Page 9 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

He released her and stepped back, straightening his coat, a pleasant smile arranging itself on his face.

Rosaline made herself cross the floor. She made herself stop at the edge of a cluster of gentlemen and wait for a gap in their conversation.

“It is a dreadful crush tonight, is it not?” Her voice came out smaller than she meant. “One can hardly find room to stand.”

The nearest lord glanced down at her as though a chair had spoken. “Quite,” he said, and turned back to his friends. “As I was saying, the gray took the third fence like it wasn’t there⁠—”

She stood a moment in the space where a reply would have gone, then made herself move to the next group, the next chance.

“I understand the soprano trained in Milan.” She addressed it to a young man with a bored, handsome face. “They say the second aria was written especially for her, which perhaps explains why she—” The sentence buckled halfway. “Why it… Why the range of it sat so.”

“Mm.” His eyes had already drifted over her shoulder to someone worth finding. “Do excuse me.”

He was gone before she could speak again.

Behind her, close enough to touch, two fans lifted, and behind them two women laughed, low and private. Rosaline could not have sworn the laughter was at her expense. Her body was certain of it anyway.

The heat rose first. Then the noise of the room began to fold in on itself, every voice rising into a single roar. The edges of her surroundings softened and blurred. Her lungs would not fill.

She pressed a hand to her chest and felt her heart slamming as though she had been running, though she had not moved, and the more she willed the breath to come, the higher and thinner it climbed.

Air. She needed air, and a door, and the absence of every eye in the room.

She turned and pushed through the crowd, murmuring apologies she could not hear, aiming for the tall doors at the far end and the dark beyond them. The corridor opened cool and blessedly empty, and she went down it half blind, one hand to the wall, dragging in a breath that would not come whole.

She rounded a corner and walked straight into a wall of a man.

He was solid as a door, and her shoulder struck his chest. A pair of hands came up to steady her by the arms before she could stumble back.

“Forgive me.” The words tumbled out. “I did not see. I am sorry, I only need—forgive me.”

“Easy.” The hands did not let go at once. “Ye’re white as the wall, lass. Are ye all right?”

Rosaline went still.

She knew that voice. She knew the roll of it, the burr under the words, the low weight of it. She had heard it in a hedge, in the dark, a year ago, and ever since her whole life had revolved around burying the memory of it. And now here it was in the corridor, holding her by the arms.

Slowly, she lifted her face to his. He was looking down at her already. She watched recognition flash in his eyes, watched them narrow, then watched the corner of his mouth lift.

“Well.” The smirk broke slowly across his face. “Where are ye runnin’ off to, little fox?”

CHAPTER 4

“Nothing to say for yerself? That’s nae the clever little fox I remember.”

Rosaline’s face went hot to the roots of her hair.

It was him. It was truly him, the voice from the hedge made flesh and standing a foot from her in a lamplit corridor. Without the black mask across his eyes, she could see the whole of what the dark had only hinted at a year ago.

Copper-brown hair pushed back from a broad brow. A jaw cut square beneath the beard. And the eyes, green as she remembered and worse for being fully visible now, fixed on her with a warmth that made the corridor feel airless in an entirely different way. He was even handsomer without the mask, which struck her as deeply unfair.

Then the rest of it caught up with her.

He remembered. He remembered the maze, the clue, the kiss she had spent a year pretending was a fever dream. And he was here, in this house, three walls from the ballroom where her brother stood telling Lady Hartsfield about their connections.

One word from this man in the wrong ear, and the story would be everywhere by morning—Lady Rosaline kissed a masked stranger in a garden.

Beatrice would be ruined by association, and Ivy would be tainted before she was even out.