Page 53 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

With that, Rosaline went.

The beverage table stood in the shade of the marquee. She reached it and set down the glass she did not want. She pressed her fingertips to the cool linen and, for the first time in a fortnight, drew a breath all the way to the bottom of her lungs.

“Ye look terrible, lass.”

She did not have to turn. Her whole body had already told her he was there, the way it always told her, before her mind had caught up to the fact.

“Thank you, Your Grace.” She kept her eyes on the table, on the ranked glasses, on anything but him. “You have a gift for flattery. It will serve you beautifully in society.”

“I mean ye look like ye havenae slept in a fortnight. I’ve nae slept either. I also mean I’ve endured dinners I loathed for the one chance of seein’ ye across a room, and ye never came.” His voice was low, pitched under the noise of the party, meant for her ears only. “Are ye all right, Rosaline? And daenae tell me ye’ve had a headache. I ken a headache. This isnae that.”

The gentleness in it was worse than any cruelty Samuel had ever managed. It threatened to undo her entirely right here, in the flat merciless sunlight, in front of everyone. She gripped the linen harder.

“We have to stop,” she said.

Silence followed.

“This. The arrangement. The lessons, all of it.” She made herself say it evenly, the way she had rehearsed it through eleven sleepless nights, because if she did not say it evenly, she would not be able to say it at all. “It has grown far too dangerous, Your Grace. My brother suspects something. Now he watches me every waking hour. If we are seen, if there is so much as a whisper, it’s not only my ruin. It’s also Beatrice’s and Ivy’s. It costs too much. It always has. I was a fool to think otherwise, and I am putting a stop to it before it destroys the people I love.” She drew in a breath. “We should go our separate ways. Cleanly. Now, while we still can.”

She felt him go rigid beside her.

“I see.” Something had crept into his voice, low and rough and bristling. “That’s yer decision, then. Made all alone, in the dark, without a word to me.”

“It is the only sensible⁠—”

“Have ye found him?” he cut her off, and the words had an edge she had never heard from him. “Some soft, respectable lord with a fine coat and a clean name. Is that it? Have ye found the man ye mean to marry?”

Rosaline turned her head and looked at him. Whatever he saw on her face made his own go still.

“A husband will be found for me, Your Grace,” she said quietly. “That is rather the point. I will not be doing the finding.”

Before he could answer, before the thing rising in his eyes could reach his mouth, she walked off across the bright grass.

She did not let herself look back, though it took the last of everything she had.

Rosaline should never have let go of the table.

Without it under her hands, she was a wallflower again, the girl who counted windowpanes, all her hard-won armor stripped away in the space of one conversation.

When Samuel returned to collect her and steered her at once toward Lord Netherby, a dry stick of a baron with forty thousand pounds a year and the conversational range of a fence post, she could not remember a single thing Magnus had ever taught her.

“Lord Netherby admires horses,” Samuel prompted, silk over steel. “Rosaline rides a little. Don’t you, Rosaline?”

“I… um… Yes.” Her mind went blank.

Netherby looked at her, waiting for more.

The silence stretched, and stretched, before she heard herself add, “Horses are very large.”

Netherby blinked.

“That is,” she continued, “they are larger than one expects when one is close to them. Which I am. Sometimes. Close to horses.” She wanted to die. “Do you find them large?”

“I confess I had not considered it,” Lord Netherby said, in the tone of a man backing slowly out of a room. Then he bowed and left, and took forty thousand pounds a year with him.

Samuel’s smile did not so much as flicker. But his hand found her elbow, and this time his grip was cruel. He walked her at an unhurried pace along the edge of the marquee and behind a stand of yews at the garden’s edge, where the noise of the party dropped away and there was no one to see.

And then he rounded on her.