Page 80 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“And I am sorry. I am sorry I rode away. I am sorry I frightened ye and made ye feel the one thing I swore ye’d never feel again under a roof of mine, which was unsafe. Ye trusted me nae to become another cage, and I became one, and I will regret that fortnight to the end of me days. I watched ye learn to move through me house the way ye’d learned to move through yer braither’s—quiet and careful, keepin’ to the rooms I wasnae in. I did that to ye. Me. The one man who swore ye’d never have cause to do it again. And I did it without even the excuse of cruelty, which is somehow the worst of it, because I did it while lovin’ ye and told meself it was honor.”

Rosaline had stopped pretending to tend the wound. She stayed there with her hand pressed over his wound and could not speak at all.

He covered her hand with his own.

“I cannae undo it,” he rasped. “I ken that. I cannae give ye back the fortnight, or unsay the words in that room, or make it so I never put that look on yer face. What’s done is done, and I’ll own it. But I can build somethin’ new with ye from here, if ye’ll have me. That’s what I came to ask. Nae as the man who cornered yer braither, nae as a bargain, a rescue, or a threat made good.”

He drew her up gently until she was on her feet, until they were nearly the same height, with him seated and her standing close between his knees. He looked up at her with his face unguarded.

“Come home, Rosaline. Nae because ye’re trapped, nae because ye’ve nowhere else. Ye’ve the entire world open to ye now, and yer braither will never trouble ye again. Come home because ye choose it. As me partner. Me equal. The other half of every hard thing I have ever had to do. Me wife, me friend, the heart of me.” His voice dropped but did not shake. “I love ye. I think I have loved ye since I met ye in that maze a year ago and been too much a coward to say it. I’m done bein’ a coward. I love ye, and I want to spend the rest of me life provin’ it to ye. Will ye have me?”

For a moment, she could not answer at all.

She had dreamed about a version of this during the worst of her sleepless nights. In every version, she had imagined it would feel like a victory. But now, it did not feel like winning.

For her entire life, she had expected that if she ever stopped holding herself upright, there would be nothing beneath her. Now, for the first time, there was someone to lean toward, to hold her upright, to stand with.

Then the tears came, and she let them fall. She did not hide them or apologize for them because she was done making herself small in every way there was.

“I am still frightened,” she admitted. “I want you to know that, before I say the rest. I am still afraid of loving you this much, of how much of me is bound up in whether you come home at night. That does not go away simply because you have made a pretty speech, however good the speech was.”

She let out a tearful, helpless laugh. “But I have spent my entire life letting fear choose for me. Fear kept me a wallflower. Fear kept me small in my brother’s house. Fear nearly kept me from you in that garden. Fear made me walk out the door a fortnight ago. And all the while, God help me, what I wanted was to stay and fight beside you. You told me in the garden that you were giving me a choice. And you know, it was the first time anyone had ever offered me a choice.

“I have turned that moment over every day since. And then you took it back that night by the fire, and it broke something in me, because I had let myself believe you meant it. But now I see that you were not taking it from me out of cruelty. You were only doing what I have done a hundred times for the people I love. I forgot, the way I have always forgotten, that the people you love are allowed to have a say in it, too.”

She cupped his face in her hands, the cut cheek, the bruised jaw, the tired lines of him. She made herself say the word she had folded away on her wedding night and hidden from herself for months.

“I love you, Magnus. I have loved you longer than I have been willing to admit, and I am tired, so tired, of being ruled by fear. So, yes, I will have you. I will come home. But I will not do it the way I did before, waiting in a beautiful room for you to come back from the dangerous parts of your life and tell me about them after. You said it yourself just now, standing in that warehouse wishing I were beside you.

“So put me beside you when there is a hard thing to be done, a cold room to read, a dangerous man to take the measure of. You will not exclude me to keep me safe. You will bring it to me, and we will do it together, because that is what I meant a moment ago when I said I would fight beside you. I will come home, and I will do it the way you once said I should be allowed to do everything.”

She smiled through her tears. “Freely and of my own choosing. There is no one holding my arm this time. There is no Samuel, no bargain, and no scandal sheet. There is only me, standing in a wrecked parlor, choosing you because I want you and for no other reason in the world.”

Something bloomed in his face that she would remember for the rest of her life.

“That,” he said hoarsely, “is the only way I ever wanted to be chosen.”

She had spent her entire life believing that to be loved, she had first to be useful, to earn it, and to mold herself into whatever the person beside her needed and pray it was enough. And here was a man who had just heard her choose him for no reason on earth but because she wanted him, and who looked at her as though she had handed him the world.

It had never occurred to her that she could simply be wanted. That it could be as simple as that.

Magnus rose, wounded and all, and gathered her in his arms. She rose onto her tiptoes to meet him the way she had learned to, the way she had always wanted to, and let him kiss her in the ruin of the cold house that had never once been a home.

It was not at all like the first time and everything like coming home.

She stopped being afraid and kissed him back, and chose him again with her whole heart, and went on choosing him and did not stop.

EPILOGUE

THREE MONTHS LATER

“Ihave decided,” Ivy announced from her place of honor at the dining table, with a napkin tucked under her chin, “that Greythorne is the best house in England, and I shall live here forever, and no one is to argue with me about it.”

“You have your own home, monster,” Beatrice pointed out.

“I have visited my own home. It has Samuel in it, and that is not a very satisfactory thing.” Ivy speared a roast potato with authority. “This one has frogs in the pond, a duke who tells lies about the Scottish weather, cake at the end of dinner, and Rosaline. I have made my decision.”

Rosaline sat at the end of the table in the golden blaze of the candles and looked down the length of it at the people gathered there.