Page 82 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

Abigail was on her feet. Leo said something no one heard because Ivy had begun to shriek with joy. She scrambled up and flung both arms around Rosaline’s neck. “Will it be a girl? Will it like frogs? May I teach it everything I know?”

Which was, Ivy assured them, a great deal.

Beatrice’s eyes had grown suspiciously wet. She blinked hard and became very interested in her glass of port.

Magnus stood amid the glorious wreck of his dinner table. His face was open now, all that careful stillness gone. He looked around at them as though he could scarcely believe that every good thing he had never thought he would be allowed to have was gathered at one table on one warm night.

“A spring bairn,” he said bemusedly, half to himself. “God help us all.”

“It will have your temper,” Rosaline told him.

“It’ll have yer stubbornness. The poor wee thing hasnae a chance.”

Rosaline laughed, with her sister’s arms around her neck and her husband’s hand warm on her shoulder.

There was a whole season waiting ahead of them with a stubborn, temper-ridden child in it. She had spent most of her life believing safety and joy were two different countries, and that she was permitted to live only in the first.

She had been wrong.

They were the same place, and she was standing in the middle of it. It had simply taken her this long to learn it.

It was very late before Abigail and Leo finally took their leave, still arguing amiably over whose gossip had been superior as they were seen out to their separate carriages. By then, Ivy had fallen asleep against Beatrice, who carried her upstairs while Rosaline and Magnus lingered below.

Rosaline stood in the hall with her husband’s arm around her and watched the last lantern go out. She felt the deep contentment of a house emptied of her loved ones because she knew, without question, that they would be back. At Darton House, the quiet after guests had been a relief; the dangerous part of an evening survived. Here it was only a pause. A held breath between one warm noise and the next.

“Come to bed, wife,” Magnus murmured against her hair.

She went with him up the great stairs, past the door of the chambers that had been hers, that neither of them had used in months, and on to the ones at the end of the corridor.

He had not asked her to move her things. She had done it herself the week she came home without a word, and he had come up one evening to find her hairbrush on his dressing table and had stood in the doorway looking at it for a long moment as though it were the finest thing he owned.

They shared everything now. That was the quiet astonishment she was still getting used to, three months on. Not only the bed—though there was that, and she had discovered in herself a frank and unrepentant appetite for it that would have scandalized the wallflower she used to be—but also the rest of it. The letters that came about his father’s case, laid open on the desk for her to read and answer. The estate decisions, settled across the breakfast table between the pair of them.

He had meant it when he had said the word partner. He had put her beside him and left her there, and somewhere in the last three months, she had finally stopped waiting for the day he would change his mind.

He closed the door behind them, and the warmth of the room folded around the two of them. He drew her back against him and placed his mouth to the side of her throat.

“D’ye ken,” he murmured, “there was a night nae so long ago when I stood in a cold warehouse and thought I’d never have this. Any of it. That I’d die without ye kennin’ that I love ye.” His hands found the laces at her back and slowly began to unfasten the careful armor of the evening. “I’ve a great deal of makin’ up to do for that, Duchess. Every foolish, silent year of it. I thought I’d start tonight.”

She turned in his arms and kissed him. There was no hesitation in it now, no careful testing of what she was permitted to want. She simply cupped his face in her hands and kissed him in the warm dark of the only home either of them had ever truly had, freely and without fear.

Magnus made a low sound against her mouth and drew her closer.

For a while, there was nothing but the slow press of his lips and the warmth of his hands on her waist. Then Rosaline reached for his cravat.

He caught her fingers before she could undo the knot. “Wait.”

She looked up at him. His expression had changed. Not with reluctance, but with something so unexpectedly tender that her breath caught.

“There’s a wee bairn in there.”

She laughed softly. “That is generally how it works.”

“Daenae mock me, woman. I’m having a revelation.”

His hand settled carefully against her belly, almost tentative despite everything they had shared. Rosaline covered it with her own.

He looked down at their joined hands. “A spring bairn,” he murmured.