Page 32 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

For one alarming instant, Rosaline was no longer thinking about macarons at all. She was thinking about what it would be like to have that same attention turned on the bare skin at the inside of her wrist, on the column of her throat.

The thought was so sudden that she blinked hard and felt her face go scarlet.

“Ye’ve the idea,” the Duke said, his voice rougher now, as though he had followed her exactly where her mind had gone. “Now, yer turn.”

She lifted the macaron again, slowly this time. She was aware of her own mouth in a way she had never been in her life, aware of his eyes on it. She bit into the macaron, unhurried, and swallowed lazily.

The Duke went very still. She heard him swallow, though he had nothing in his mouth.

“Aye,” he said, his voice uneven. “Ye’re a—ye’re a very apt pupil, Lady Rosaline.”

“Rosaline!” Ivy came skipping back with Miss Dean and a small paper twist of lemon drops clutched to her chest. “Miss Dean says we must go. It has been ever so long, and I have got both the lemon and the violet ones, and—oh, are you buying the pink macarons? You should. They are the prettiest.”

The Duke straightened at once, and the tutor and everything under it folded away, ceding place to a duke who had happened upon a lady and her youngest sister in a shop.

“Lady Rosaline. Lady Ivy.” He bowed to Ivy with as much gravity as he had given the imaginary Earl, which made her giggle all over again. “Mind that condition of yers. Sweets in the ears. Very rare.” And to Rosaline, with a look that lasted precisely one beat longer than courtesy allowed, “Good day, My Lady.”

On his way past the counter, he laid down a sum that could have bought the whole tray, told the girl behind it to send the rest to Lady Ivy’s carriage, and did not wait to be thanked. Then the bell jangled, and he was out the blue door and into the bright street.

Rosaline stood among the toffees with a half-eaten pink macaron in her hand and her pulse thundering like a drum, with no earthly idea how she was going to walk to the milliner’s and pretend in front of her brother that nothing had happened at all.

CHAPTER 14

“Bow first. Bow low. Say ‘My Lord’ until you are sick of the taste of it. And whatever the man says to you, however wrong, however insulting, you do not correct him. Are you listening to me, Magnus?”

“I’m listenin’.”

“Say it back.”

“Bow low, Me Lord this and Me Lord that, and let the old goat be as wrong as he pleases.” Magnus looked out the carriage window at the great gray face of Ulverton House, all columns and cold gray stone. “I’ve had the lesson twice already, Leo. Once from ye and once from a better teacher than ye’ll ever be.”

“I am choosing to ignore that.” Leo straightened Magnus’s cravat with the fussing hands of a man sending a boy to church. “Ulverton is the whole game. He has the ear of every serious man in the party; he forgets nothing, and he has already decided you are a Highland brute who eats with his hands. You have one hour to make him wrong about it. Do not waste it proving him right.”

“Alright.”

“And Magnus.” Leo caught his sleeve as he reached for the door. For once, there was no humor on his face. “If any man in London knows where the bodies of the last twenty years are buried, it is him. Charm him properly, and you’ll be a great deal closer to the truth of your father’s death than you were this morning.”

Magnus said nothing to that. He climbed down from the carriage and went up the cold stone steps. By the time the front door opened, he had put every wild thing in him away in a locked drawer and turned the key.

The Earl of Ulverton received him in a library the size of a chapel, seated by the fire with a blanket across his knees and a face like a fist. He was very old and very upright, and he did not rise. He watched Magnus cross the long room toward him with the frank expectation of being disappointed.

Magnus bowed lower than the room required, low enough that the old man’s eyebrows twitched a fraction. He held it a beat past the point of comfort before he rose again.

“Me Lord, it is an honor. I am grateful ye’d agreed to see me.”

“Sit, Your Grace.” Ulverton gestured to the chair opposite with one dry hand. “I confess I agreed to it chiefly out of curiosity. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

There it was, laid in the very first minute, the little hook baited and dangled.

A week ago, Magnus would have asked him coldly what exactly he had heard. He heard Rosaline’s voice instead, clear as a bell.

“You do not say you have heard of him, because then he’ll wonder what you have heard, and half of it is unflattering.”

“Then I hope to be duller in person than in the tellin’, Me Lord.” Magnus sat. “Most men are.”

Something flickered at the corner of Ulverton’s mouth. Not a smile, but the distant ancestor of one.

“How do you find London, Your Grace?”