Page 48 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“Look at ye. Come apart in my hands and still the finest thing I’ve ever seen. I have ye. I’m nae goin’ anywhere.”

When at last she sank back, her breath came in shallow, uneven gasps. Magnus remained close, one hand braced beside her, as though he would not let the world intrude until she had found herself again.

CHAPTER 21

“We cannot stay like this.” Rosaline’s voice was scarcely a breath, her forehead still resting where his heart slammed against his ribs.

“Nay.” His hand slowly traced down the length of her spine. “We cannae.”

And yet neither of them moved.

The candle on the far shelf had guttered low, and in its failing light, Rosaline could not make herself care about the door, the party, the whole ordered world waiting for her on the other side of it.

There was only the warm dark and the steady thunder under her cheek and the astonishing, ruinous fact of what she had just let happen in her brother’s house.

Her body did not feel like her own. It felt remade, tender in places she had never before had cause to consider, humming still with the memory of his hands and his mouth and the low wrecked sound of her name in his voice.

A week ago, she had been a wallflower who counted windowpanes to keep from weeping. She no longer knew what she was.

Then, from somewhere down the corridor, footsteps sounded.

Rosaline went rigid in his arms. Magnus’s head came up, all the languor gone out of him.

“Rosaline?” Samuel’s voice called, the measured tread of his boots drawing nearer. “Rosaline, are you back here? The Hargraves have been asking after you this quarter hour.”

Three hard raps sounded at the library door.

Rosaline could not breathe, but Magnus had already moved, and where her hands shook uselessly at her sides, his were quick and certain. He drew the shoulder of her gown back into place, smoothed the crushed silk down her waist, turned her by the hip toward the thread of light at the door, and lifted his fingers to her hair, finding the pin that had come loose and sliding it back into place.

“Breathe,” he whispered in her ear. “Slowly. Ye were faint, ye came for quiet. That’s all. Ye’re perfect. Go.”

“A moment,” she called, and her voice came out miraculously level. “I am coming.”

When she looked back, Magnus was already gone, melted into the shadows behind the tall shelves as though the room had swallowed him whole.

She opened the door to her brother.

Samuel filled the frame with a branch of candles in his hand, and their light spilled past her into the dim room and found nothing, because there was nothing to find. His eyes moved over her all the same, over the color in her face she could not command down.

“What are you doing back here, in the dark, alone?” he asked.

For the space of a breath, she could not form a single word.

“The rooms were so warm.” She pressed a hand to her temple and did not have to feign unsteadiness. “I felt faint. I only wanted a moment out of the crush, somewhere quiet, and I did not think to bring a candle. I’m sorry, Samuel. I’ll come along now.”

He did not answer at once. He looked past her into the library, at the two chairs, the cold hearth, the shelves giving up nothing, and something flashed across his face that she could not read and did not like.

For one endless moment, she was certain he knew, that he would step past her into the room and call Magnus out of the dark by his name, and that everything she had spent her whole life guarding would come down at a stroke because she had been too weak to keep her hands to herself. Her pulse struck so hard against her throat she was sure he would hear it.

“You will not disappear again,” he said. His hand closed around her upper arm, not gently, and drew her out into the corridor and the light. “Not once more this evening. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

He steered her back toward the music, and only at the bend in the corridor did he glance over his shoulder at the dark doorway they had left behind.

Samuel watched her after that, not bothering to hide it.

The suspicion took root in him the way frost took a window, spreading fine and silent until the whole pane was rimed over. He had no proof of anything, but he did not need proof. He needed only the memory of her flushed face in a doorway and he set about tightening every rein he held.