Page 34 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

He turned his face to the window and let the city blur past. Against every instinct of self-preservation, his mind went where it had been trying to go all day.

A dim sweet shop. Warm sugar in the air. A small pink macaron, and a woman learning to be watched, her eyes lifting from beneath her lashes and her mouth doing that unhurried thing he had shown her. Though he wished he had not, because he had not slept a full night since.

She had blushed to the roots of her hair, and he had known, with a certainty that had nothing to do with vanity, exactly where her thoughts had gone, because his had gone to the same place and stayed there.

It had taken everything in him to bow and leave that shop—rather more than it had taken to bow to Ulverton.

Magnus clenched his jaw and made himself do the arithmetic again, the cold clean sum of it, the way he did every time his mind wandered to her, which was more often now than he cared to admit.

She wanted a safe man with a safe name. She had told him so herself, plainly, in a room full of ruined silk, and she had been right to. A dull English gentleman with a spotless house and a title no one whispered about, who would lift her sisters and never once make her the story the ton told at supper.

That was the whole of what she needed, and it was the one thing on this earth he could not be. Not for her, not for anyone, not while there was a debt in the north still owed, a name still to clear, and a killer somewhere in this glittering city who had let a good man die in the dark.

He had a father to answer for. It left no room for wanting the one woman in London he had no business wanting.

He knew the sum; he had done it a hundred times. It kept coming out the same, and it kept refusing to convince him.

CHAPTER 15

“You have surprised me, Rosaline. I do not say it often, so mark it. Two dinners and a musical now without catastrophe, and I am reliably told that Lord Bracewell asked after you by name this week. By name.”

“I am glad, Samuel.”

For the fortieth time that evening, Rosaline resisted the urge to draw the neckline of her gown a half-inch higher. It was a deep blue silk, cut lower than anything she had worn before, and she felt half-naked in it and entirely on display. Which was, she had been assured, precisely the point.

“See that it continues.” Samuel surveyed Lady Bexley’s crowded reception room with the air of a general reviewing ground. “This is not for your amusement, you understand. Whatever has come over you these past weeks, whatever accounts for it, I do not much care, so long as it holds. Beatrice came out in the spring. Ivy much later, but still… Every rung you climb now is a rung they will not have to climb alone.” He glanced at her, and there was no warmth in his eyes, only calculation. “Do not grow careless simply because you have finally grown competent.”

“I understand.”

“Good.” He moved off to be seen among better people.

Rosaline let her shoulders drop a fraction, and it was in that small unguarded moment that she saw him.

The Duke of Greythorne stood across the length of the room with Lord Rivercourt at his side, the pair of them ringed by a knot of gray-headed lords. From what she could see, he was being perfectly charming. He bowed at the correct depth. He laughed at the right moments. He had one old earl positively beaming.

She understood, with a small private jolt, that she was watching her own lessons worn like a well-cut coat, and that he wore them better than she had dared hope.

He did not look at her, not once.

She told herself she was glad and turned away, not daring to examine why the gladness sat so poorly.

“Lady Rosaline, is it? I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. Denby. Charmed, thoroughly charmed.”

The seating had been arranged by a hostess with either great mischief or none at all in her heart, and it had placed Rosaline between two dull baronets and directly across from Lord Denby, a florid young man with a high opinion of himself and a wine-colored waistcoat straining to contain it.

Beside Lord Denby, close enough that Rosaline could not lift her eyes without risking a blush, sat the Duke of Greythorne. She did not lift her eyes to his. She fixed them with great deliberation on Lord Denby.

“Lord Denby.” She let her lashes fall, slowly lifted her gaze to his, and held it. “I had so hoped there would be interesting conversation on this side of the table.”

Denby’s fork paused halfway to his mouth. “Had you? Had you, indeed?” He set the fork down, the better to devote himself to her. “Well, you have come to the right place, Lady Rosaline. I am considered rather good company. I have just returned from Vienna, you know.”

“Vienna.” She widened her eyes the exact degree the word deserved. “How I envy you. One hears such things of the music there. You must tell me everything.”

It was working, of course. It always worked now, which still astonished her a little each time.

Denby puffed out his chest and began to hold forth on Vienna, of which he plainly knew a great deal less than he believed. Rosaline arranged her expression into rapt attention and made the small encouraging sounds that kept a man of Denby’s sort talking indefinitely.

“The opera houses, chiefly,” he was saying. “Though I confess the German tongue defeated me. Guttural stuff. No music in the language itself, whatever they manage to wring out of the instruments.”