Page 49 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

Three mornings later, he summoned her to his study, and she stood before his desk while he attended to his correspondence.

“You have been strange for weeks,” he remarked. “Distracted. Careless. I have watched you make progress this Season, and I have lately watched you begin to squander it. I will not have it, Rosaline.”

He set down his pen and looked at her then, which was worse.

“Do you think any of this is easy for me? It’s Beatrice’s first Season. Then I have Ivy’s in just a few years. Everything those girls will ever be offered rests on the name you carry into a marriage, and every hour you spend mooning and vague is an hour you steal from their futures. Is that what you want? To be the ruin of your own sisters?”

“No,” she said. “Of course not.”

“Then behave as though you love them.” He returned to his correspondence. “You will attend every event I choose. You will be charming. And you will stop wandering off into dark rooms as though you have something to hide. That will be all.”

He took up his pen again, and she understood she had been dismissed like a servant. He had not once asked how she felt or whether her head still ached from the faintness she had claimed in the library. It had not occurred to him to wonder.

It never did.

She carried the words out with her, and they did their work because they were built precisely for her, keyed to the one lock in her that always opened—her sisters. It had always been her sisters.

And so she did the only thing left to her.

She hid.

The night of the Ashfords’ dinner, when the maid came to dress her, Rosaline was already beneath the counterpane with the curtains drawn.

Samuel came to the door himself, and she made her voice small and frayed and told him that the light hurt her eyes, that she could not think for the pounding in her head, that she would do nothing but shame them all by fainting into the soup.

He stood over her bed a long moment, searching her face in the dimness. She kept her eyes half shut and her breathing shallow until at last he turned on his heel and left her to the dark.

The next day, he found her in the morning room, where she had arranged herself pale and wilting over a breakfast she had no intention of eating. “The card party is this evening. You will be attending.”

“I will try.” She did not look up. “I have been dizzy since I woke. If I must stand over cards in a hot room for three hours…” She pressed her fingertips to her temple and let the words trail into nothing, as though the effort had cost her the rest of them.

“You are always dizzy of late.” His gaze moved over her, cataloging. “How convenient that it troubles you only on the evenings I have need of you.”

“You think I enjoy this?” She lifted her eyes and let them swim and lose their focus. It was not wholly a performance; she had slept perhaps four hours in the week. “I want nothing so much as to be well. Give me until the Selbys’ rout. I will be recovered by then, I promise you, and twice as charming for having missed tonight.”

He considered it for a long moment, the bother of hauling a swooning sister through a card room set against the bother of waiting, and as she had gambled, he chose to wait.

“The Selbys’,” he agreed. “Not a day past. My patience is not infinite, Rosaline. Nor is your usefulness.”

Then he left her to her cold toast.

She let herself breathe.

It was a coward’s strategy, and she knew it. But every event was a room Magnus might walk into, and she did not trust herself within twenty feet of him, not anymore, not after their kiss in the library.

Distance was the only safety she had left. She clung to it and told herself the hollow ache beneath her ribs was relief, and did not for a moment believe it.

“You are not sick.”

Rosaline looked up from the book she had not been reading.

Ivy had crept in first, as she always did, and was already burrowing under the coverlet against Rosaline’s side. But it was Beatrice who had spoken, who stood at the foot of the bed with her arms folded and her sharp eyes doing their careful arithmetic.

“I have a headache,” Rosaline said.

“You’ve had a headache for eleven days. That is not a headache. That is a tenancy agreement.” Beatrice came and sat on the edge of the mattress. “Even Samuel has stopped believing you, and Samuel believes whatever is convenient.”

“I brought you a picture.” Ivy produced a folded paper and pressed it earnestly into Rosaline’s hands. “It’s Scotland. That’s a castle, and those are the mountains, and that’s a stag, though he came out rather like a dog. I used nearly all the good blue on the sky, but I am not sorry. Beatrice says stags are enormous. Is it true?”