Page 65 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“I am giving this away, you understand,” she told him, turning it in the light. “To Abigail. She earned it a year before I did.”

“Course ye are.” Magnus looked down at her, and whatever was on his face then was a great deal larger and more dangerous than the moment could hold. He did not say it, and neither did she. “Give the whole world away if it pleases ye. Ye’re a duchess now. Ye can afford to be generous.”

He lifted her hand and kissed the knuckle above her wedding band in front of everyone, scandalous, Scottish, and entirely hers.

“Only save yer evenings for me.”

CHAPTER 29

“Do they have frogs in Scotland?” Ivy planted herself squarely in front of Magnus with the grave urgency of an ambassador. “Big ones? Bigger than English frogs? Beatrice says everything Scottish is bigger and crosser, which is why you are the way you are, so I need to know about the frogs specifically.”

Magnus set down the chicken leg he had been eating and gave the question the solemn consideration it deserved. “Aye. We’ve frogs the size of yer two fists together up in the lochs, and they’ve a temper on them ye wouldnae believe. There’s one that lives near me aunt’s house that has been croakin’ the same insult at me since I was a boy. I’ve never once made out the words, but I ken it’s nothin’ kind.”

Ivy’s whole face opened like a window. “Can I see him? When we come to Scotland? Rosaline promised I could come to Scotland and see a stag and look for fairies in the lochs. She promised on every frog in England, and now you have Scottish frogs, which are better, so…”

“Then ye’ll come, and ye’ll meet the whole ill-tempered lot of them, and I’ll teach ye to catch the wee ones in yer hands so ye can carry them to Beatrice’s bed.” He leaned in, conspiratorial. “That last part we’ll nae mention to yer sister.”

“Which sister,” Beatrice asked darkly from behind her book, “am I to understand is receiving frogs in her bed?”

“Neither of ye. It’s a hypothetical frog.” Magnus said it with such grave innocence that Ivy dissolved into giggles and even Beatrice’s mouth betrayed her.

Magnus sat in the dappled shade of a Hyde Park elm with a duchess at his side and her sisters at his feet and felt, with a quiet astonishment that had not yet worn off, the shape of a thing he had not had since he was a boy of fifteen.

A family.

A loud, sharp-tongued, frog-obsessed family, and it was impossibly his.

He looked up and found Rosaline watching him over the rim of her glass, and the look in her eyes was warm enough to scald.

“You are very good with her,” she murmured as Ivy scrambled off to interrogate Leo about whether marquesses were allowed to eat the last of the strawberry tarts.

“I like her. She says exactly the thing she means and hang the consequences.” Magnus shifted closer under cover of reaching for the wine until his shoulder pressed against the warm length of hers, and his voice dropped. “Reminds me of a woman I ken. Though that one waited twenty-one years to start sayin’ what she meant, and now I cannae get her to stop, and I find I like her loud even better than I liked her quiet.” His mouth grazed the shell of her ear, scandalous in the open park. “Especially in the evenings, when I have her alone.”

“Magnus.” The color flooded her throat, and she did not move away. “There are young girls present.”

“The girls are besieging a marquess. We’ve a whole minute.”

But he leaned back all the same, letting her recover, savoring the flush he had put there, the private knowledge of it a heat that ran under the whole bright afternoon.

Rosaline let him have his victory for exactly as long as it took her to refill his glass. Then she leaned in and set her mouth close to his ear, as he had done to her.

“When we are home,” she murmured, sweet and unhurried, “and the door is locked, I am going to take my time with you. All of it. Slowly enough that you remember only my name in your mouth… and yours in mine.” A pause, warm against his ear. “I have been thinking about it since the strawberries. I thought you should suffer for it too.”

Magnus forgot entirely what he had meant to say, and knocked clean over the wine he was holding.

“There are children present, Your Grace,” she said serenely, then returned to her strawberries.

It was the proudest he had been of anyone in his whole life.

“Where is Lord Darton today?” Abigail asked, settling down on the blanket with a plate. “I confess I braced myself for him. I had a great many withering remarks prepared, and now I have no one to aim them at.”

“Urgent business.” Rosaline’s voice was carefully neutral. “Or so his note said. He regrets he cannot join us.”

“He is not busy.” Ivy had returned and delivered this with the flat certainty of a child reporting the weather. “I heard him tell his valet that he would not sit on a blanket in a public park to be stared at and whispered about by people wondering how a sister of his married a savage Scot. And then he said.” She screwed up her face in recollection. “He said he would rather not be in the same green acre as that Scot because he is frightened of you.” She beamed at Magnus, entirely pleased to be the bearer of such excellent news. “Everyone is a little frightened of you. But Samuel most of all.”

Silence fell over the blanket, delicate as spun sugar.

“Ivy,” Beatrice said without heat, “we have discussed the difference between things that are true and things that are said aloud at picnics.”