Page 13 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

His fox did not turn her head. She had the stillness of someone who had heard and had decided that not hearing was the only dignity left to her.

Something in Magnus’s chest pulled tight and hot on her behalf.

He did not look away. He watched her through the entirety of a dreadful aria, willing her to feel it, and near the end she did. Her gaze lifted from the middle distance, crossed the room, found him standing against the ferns, and held.

For a moment, she did not look away. Neither did he.

The soprano climbed and strained, the fans fluttered, and across the crowded room, two masked strangers from a year ago looked at each other without a scrap of mask between them.

Magnus let her see that he saw all of it, the cruelty in the next chair and the straight brave spine she met it with.

Then color climbed her throat and cheeks, and she dropped her eyes to her folded hands and would not raise them again.

Magnus felt his mouth curve for the first time all evening.

The last note died down. The room broke into the polite applause of people relieved it was over, chairs scraped back, and the crowd rose and began its slow reshuffle toward the refreshment tables.

“You,” Leo said at his elbow, “have been staring at the same three rows for half an hour, and I would stake my horses it is not the harpist who has caught your eye.” He followed Magnus’s gaze with open interest. “The dark-haired one by the aisle. Who is she? Do you know her?”

“Nay.” The word came out too quickly. “I daenae ken her at all.”

“You are a dreadful liar, McCormack. It is one of your few endearing traits.”

“Leave it.” Magnus turned deliberately away from the three rows and the bent dark head and everything the sight of it stirred within him that had no place in a night meant for other work.

He had come south for one purpose, and it was not a woman he could not have, seated among people who would sooner see them both ruined than well matched.

“Ye said charm was the only way in. So, take me to a knot of men worth charmin’, and let the two of us be loathsome together. I’ve a faither to think of, and the night’s already half wasted.”

Leo looked at him a moment longer, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth that Magnus did not care for in the least.

“As you say,” he murmured, and led the way into the crowd. “As you say.”

Magnus glanced back. Once. He could not help it.

And found the aisle seat empty and his little fox gone.

CHAPTER 6

“Ayoung lady’s accomplishments are all very well, but it is her steadiness that makes a house. My late wife had it. One knew that whatever the world threw at the door, the drawing room would hold.”

The Earl of Oldbrook said it to the little circle at large, though his eyes rested on Rosaline as he spoke, pale and sharp, moving over her with the frank assessment of the auction ring. He was a tall man gone silver, courteous to the bone, with a stillness about him that made the younger lords defer without quite knowing why they did.

“Just so, My Lord.” Samuel had positioned himself at the Earl’s elbow within a minute of the last note dying down and had not left it. “My sister is the steadiest creature in London. Rosaline, tell Lord Oldbrook your thoughts on the second movement.”

Rosaline had no thoughts on the second movement. She had spent the second movement enduring the two ladies behind her and the small hot certainty that they were laughing at her, and she had heard perhaps four bars of it.

She folded her hands and reached for something that would not embarrass anyone. “It was very affecting, My Lord.”

“Affecting.” Oldbrook inclined his head, as though she had said something of substance. “Indeed.”

Beside her, Beatrice made a sound she muffled with a cough.

Two of the older lords’ sons, ranged behind their fathers like well-brushed hounds, looked at Rosaline with the mild, incurious attention men gave a girl their fathers had suggested they consider. She counted the seconds until she might be allowed to stop existing so publicly.

“Darton,” a new voice called, warm and resonating. “There you are. I have been trying to reach you across this crush for a quarter of an hour.”

Leo Hughes, the Marquess of Rivercourt, emerged from the crowd with an easy smile on his face. At his shoulder, half a head taller than all the men in the circle, was the last person on earth Rosaline wished to see.