Page 31 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

The warmth crawled up her neck before she could stop it, and she busied herself with a tray of sugared violets so that he would not see all of it.

“Thank you,” she returned. “It was your instruction, Your Grace.”

“It was yer nerve. I only pointed at the door; ye walked through it.” He set the macaron down. “Which brings me to a matter of business, since fate’s been kind enough to put us in the one quiet shop in London. Ye owe me a lesson, lass.”

Rosaline quickly glanced around. Ivy and Miss Dean were wholly absorbed at the far wall, deliberating over a jar of barley sugar. The shopkeeper was weighing something for an elderly gentleman at the counter. The two of them stood alone among the trays, and to any passing eye, they were nothing but a lady and a lord debating the merits of marzipan.

“Here?” she whispered.

“Where better? We browse. We murmur. No one thinks a thing of it.” He picked up a different macaron, held it up as though asking her opinion, and lowered his voice beneath the hum of the shop. “I’ve a meeting in three days. A man whose help I need and I cannae afford to set wrong in the first five minutes the way I set every other man in this town wrong. Ye promised me the rules. I’m callin’ the debt.”

“Which man?”

“An old one. Titled to the teeth, traditional to the bone, the sort that decides whether he likes ye in the time it takes ye to cross a room and never revises the verdict after.” He turned the macaron in his fingers. “Pompous. Easily offended. Quick to judge, and slow to forgive the judgment.”

Rosaline nodded slowly, thinking. This, at least, she knew.

“Then you do not walk in as yourself,” she advised. “You walk in as the version of yourself he expects to dislike, and you disappoint him. You bow first, lower than you think necessary, because a man like that counts the inches. You call him My Lord early and often. You ask after his health, his estate, and his hunting in that order, and you let him talk, and you do not under any circumstances offer an opinion he has not asked for.”

“I’m to say nothin’.”

“You are to say a great deal, all of it about him. You avoid politics until he raises it, you avoid Scotland entirely, and you never once make a joke at your own expense, because he will not understand you are doing it and will simply believe the unkind thing you have said.” She warmed up to it. “Flattery, but never anything he can catch as flattery. You do not tell him his estate is fine. You ask him how he manages such a fine estate, so that the compliment arrives disguised as a question and he may answer it for twenty minutes and think you the cleverest man he has met all year.”

The Duke was quiet for a moment, turning that over. “That’s genuinely diabolical.”

“It is manners.”

“It’s the same thing, dressed for church.” But he was nodding. “Show me. Play the old goat. I’ll come across the room.”

She did. She drew herself up into the querulous, chin-lifted hauteur of every dreadful earl she had ever curtsied to, and Magnus came toward her with his hand already extended.

“Me Lord, fine to meet ye at last. I’ve heard⁠—”

“No.” She dropped the character. “You do not shake his hand like a farmer sealing a sale. You bow. And it is not fine to meet you; it is an honor. And you do not say you have heard of him, because then he’ll wonder what you have heard, and half of it is unflattering. Again.”

He tried again. He bowed too shallowly, and she made him redo it lower. He said an honor, Me Lord, and it came out flat as a board, and she made him find the warmth in it. He offered his opinion on the weather unprompted. She caught him at it, and he grumbled and did it over.

By the fourth try, he crossed the invisible room, bowed low enough, and said, “An honor, Me Lord. I’ve long admired how ye keep the north woods at Harrow. However do ye manage it?” with such smooth and plausible deference that Rosaline nearly applauded.

“There,” she said. “That. That is the man who gets the meeting.”

“That,” the Duke responded, “is a man I’d cross the street to avoid. But I get yer point.” Something shifted in his manner, the pupil giving way to the tutor. “Now, since we’re tradin’, I’ve one for ye in return. A good one. Better than lashes.”

“I did not agree to another⁠—”

“Ye’ll want this one.” He glanced toward Ivy, who was still deliberating, and lowered his voice further. “Next time ye’re with a man, and there’s food or drink to hand—at a supper, a picnic, whatever it may be—ye’re nae to simply eat. Ye eat like ye mean it. Slow. Sensual. Ye make a small event of it.” He nodded toward the tray. “Take one. Go on.”

Rosaline picked up a small pink macaron and took a quick, self-conscious nibble at the edge of it.

The Duke watched, his lips twitching.

“Like a wee frightened deer,” he said. “Aye, that. That’s a lass hopin’ nobody will notice she’s eatin’. We want the opposite of that.” He took a macaron of his own. “Watch.”

She watched.

He raised it and bit into it, slow and clean. She found her attention drawn against her will to his mouth, to the deliberate way he took it, the brush of his thumb at the corner of his lip after a crumb that was not there, the unhurried press of it.

It was the most ordinary thing in the world, yet he made it look like a secret being told.