

“There. The gap in the yews. Go.”

They burst through the yews into the green heart of the maze, half a step ahead of a shrieking pair of Fenwicks, to find the little golden fox gleaming on its plinth.

Magnus swept it up and Rosaline clean off her feet in the same motion, spinning her once in the dappled light while she laughed and clutched his shoulders and told him breathlessly to put her down before someone saw.

“Let them see.”

He did not put her down. He held her up against him in the private green heart of the hedge, both of them masked and breathless, and his voice dropped to something that curled low in her belly.

“D’ye recall the last time I had ye alone in a hedge, Duchess? Ye were a great deal more scandalized then. And a great deal less mine.” His mouth brushed the corner of hers, maddening, unhurried. “I’ve a mind to remind ye how that first afternoon went. Slowly. The moment we’re home, and I’ve got ye out of this very fine gown.”

“Magnus.” It came out unsteady. “We are in a public hedge maze. With a trophy.”

“Aye. And two Fenwicks gapin’ at us through the yews this very moment.” He set her down at last, unrepentant, and pressed the little golden fox into her hands. He tucked a loosened curl back beneath her mask with a tenderness entirely at odds with the wickedness in his eyes. “Won fair, Duchess. Yer brains, me legs. We make a fearsome pair.”

And Rosaline, standing masked and laughing in the green heart of the maze where in the past she had hidden from the whole world, understood that she was hiding from nothing anymore.

She had crept into this hedge once and come out changed past knowing. She had walked into it this year a duchess, a wife, and a partner in the winning, and she thought she had never in her life been so glad to be so thoroughly seen.

They walked out to applause hand in hand, and Rosaline held the small gold fox and thought at once of Abigail, who had blundered every dead end of this maze at her side a year ago and lost with such good grace, and who deserved a golden fox far more than a mantel at Greythorne ever would.