Page 54 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“A disgrace.” He said it very softly, which was worse than shouting, his face close to hers and perfectly composed in case any eye should stray their way. “Larger than one expects. Do you know what you are, Rosaline? You are a stone I have carried up a hill for three years. Every door I open, you close. Every advantage I make, you squander. Netherby was prepared to overlook your age and your dullness for the sake of the connection, and you gave him horses are very large.”

“Samuel, I⁠—”

“Be quiet.” His fingers dug into her arm. “I am finished. Do you hear me? I am finished pretending you are capable of securing your own future. You will ruin our sisters with your sulking, your headaches, your imbecile mouth, and I will not permit it. I will choose your husband myself. Whatever wretch will have you at whatever price, and you will take him, and you will be grateful, and you will be gone from my house, my accounts, and my concern.” His lips thinned. “God knows I have tried. God knows what I was given to work with. Our mother would be ashamed to call you her daughter if she saw the creature you have let yourself become.”

The garden tilted.

Of all the things he had ever said to her, in three years of small cold cruelties, that one went in clean under her ribs and struck something that had no armor over it at all.

Her mother. Her mother, who had smelled of orange-flower water and had let Rosaline plait her hair and had, in the last thin months of her life, pressed Rosaline’s small hand to the swell of her belly and said, “You will love her for me, won’t you? Whatever happens.”

Rosaline had loved Ivy. And Beatrice. And Samuel had just used the whole of it as a knife.

She could not speak. Her eyes burned. Samuel saw it, and something like satisfaction settled over his features.

“That is enough.”

The voice came from behind her. It was not loud, but it went through the little screened space like a blade through silk, and Samuel’s head snapped up, and Rosaline turned with him, her skirts catching against the low yew branches.

Magnus stood in the gap in the yews. Rosaline had not heard him come. He was not looking at her. He was looking at her brother, and there was nothing polished about his face now, nothing of the careful manners she had spent weeks drilling into him. What was underneath had risen to the surface, and it was terrible and very calm.

“Your Grace.” Samuel composed himself with effort, and his voice took on the smooth condescension he kept for men he considered beneath him. “This is a private conversation. You will oblige me by removing yourself from it.”

“I heard the entirety of yer private conversation.” Magnus approached them, unhurried. “That’s nae how a man speaks to a woman in his care, Darton. That’s nae how a man speaks to anyone.”

“That woman is my sister, and my charge, and none of your business.” Samuel jutted his chin. “I am aware that in whatever bog you were reared, such distinctions are lost. But here, a gentleman does not insert himself between a peer and his family. Go back to the party. Go back to Scotland, for all I care. You are out of your depth, Your Grace, and you are making a spectacle.”

“Aye, likely I am. We savages do.” Magnus did not move. “She deserves to choose her own husband. That’s all. Every soul on that lawn gets to choose, the dullest of them, the cruelest, and ye’d deny it to her because it’s convenient to ye. A man who’d do that to the women in his own house isnae a protector. He’s a jailer with a good tailor.”

Samuel laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. “How very stirring. Do they teach speeches like that at whatever kirk you attend?” He turned away from Magnus as though the matter were closed, and his hand shot out and closed around Rosaline’s wrist hard. “Come, Rosaline. We are finished here, and so is His Grace.”

He pulled, and Rosaline stumbled a step.

Magnus stepped between them and the gap in the yews, blocking their path. “Let go of her wrist.”

“I beg your⁠—”

“Ye’re leavin’ marks, Darton.” His voice had dropped to something very quiet. “Let go.”

Samuel did not let go. But he did not pull again either.

In that suspended moment, Magnus looked at Rosaline for the first time since he had come through the yews. Really looked at her, at her burning eyes and her pale face and her brother’s fist around her wrist, and she watched him arrive at a decision she could not read.

“Marry me,” he said.

The garden went silent. Even Samuel had nothing to say for a second.

“Marry me, Rosaline.” Magnus said it again, steadier, as though the second time had cost him less than the first and he had found he meant it more. “Nae a husband found for ye. Nae a wretch at whatever price. Me. Now. Of yer own choosin’.”

“You cannot be serious.” Samuel found his tongue at last, and it dripped with venom. “You? She would sooner marry a footman. My sister is the daughter of an English earl. She will not shackle herself to some savage dragged out of a Highland bog with a borrowed English title. The very notion is⁠—”

“Rosaline.” Magnus did not so much as glance at him. His eyes stayed on hers, steady, certain, and gentle in a way that had no business surviving in that hard face. “Ye have a choice here. Whatever he tells ye, whatever he’s always told ye, right now ye have a choice. And ye can choose me.”

And there it was, the thing Samuel had spent her whole life making certain she never had—a choice. Held out to her across three feet of trampled grass by the Scot her brother had just called a savage, in a garden corner, in the worst and least romantic circumstance she could ever have imagined.

It was still, God help her, the first choice anyone had offered her in as long as she could remember.

Something that had been banked within her for twenty-one years began to burn.