Page 62 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“You never speak of yours,” she went on, softer. “Your family. I have given you several small pieces of mine, and you have given me almost none of yours. Will you? Just tonight. Whatever you can bear to.”

The fire crackled, and the rain went on, and Magnus found words coming out of him that he had never once in his life said aloud to anyone.

“Me faither was taken from our house when I was fifteen years old. I didnae understand the half of it then, mind. I was a lad. All I knew was that they came for him and he never came home again. The why of it I had to dig out for myself, year upon year, long after they’d put him in the ground. It’s taken me the better part of my life to learn what I’m about to tell ye.”

He felt her go still against him, but he kept his eyes on the fire.

“My father… He was a good man. That’s the plainest way I ken to say it, and the truest. A laird and baron with more land than money and more conscience than sense, and he’d gotten wind of somethin’ he wasnae meant to. Powerful men doin’ a wicked thing and growin’ rich on it, and dressin’ up the whole of it as the King’s business.” His thumb moved slowly over her shoulder. “Most men would have looked the other way. Kept their heads down, kept their lands, kept their sons safe. Me faither wasnae most men. He said he’d sooner be poor and right than comfortable and complicit, and he set about gatherin’ what he could to prove it.”

“What happened?” Her voice was very soft.

“They got to him first. It’s an easy thing to destroy a principled man if ye’ve money, reach, and no scruples. Ye simply arrange for the proof to point the other way.” His jaw tightened. “They charged him with treason. Sedition against the Crown, on papers he never wrote and a witness who was paid. And one night, they came for him. He crouched down in front of me, the way he had when I was a wee lad and took my face in his two hands and said, Ye guard this house. Ye guard what is ours. That is yer task now, nae mine. Promise me. Then the dragoons dragged him out of his house in front of his household. I watched them do it, and he looked back at me once, just once, and then he was gone, and I never saw him alive again.”

Rosaline’s hand had found his and gripped it.

“He died in a cell awaitin’ a trial they had no intention of ever grantin’ him. Illness, they said, though a man dies quickly enough of cold, damp, and a broken heart without any help from fever. His name was never cleared. The lands went. What little was left came to me through an aunt who raised me hard and loved me harder. I grew up the son of a traitor in a country that had murdered him with paperwork and gone home to its dinner.”

He turned his head and briefly pressed his lips to her hair, needing the warmth of her.

“And then, three years ago, a cousin I’d never met died heirless, and I woke up a duke of England. Of all the absurd things. The son of a traitor, handed a coronet and a seat at the very table where they’d done it.”

“That is why you came.” Understanding moved through her voice. “The lessons, the ballrooms, the men you despise. You came to find them.”

“Aye.” He let the fire crackle a while. “I came to find every man who had a hand in it, and to see me faither’s name cleared if it’s the last thing I do on this earth. That’s the whole of me, Rosaline. That’s what ye married, threat and hedge and all. A man on an errand of justice a decade in the makin’.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she asked carefully, “Do you know who they are? The men?”

“I’m beginnin’ to.”

He stopped there, because there was a name sitting behind his teeth, the name of a silver-haired man with pale eyes, and he found he could not yet set it loose even here, even to her.

“I’ll tell ye when I’m certain. A name spoken too soon is a blade ye hand to yer enemy. When I ken it past all doubt, ye’ll be the first soul I tell. I promise ye that.” He looked down at her. “Leo kens what I’m about, the huntin’ of the men who did it. He’s helped me at it. But the rest, the night itself, me faither, what it did to the boy I was… I’ve never lain before a livin’ soul. Nae Leo. Nae me aunt, even at the end. Ye’re the first I’ve told the whole of it. Make of that what ye will.”

She made of it the thing he had not dared hope for.

She turned her face up and looked at him, dry-eyed, steady, fierce, and said, “Then we will find them. However long it takes. You are not doing it alone anymore, Magnus. I have spent my whole life reading cold and dangerous men across drawing rooms. I should think I might finally be of some use.”

Something in his chest that had been tight for sixteen years eased by a fraction it never had before.

“My mother used to smell of orange-flower water,” Rosaline said then into the quiet, giving him an offering of her own in return, because that was how it was done between them now—one wound laid beside another. “She died when I was thirteen, after Ivy was born. She was the only warm thing in that house, and when she died, the warmth died with her, and my father closed like a fist. Then he died too and left Samuel the key to all of us.” Her fingers curled into her palms. “She made me promise to love Ivy for her. So I did. I loved all of them for her, and I forgot somewhere along the way that I was permitted to want anything for myself. I did not remember until a scoundrel in a maze told me I was interesting.” She let out a small breath of a laugh. “She would have liked you, I think. She married my father for love.”

Magnus gathered her in and held her. He held her while the rain came down, and thought that whatever else this strange forced marriage had been, it had stopped some while ago, and without his noticing, being a bargain.

London had changed its mind about him, and it did not even have the grace to be ashamed of it.

“You are respectable.” Leo delivered the word like a diagnosis of something faintly disreputable, dropping into a chair in the study with a fistful of cards and an expression of pure delight. “It is the most extraordinary thing I have ever witnessed. Six weeks ago, you were a Highland brute they crossed the street to avoid. You marry one well-bred wallflower while in a kilt, and now you are a reformed man, a romantic, a duke who followed his heart against all worldly sense.”

He fanned the cards out on the desk. “Do you know what these are? Invitations. The Ashfords. The Selbys. Lady Danforth, who told half of London in April that you had the manners of a Highland cow. She wants you at her dinner on Thursday. You and your enchanting Duchess.”

Magnus turned one of the cards over in his fingers and did not smile, though the irony of it sat bitter and useful on his tongue.

“So it’s nae the man they’ve decided to accept,” he said. “It’s the marriage.”

“It is the story, my dear friend. London cannot resist a story, and you have given them a delicious one. The savage tamed by love. The wild duke who wanted a proper English rose so badly that he snatched her from under her brother’s nose.” Leo shrugged, elegant and unbothered. “It is nonsense, of course. But it is nonsense that opens every door in Mayfair, and you have spent a year trying to open those doors with a great deal more effort and a great deal less success. I would take the nonsense, if I were you. Take it and use it.”

He was right, and Magnus knew he was right. He sat with the cards spread before him and felt the whole careful year of scheming rearrange itself around this one absurd unlooked-for advantage.

Every table he had bowed and scraped to reach was open to him now. Every powerful man who had looked through him would sit across a dinner table from him and call him a good fellow, because he had done the one thing the ton could forgive anything for—he had married well.