Page 45 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

Lord Ulverton swelled with pleasure and began to explain, and Magnus arranged his face into keen attention and let the man talk. Across the small circle, Leo caught his eye, clearly delighted, as though Magnus were a bear who had learned to waltz.

It was working—all of it. A month ago, these same men had looked at him as though he might bite. Now, Ulverton was three anecdotes deep and two others had drifted over to listen, and not one veiled jab about Highland savagery had been thrown all afternoon because Magnus had given them nothing to catch.

He bowed his head. He flattered in the shape of questions. He swallowed a dozen opinions he would once have flung like knives.

“You are unsettlingly charming today,” Leo murmured, once Ulverton had been safely handed off to a new audience. “I keep waiting for the part where you threaten someone. It is like watching a storm decline to break.”

“I’m learnin’ the tune, that’s all.”

“You are learning something.” Leo gave him a shrew look. “I only wonder who’s been teaching it to⁠—”

A footman appeared at Magnus’s elbow with a small box and a folded note. “For you, Your Grace. Delivered just now. There’s no name, I’m afraid.”

Magnus opened the box. Inside, packed in paper, were a dozen marzipans from a certain shop, along with a note in a neat and careful hand.

A savage kept my secret. It seems only fair I keep his. Thank you, Your Grace.

Magnus stood very still for a moment in the middle of the crowded room. Then he closed the box, folded the note once, and tucked it in the breast pocket of his coat, where it would sit for the rest of the day.

“Well?” Leo prompted.

“Hush.” Magnus could not for the life of him stop the twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Have some marzipan, Leo. They’re the finest in London, and I’ll thank ye nae to ask where I got them from.”

CHAPTER 20

“Stop fidgeting with your gloves, you look wonderful. If you keep tugging at them, you will ruin the whole gown,” Beatrice murmured.

“I am not fidgeting.” Rosaline stopped fidgeting.

Her younger sister shot her a look. “You’ve been strange as a cat all evening. It is only Samuel’s soiree. The same forty dull people we always see, in Samuel’s drawing room, where nothing more exciting than the fish course has ever occurred. What on earth is the matter with you?”

“Nothing is the matter.” Rosaline smoothed her skirts, a deep midnight blue that Sarah had laced her into with an approving cluck, and told herself it was true.

Which was the precise moment the footman announced Magnus and he walked into her brother’s drawing room.

Rosaline’s whole body went tight as a plucked string.

“There.” Beatrice’s eyes narrowed, following her sister’s gaze across the room and back. “That. What was that? You went positively rigid.”

“I did no such thing. I am merely startled. I did not expect a duke to actually attend.” Rosaline forced herself to relax, one muscle at a time. “Everything is fine, Bea. Truly. Go and rescue Ivy before she talks Lady Prowse’s ear off.”

Beatrice went, though not without a backward glance that saw entirely too much.

Magnus kept his distance all evening, and it was somehow worse than if he had not.

He was faultless. He bowed to Samuel with exactly the deference his vanity required. He complimented the music. He did not once cross the room toward her, nor let his gaze rest on her long enough for anyone to remark. He had learned the steps so well that no one in the room would have guessed there was something between them.

But every time she glanced up, his eyes were already on her, dark and unhurried, and every time, her pulse answered before her good sense could stop it.

So she did what he had taught her. She turned the whole force of it on someone safe.

Lord Bracewell was easy. He had been half in love with her since the musicale, and it took only lowered lashes and a well-timed laugh to have him beaming.

When Lord Cathmore drifted over to see what he was missing, she did the same, tipping her head and laughing low at some witless remark about his hunters as though he were the cleverest man in England.

It was working beautifully. Two lords, warm and attentive, in full view of her brother, who watched with visible satisfaction.

She made the mistake of glancing across the room only once.