Page 8 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“The little fox, as you called her.” Leo watched him over his glass. “You never found her.”

“I looked.” The words came out flat, worn smooth from a year of use. “The house wouldnae give up its guest list. The old woman who sent the invitation couldnae recall half the names, and the half she recalled led nowhere. A masked lass in a house full of masked lasses, and nae a thread to pull.” Magnus turned the glass without drinking. “She could be married by now. In London, in Cornwall, dead of a fever for all I ken. A year’s a long while to chase a voice in a hedge.”

“Or,” Leo countered, “she is unmarried, and bored, and somewhere in London this very Season, and you are being needlessly funereal about it.” He tilted his head toward the ballroom. “She could be in that room.”

Magnus rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “There are matters that need me attention a great deal more than a lass in a fox mask.”

“Ah, those matters.” Leo’s voice dropped, the humor gone out of it. “The ones you crossed a border to be near. The names in that little book you think I’ve never seen.”

“Leave it.”

Leo studied him. “I only mean to say that a man can hunt his father’s ghost and still let himself want one living thing. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”

Magnus set the second glass down as untouched as the first.

Across the room, a woman laughed too loudly, a hundred candles burned to illuminate people saying nothing to one another, and the weight of why he was truly here pressed down on him like a hand between his shoulders.

“I’m going,” he said. “Stay. Charm yer debutantes. I’ve had me fill of this city for one night.”

He turned toward the far doors and the cool dark of the corridor beyond, where at least a man could hear himself think.

“Straighten your spine, Rosaline. You are standing like a governess. And Beatrice, that is not a smile; that is a threat. You look as though you mean to bite the next man who approaches.”

“I do mean to.” Beatrice bared her teeth a fraction wider. “It saves so much time.”

“We are too close to the door.” Samuel’s gaze swept across the room and found it wanting, as it found everything wanting. “No one of consequence lingers near a door. We shall never be seen here.” He took each sister by an elbow and repositioned them like furniture. “There. Now, smile as though you are enjoying yourselves, which God knows one of you might manage.”

Rosaline tried. She lifted the corners of her mouth and felt the shape of it sit wrong on her face. The ballroom pressed in on every side, hot with too many bodies, loud with a music she could not hear over the roar of so many voices. Beneath her gloves, her palms had grown damp. She counted the panes in the tall windows for something to hold on to.

“You might try speaking when a gentleman addresses you,” Samuel said to her, his voice low. “A single word. Two, if you are feeling reckless. This is your third Season, Rosaline. People have begun to notice a girl who cannot open her mouth.”

“Perhaps if the gentlemen were worth answering—” Beatrice began.

“Perhaps if you held your tongue for the length of one waltz.” Samuel straightened his cuffs. “I see Lady Hartsfield. I mean to remind her of our connection. Stay here. Both of you. Do not move, do not slouch, and for the love of heaven, do not say anything memorable.”

He disappeared into the crowd before either of them could reply.

Rosaline let out a breath.

Beatrice slipped a hand into hers and squeezed once.

“He is a horror,” she murmured. “You know that, don’t you? However much he says it in a reasonable voice.”

Before Rosaline could answer, a trio of young ladies drifted near, their silks whispering, their smiles the sharp kind she had learned to dread.

“Lady Rosaline.” The eldest of them dipped into a curtsy that was all mockery. “We wondered whether you had lost your voice entirely, or whether you were simply saving it for someone important. And your sister, of course. So refreshingly blunt.”

“Refreshing is a kind word for it,” said the second behind her fan. “I would have said unmarriageable.”

“How fortunate, then,” Beatrice said, sweet as poison, “that no one asked either of you to marry her. Do run along. I believe there is a mirror in the next room dying for your attention.”

The eldest girl’s face pinched. She opened her mouth to say something worse, and that was the moment Samuel reappeared, having heard the last of it, his color high.

“Ladies, forgive my sister.” He said it to them, not to Beatrice, and then bowed, actually bowed. Rosaline watched him choose strangers over his own blood without a flicker. “She is high-spirited and speaks before she thinks. It shan’t happen again. Please, enjoy your evening.”

He waited until the girls had swept off, satisfied, before he grabbed Rosaline by the arm and drew both sisters into the shallow alcove beside a pillar. His grip was not gentle. He leaned close to Rosaline’s ear, and his voice, when it came, was low enough that only she could hear it.

“Understand me. You will accept a suitable man this Season. You will do it before the summer, or you will take Beatrice down with you and Ivy after her, because no decent family will touch a house with a spinster rotting at its center.” His breath was warm and terrible against her cheek. “I will not let you ruin us, Rosaline. I will not. Now, go and be pleasant to someone before I lose what patience I have left.”