Page 6 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

Tomorrow, there would be a carriage, a brother, a road out of London, years of drawing rooms where she said nothing anyone remembered. Tonight, there was only this stranger with the burred voice, the green eyes, the mouth so near her own, looking at her as though she were the most interesting thing the whole staged house had produced.

She should step back. She knew every reason. She could name each one and put it in order, the way she read a difficult page.

She did not step back.

He closed the last of the space between them and kissed her.

His mouth was warm and unhurried, and it asked rather than took. Rosaline answered before the ordered part of her could file a single objection. Her hand found the front of his coat. His fingers rose to the line of her jaw, careful of the mask’s ribbon, tilting her face up to him.

The green wall, the cold, the whole clever cruelty of the maze fell away, and there was only the press of him, the beard against her skin, the low sound he made in his chest that she felt more than heard.

“Fox!” The name cut through the hedges from somewhere off to the left. Abigail’s voice, bright and searching. “Fox, where have you gone?”

Rosaline came back into herself all at once, her breathing ragged, her palm still pressed flat against the man’s chest.

What on earth was she doing? She was in a stranger’s arms in the dark, with her friend calling her name three walls away.

She stepped back so fast that her heel caught in the grass.

“Steady.” His hand shot out, but she was already beyond it.

“I have to go.” She pressed the back of her glove to her lips. “That is my friend. I have to go.”

“Then go.” He made no move to stop her. Through the mask, his green eyes only watched. “Clever little fox.”

She turned toward Abigail’s voice and did not let herself turn back. Left, then right, then toward the sound, threading the hedges by ear now rather than logic, until the path spilled her out into a wider run. And there was Abigail, the white dove mask shoved up onto her hair, hands on her hips.

“There you are.” Abigail seized her arm. “I have been calling and calling. I turned one corner, and you had simply vanished, like something in a fairytale. Where did you go?”

“Out.” Rosaline’s voice came out thin. She steadied it. “I found the way out.”

They followed the last of the torches together.

The hedge opened, and the gardens gave them back to the lawn, where a small crowd had gathered near a raised dais. A woman in a gold gown stood there holding a slim volume aloft, laughing behind her mask while the guests applauded.

“Oh, no.” Abigail stopped short. “No, no, no. Someone’s reached the center.”

“The chase is won,” a footman announced, pleased with himself. “The prize is claimed.”

Abigail’s shoulders dropped. “We were close. I know we were close. I could feel it.”

“We were.” Rosaline took her friend’s hand. “I am sorry. Truly. I lost you, and then I lost the game, and I have made a poor showing of your birthday all around.”

“Don’t you dare.” Abigail turned, her eyes shining despite the droop of her mouth. “This was the finest birthday I have had. A masked house, a hedge in the dark, and my dearest friend vanishing into thin air. I would not trade one moment of it for a shelf of scandalous books.” She linked their arms together and drew Rosaline toward the drive. “Though I confess, I am dying to know. How did a girl who has never so much as walked to church without a chaperone find her way out of that maze, alone, in the dark?”

Rosaline glanced once over her shoulder toward the black mouth of the hedge, where the torchlight showed her nothing but green and shadow.

“We must go,” she said. “The hour is dreadfully late, and your grandmother will send out riders. I will tell you everything in the carriage.”

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

Or nearly. Some of it. As much as she could bear to say aloud without her face giving her away.

Abigail chattered the length of the drive, and Rosaline nodded in the right places, hearing perhaps a third of it. Her mind had stayed behind in the dark of the maze, in a narrow green corridor, on the warmth of a stranger’s mouth and the burr in a voice that had called her clever.

But by dusk tomorrow, she would be a hundred miles and a whole other life away from him.