Page 69 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

It was not true. He wanted to tell her that the life they had made was the most real thing he had ever held, that he had meant every hour of it. But even as he reached for the words, he felt the old purpose beneath them. Felt the cold resolve that had been the spine of him since he was a boy standing on a staircase in his nightshirt.

And he could not swear to her that he would choose her if he were forced to choose between her and that purpose.

That was what he could not say.

Worse, it was what she had already seen on his face.

“Yer sisters.” He said it quickly, reaching for the one thing he could give her, the one fear he could answer. “Whatever comes of this, however it falls, I’ll see Beatrice and Ivy protected. I’ll set it down in writing before I ride. Settlements, guardianship, a house of their own if it comes to that. Nothing I do will touch them. I swear it to ye. They will never want for anything, and any of this will never harm them. That I can promise ye.”

She looked at him for a long moment. “What about you?”

He did not answer at once. And that, he understood too late, was the answer.

“I want justice for me faither,” he said. “I have wanted nothing else for sixteen years. And I will have it, Rosaline. Even if it kills me.”

He heard the words leave him. He meant them. He had meant them his whole life, and it had never once occurred to him that meaning them might cost him something he was not prepared to lose until he watched them land.

“So,” Rosaline said softly, “you want to die for justice rather than live with me.”

“It’s—” His throat closed up, and he swallowed hard. “It’s nae that simple.”

“Yes, it is.” She shook her head slowly, and a tear rolled down her cheek. She did not wipe it away. “It is that simple, and you know it is. When you asked me to marry you in that garden, with my brother’s hand around my wrist, do you remember what you said? You said you were giving me a choice. You held it out to me like it was the only thing in the world that mattered, because you knew, you knew, that no one ever had. And I took it. I chose you.” Her voice cracked and steadied. “And now you are standing here, taking it back. You are deciding, all on your own, in the dark, without consulting me, that a dead man’s honor is worth more than the living woman in front of you. You are making the choice for both of us. You are doing the exact thing you swore to me you never would.”

The blow was so precise, so perfectly aimed at the one place he had no armor, that for a moment he could not breathe. Because she was right, he knew she was right. But it did not move the thing inside him one inch, and that was the worst of it.

He could see the entirety of what he was doing to her and still feel the old iron purpose holding fast beneath it, immovable, older than she was, older than any warmth the two of them had built in a handful of stolen months.

He wanted to reach for her. He wanted to take all of it back, to say the words that would bring the light back in her eyes, but he stood rooted where he was and did not say them, because they would have been a lie and she would have known it before they cleared his teeth. She always knew.

“I wanted to marry ye.” His voice was low. It was the truest thing he had. “I want ye still. God help me, Rosaline, I have never wanted anything the way I want the life we’ve started. But this—” He stopped and took a deep breath. “This is me purpose. It was me purpose before I ever kent yer name. I cannae set it down. If I did, I wouldnae be a man ye could love. I’d be a shell wearin’ me faither’s face.”

She was crying in earnest now, without sound, the tears coming steady and silent while she looked at him. She nodded slowly, as though he had confirmed something she had already known and only needed to hear aloud.

“I’ll leave you to your purpose then,” she said, and walked out.

CHAPTER 32

“Will you not take a little something, Your Grace? Cook has made the veal broth. The one you like.”

“Thank you, Sarah.” Rosaline did not turn away from the window. “Leave it, if you would. I will have it.”

She would not. They both knew she would not.

The maid set the tray down all the same on the small table by the cold hearth, where yesterday’s tray still sat untouched, the broth gone to a gray skin, and walked out as quietly as she had come.

Rosaline heard the soft click of the door and was alone again with the long gray afternoon.

Four days. Four days since she had walked out of that room and up the stairs and shut a door of her own, and in all four of them she had learned exactly how large a house could be made when two people set themselves to never occupying the same part of it at once.

She had become an expert at it with a speed that frightened her. She knew the sound of his boots on the stairs now and could wait motionless on a landing until they had passed. She knew which hours he took in the study and kept to the garden throughout them, walking the cold paths in a shawl until her fingers went numb, because numb fingers were easier to bear than the sight of him.

She had spent three years learning to make herself small and invisible in a house that did not want her. It turned out the skill had not left her. It only waited patiently to be needed again.

The cruelty of it was that this house had wanted her. That was the thing she could not get past, turning it over again in the sleepless dark. She had come here a bargain, a rescue, a threat made good, braced for cold. Instead, there had been warmth and a husband who filled a room with paper because she might like to draw, dug her a frog pond in his imagination, and looked at her across the dinner table as though she were the only bright thing in it.

She had let herself believe it.

That was her fault, and she knew it, but the knowing did not help. She had let herself unlatch every door she had spent her life bolting, had walked into the warm and put down the whole heavy armful of her guardedness, and now she stood in the wreck of it in a beautiful cold room and understood that she had done the one thing she had sworn she would never do again since her mother’s death.