Page 66 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“But it is both.” Ivy was unrepentant.

Magnus laughed, because there was nothing else to do with it, and because a small savage part of him was not the least bit sorry that Samuel lay awake at night frightened of a Highland brute in a kilt.

“Ye’re a dangerous creature, Lady Ivy. I’d nae cross ye for the world.” He handed her the last strawberry tart off his plate, a bribe and a benediction. “Say nothin’ true and aloud about me, and it’s yers.”

Rosaline chose that moment to reach into the hamper and draw out something wrapped in a linen napkin. She set it in Abigail’s lap.

“For you,” she said. “Open it.”

Abigail unwound the linen and went still. The little golden fox gleamed up at her in the sunlight.

“Rosaline, this is Reynard Chase’s prize. You won this. The whole of London is talking about how you won this.”

“We won it. But you and lost it a year ago in every dead end of that dreadful maze, and you never once stopped laughing at me for leading us wrong.” Rosaline’s voice had gone soft. “It was always going to be yours. I only had to marry a man with fast enough legs to go back and fetch it.”

Abigail’s eyes were suspiciously bright. She opened her mouth, no doubt to deflect with a joke, but then she closed it again and simply held the fox.

Magnus looked at his wife giving away a trophy that half of society coveted as though it cost her nothing, and thought that he had married the most generous creature he had ever encountered.

He caught her hand where it lay on the blanket between them, hidden by her skirts from the others, and drew his thumb slowly across her knuckles. Her breath hitched, though her face never gave her away.

“Ye keep bein’ this kind, this clever, this bonnie,” he murmured, “and I’ll be forced to invent some urgent reason to take ye home early, and every soul at this picnic will ken precisely why.”

“Then behave,” she breathed, but did not pull her hand from his.

“Nae a chance, wife.”

It was Leo who drew him out of it and away.

“Walk with me. I want to steal the good cigars I know you’re hiding, and I refuse to do it in front of witnesses.” He said it lightly, but the look in his eyes was grave.

Magnus rose and went with him a little distance down the path, out of earshot, into the bright bustle of the park.

“Ye’ve found something,” he noted quietly.

“I have found a man named Deane.” Leo kept his voice easy, his face pleasant, a gentleman remarking on the weather. “He was a clerk once to a certain circle of very great men, and he handled a great many papers he was paid handsomely to forget. He is no longer handled handsomely. He was turned out two years ago, ruined, bitter, drinking his grievance, and he has been telling anyone who will stand him a bottle that he knows where a good many bodies are buried.” He paused. “One of them is a laird charged with treason on documents that a sober Deane once swore, to a man I trust, he watched forged with his own eyes. Your reputation is worth something now. A duke can send for a ruined clerk, and no one will blink an eye.”

The bright afternoon went very cold and very sharp around Magnus, the laughter behind him and the name in front of him suddenly existing in two separate worlds.

“Where is he?”

“Southwark. I have the direction.” Leo held his gaze. “Softly, though. If Deane starts naming the great men he forged for, and word reaches the greatest of them before you have what you need, he will be a corpse within a week. These are not gentle people, whatever their tailoring.”

Magnus glanced back down the path. Rosaline had her head tipped back, laughing at something Ivy had said, the sun beating down on her face and turning her cheeks rosy.

He had come to England for the cold thing. He had not expected to find the warm one waiting alongside it, nor how fiercely he meant to keep them both.

“Softly,” he agreed. “Set up the meetin’. And Leo.” He clasped his friend’s shoulder briefly. “Thank ye. For all of it. Ye’re a better man than ye’ll ever let anyone say.”

“Slander,” Leo drawled. “And this time, not the least bit true.” He covered Magnus’s hand with his own for a moment before stepping away, and then he raised his voice for the blanket. “Now, come and defend me. The little one is accusing me of hoarding tarts, and I fear the Duchess believes her.”

Magnus went back to his family in the sun, folding the dark thing carefully away for later. He let his wife pull him down onto the blanket beside her, and stole the last of her wine, and paid for it with a kiss to the corner of her mouth that made her blush all over again in front of everyone.

He did not, for one whole golden hour, think of Southwark at all.

CHAPTER 30

“You were followed. Of course you were followed. A duke’s carriage, in these lanes.” The voice came through the door before it opened, thin and shaking, pitched low. “Everyone is followed. That is the first thing you learn, and the last.”