Page 74 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“I can goose anyone I like. Rank is no protection against a determined goose.” Beatrice let the words land, watched the smile take hold. Then, she gently let go of the joke and took her sister’s hand. “There. That is much better. You have a face again, rather than a mask.”

They sat there for a while, their hands linked, like they had sat a thousand times through bad nights when they were children.

Rosaline looked at her sharp, fierce, absurd sister, armed with nettles and a whole arsenal of love, and felt the thing she had been circling all week settle over her like a weight.

Because in that moment, she understood Magnus, and that was the trouble. Sitting here in this room, with Ivy’s laughter coming up the stairs and Beatrice’s hand tight in hers, Rosaline felt the same fierce certainty that she would do the same for these two as Magnus felt he must for his father.

She understood what drove him, and she could not pretend she did not. She would burn the whole world down for Beatrice and Ivy. She had nearly burned herself down for them already, year after year, calling it nothing. She never once thought it a choice because for the people you loved, it was not a choice. It was simply the shape of you.

That was what she had walked out on. Not a man being cruel, but a man loving a father the way she loved her sisters. And that was the thing she could not tell Abigail and could barely admit to herself.

She wasn’t truly angry, not really. She only wished, with everything inside her, that understanding a person and living with that understanding were the same thing. But they were not, and the wishing did not make it true.

“He is not cruel,” she said softly to Beatrice, and herself. “That is what makes this so hard. If he were cruel, I could simply hate him and be done with it. But he is only a man who loves too fiercely and cannot let it go. I know exactly how it feels because I am the same.” She squeezed her sister’s hand. “I understand him, Bea. Completely. And it’s the understanding that hurts, not the quarrel.”

Beatrice looked at her a long moment. “Then it sounds less like your marriage is over and more like two people who have not had the right conversation,” she said quietly.

Rosaline had no answer for that.

Below, Ivy was galloping up the stairs, triumphant and bearing cakes and news of cakes. Rosaline quickly wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand, plastered a smile on, and let the matter close.

But the words stayed with her the whole cold ride home.

Two people who have not had the right conversation.

She turned her sister’s words over and over in the dark carriage, and did not let herself hope, because hope was dangerous. She had spent a week learning to live without it.

Yet she had not quite managed to put it down.

CHAPTER 35

“Imust confess, Your Grace, that I did not expect an invitation to a warehouse at midnight without a servant in sight.” Oldbrook stepped into the circle of lantern light. He didn’t hurry as he took off his gloves one finger at a time as though he were preparing to inspect the legs of a racehorse. “I had rather hoped we understood one another.”

He drew off the second glove. “Though I confess I have wondered, once or twice of late, whether you were quite as content to let old graves lie as you gave me to believe. Your father never did learn when to leave a thing alone.” The pale eyes settled on him, mild and unhurried. “I should be sorry to find it ran in the blood.”

Magnus stood at the center of the empty floor and watched him approach.

He had chosen the location with care. An old warehouse on the river’s edge with its owners bankrupt and long gone. The stone floors were swept clean of everything but dust and cold. The building stood empty except for a double row of squat stone pillars struggling to hold up the roof.

Once, he had thought that he would feel his father beside him when he finished things. He had thought that the closer he came to the men who had done it, the closer his father would feel.

It had never worked that way.

The closer he came to justice, the fainter the memory of his father grew, worn thinner year after year of his hunt. Magnus could no longer remember the sound of his voice, and he scarcely recalled his last words on the steps long ago. He had given years to a man who was slowly and terribly becoming a stranger to him.

He didn’t let himself think about what that meant. He had trained himself a long time ago not to.

He had come to it straight from the north. The sworn depositions were his now. He had prised from a forgotten Edinburgh strongroom that had swung open to a duke’s name where it would have stayed barred to any lesser man, exactly as Deane had. The better part of a fortnight it had cost him, Edinburgh and back over hard roads. The proof was complete at last. Every piece of it but the man himself, and the forged letter that would put the noose in his own hand was folded now against Magnus’s chest, waiting.

He had sent Oldbrook a letter three days ago, worded exactly as a defeated man’s letter should be worded. He offered to talk, to come to terms, and to name the price of his silence before he left England. He made it sound like he wanted a truce. Like he was tired, frightened, and ready to sell. And like a spider waiting for its prey, he had watched his trap close on the one thing Oldbrook could never resist: the chance to buy another soul cheap and be rid of a nuisance.

Magnus had not slept in the three days since he had sent the letter. He had lain in the cold half of his cold bed and turned every step of it over in his mind. He considered every place it might go wrong and every way a man like Oldbrook could wriggle or strike, and he had told no one. Not Cauldwell, who would have advised patience, and not Leo, who would have insisted on accompanying him and risked getting himself killed.

And he hadn’t told Rosaline, who was not speaking to him and would have looked at him with her gray-flecked eyes and seen the recklessness of his plan in a heartbeat. She would have been entirely right to be afraid.

He had posted the Bow Street Runners outside the warehouse in the dark alley and told them the signal to listen for. Then he had come in here alone to finish it, because it had always been something for him to finish alone.

“There’s no price, Me Lord.” He kept his voice flat and almost gentle. “I ken that’s a disappointment to ye. Ye came to buy me. But I didnae ask ye here to sell.”