Page 3 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“This is not amusing.” She pressed a hand to the hedge, and it gave up only the wet smell of yew.

She took the left fork, then a right, then stopped, because none of it looked like anywhere she had been. The torches had thinned. The dark had thickened.

“Dove. Ab—” She caught the name behind her teeth.

She stood very still and let out a slow breath. Panic would not find her a door. Panic never had.

So, she looked. Truly looked, the way she read a difficult page twice until it surrendered its meaning. The plaques were not scattered by whim. Every third junction bore a moon, and every moon had turned her correctly so far. The hedges were not planted at random either. Where a wall was meant to fool the eye, its leaves grew a shade paler, younger, trained across a false gap in the older growth.

The whole clever cruelty of it revealed itself all at once, a thing designed to be beaten only by someone patient enough to stop and see.

“All right,” she said to no one, something in her chest loosening. “All right. You built this to be solved. So, I shall solve you.”

She counted turns under her breath. She trusted the moons, the odd numbers, the darker of any two paths, and the maze gave way to her one junction at a time. The hedges pressed closer as she went, denser here, older, the torches set further and further apart until whole stretches ran only on moonlight.

The music was gone. The laughter was gone. There was only the crunch of her slippers and the sharp green wall on either side, drawing her toward the heart of the thing.

She rounded a final corner into a corridor of hedge so narrow that her skirts brushed both sides, so dim that she nearly missed the shape standing at the far end of it.

A man. Tall, broad through the shoulders, a mask across his eyes and the torchlight catching only the lower half of his face. He had been watching her come.

He tilted his head to the side.

“Well, well, well,” he drawled, his voice low and rough, a roll buried in it, an accent she had never heard in any London ballroom. “Aren’t ye a clever little fox?”

CHAPTER 2

“Are ye lost, little fox?” the man asked.

“I am not lost. I am between one place and another.” The words came steadier than she felt.

Rosaline kept her spine near the hedge as she took the measure of the man filling the path.

He was tall. Not the courteous tallness of ballroom lords who bent at the neck to seem agreeable, but a height that made the narrow green corridor feel narrower still, his shoulders broad enough to close it off on their own. A plain black mask covered the upper half of his face. No gilt, no feathers, none of the theater the rest of the house had draped itself in. Below it sat a beard and a mouth already quirking at one corner. When the torchlight found the eyeholes, the eyes behind them showed green, deep as the yew crowding them on either side.

“Between one place and another.” He gave the words back to her slow, turning them over. His voice was nothing she had heard in any drawing room in England, low and rolling, the r’s burred soft, the vowels pulled wide. “That’s a bonnie way to say lost, lass.”

“I am not lost.” She lifted her chin. “If you will step aside, I will prove it.”

He did not step aside. He tilted his head instead, studying her. “Prove it, then.”

She would not give him the satisfaction of squeezing past. She turned on her heel and walked back the way she had come, back straight, pace even, into the fork she had passed a moment before. She took the left of it. Twenty steps on, the hedge closed into a solid green wall in front of her.

A dead end.

Behind her, unhurried boots crunched on gravel. She did not need to turn to know his mouth had gone from tilting to something wider.

“I tried that one meself.” He came to a stop a respectful pace away, though respect had little to do with the way he looked at her. “And the two before it. This corner of the beast has been laid to trap. A wee cruelty from whoever built it.” He nodded toward the wall. “I’ve been at it near half an hour, but perhaps a clever little fox like ye could get us both out of here.”

“There is no us.” Rosaline stepped around him, careful to leave air between them, and started back toward the fork. “We are not in this game together, sir. And I am not hunting a prize. I am hunting my friend, who I have lost somewhere in all this green, and I would sooner find her than stand here trading riddles with a stranger.”

“A stranger.” He fell into step behind her. “We’re all strangers tonight. That’s rather the point of the masks, no?”

“Then let us both enjoy our anonymity separately.”

She reached the fork, turned right this time, and walked with purpose. The path bent, bent again, opened onto a little square of clipped grass, and stopped. Hedge on three sides.

Another dead end.