Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke (Regency Second Chances #10)

Chapter 1

“If you turn back now, Rosaline, I will never forgive you. And neither will my grandmother.”

Abigail’s gloved fingers closed around her wrist and pulled toward the door.

Rosaline planted her feet in the gravel. Every window of the great house burned gold, and music threaded out from somewhere deep within, low and strange, unlike any quadrille she had ever stood up for.

“Your grandmother would forgive me anything,” she replied. “She once forgave a footman for setting the topiary alight.”

“She said the peacock looked improved afterward.” Abigail laughed and tugged again.

“Which is exactly why I adore her, and exactly why she is the only soul in London who could have gotten us past that door. Do you know what she said when she pressed the card into my hand? ‘A girl turns nineteen but once, my dove. Go and be a little wicked while it still becomes you.’”

“And you took that as instruction.”

“I took it as a birthday gift, and I intend to unwrap it.” Abigail’s eyes shone brightly.

“One night, Rosaline. One. The Season is over. Tomorrow, your brother will pack you and both your sisters into a carriage and shut the three of you in Kent until spring, and I shall not see your face for half a year. Grant me this before he does.”

Rosaline drew her cloak tighter. Two more carriages had rolled up behind theirs, masked faces at the windows.

“I told Samuel I would sleep under your roof tonight,” she said. “Under your roof. Not on the outskirts of London, at a house whose name I do not even know.”

“You are sleeping under my roof. After.” Abigail caught both her hands now.

“You told your brother the truth, more or less, and you may scold me the whole way home in the morning. But if you make me walk in there alone on my birthday, I shall weep on the step, and then someone truly will recognize us.”

A footman passed with a tray of something that steamed and smelled of cloves. Beyond the doors, a woman’s laughter climbed high and broke off into hush.

“Half a year,” Rosaline murmured.

“Half a year of your brother deciding which dull baron gets to bore you into the grave.” Abigail squeezed her hands. “Come, and be no one for a single evening. Then go home and be Lady Rosaline again, dutiful to the bone.”

Rosaline looked once more at the drive, at the safe dark road that led back toward everything expected of her, and let her friend drag her up the steps.

The moment they crossed the threshold, a butler in deep green livery bowed and lifted a tray toward them. Not glasses, but masks.

“The house asks that no guest go unmasked,” he said, as though this were the most ordinary request in England. “And that no guest go by a name that belongs to them.”

Rosaline’s hand hovered. Silk and papier-maché, gilded and feathered, a dozen faces staring up from black velvet. A swan. A cat with jeweled eyes. A stag.

Her fingers settled on a fox, russet and sharp-nosed, its edges lined with gold.

“Oh, that one.” Abigail plucked a white dove mask for herself and tied it in place before Rosaline could think better of any of it.

“You see? Already the cleverest choice in the room. Tonight you are the Fox, and I am the Dove, and neither of us has ever heard of a Rosaline or an Abigail in our lives.”

“Abigail—”

“Dove.” She pressed the fox mask to Rosaline’s face and knotted the ribbon at the back of her head, gentle where her words were not. “Say it. If you slip and use my name in here, someone will carry it out by morning, and we will both be ruined before the banns are ever read. So, who am I?”

Rosaline breathed in the faint smell of paint and glue. Behind the mask, the crowded hall tilted into something less real, and the tight knot in her chest loosened a fraction.

She was nobody. For a few hours, she owed no one anything.

“You are the Dove.”

“There she is.” Abigail beamed. “Now, come and be wicked with me.”

The house had not been arranged for a party so much as staged for one.

Mirrors doubled every candle until the corridors ran on in gold forever.

A quartet played behind a screen painted with a forest at night, and the guests drifting between the rooms wore the faces of beasts, birds, and half-remembered gods.

No one curtsied. No one announced anyone.

One man moved through the crush without offering so much as a nod, tall and unhurried, a plain, black mask across the upper half of his face.

A dowager in peacock feathers posed herself as he passed and got nothing for it, not the smallest tilt of his head.

Then his gaze found Rosaline alone against the wall, and he stopped, and he bowed to her.

Then he was gone again into the candlelight, before she had gathered her wits enough to do more than stare after him.

“There.” Abigail seized her arm and steered her toward a set of open glass doors, where footmen were funneling the guests out into the darkened gardens.

A placard on a gilt easel stood beside them, lettered in a bold hand.

THE REYNARD’S CHASE

Enter alone or in pairs.

Follow the clever fox to his den.

First to the heart of the maze claims the prize.

“A maze.” Rosaline peered out. Torches lined a path down to a wall of black hedge, taller than any man, its single opening lit like the mouth of a cave. “In the dark.”

“Not merely a maze.” A woman in a peacock mask leaned in, delighted to explain.

“The hedges are laid with clues, my dear. Solve your way to the center before the rest, and the prize is yours.” She lowered her voice with relish.

“A first edition. Cleland’s Memoirs. The unexpurgated one.

The book no lady admits to owning and every lady has read. ”

Abigail’s fingers dug into Rosaline’s arm. “I want it,” she whispered, the instant the peacock had swept on. “Rosaline. Dove. Whoever I am. I want that book more than I have ever wanted anything, and you are the cleverest person I know, and you are going to win it for me.”

Rosaline stared at the mouth of the maze. “I am going to win you a scandalous book.”

“For my birthday.” Abigail was already pulling her down the torchlit path. “You’ll be away from me for half a year. Give me a story to keep me warm through all of it.”

The hedges closed over them, and the noise of the house faded away.

Inside, the maze breathed cold and green. A small brass plaque had been set into the first junction, catching the torchlight, a line of verse cut into it:

Where the hound would turn to bay, the fox slips quiet, another way. Below it, two arrows, left and right.

“The hound turns to bay,” Rosaline murmured, running her thumb over the letters. “The fox does the opposite of the obvious. The bright path is the trap.” She looked left, where the torches burned brighter, then right, into the dimmer fork. “We go right.”

“How can you possibly—”

“Because whoever built this wants us to feel clever, not to be given the answer.” Rosaline was already moving. “Come.”

They found the next plaque set low in the hedge, half swallowed by leaves. Rosaline crouched and brushed them aside.

“The straight road flatters,” she read. “The crooked road knows.”

She glanced up the two paths before them. One ran arrow-true toward a distant torch; the other bent almost at once out of sight.

“The straight one, surely.” Abigail was already leaning that way. “It goes toward the light.”

“It flatters.” Rosaline caught her sleeve and drew her toward the crooked fork. “That is the clue. The path that looks easiest is the one that deceives you.”

“You are frightening when you do that.” Abigail followed, delighted. “Do it again.”

They found the next plaque and the one after. Rosaline read each aloud, and Abigail read them back wrong on purpose, and they laughed too loudly, hushed each other, and pressed deeper into the green dark, their hands linked.

A hare cut into brass. A moon. A verse about counting the turns and trusting the odd ones over the even.

For the length of the game, Rosaline forgot Samuel entirely, forgot Kent, and the dull baron waiting somewhere in her future.

She was only a girl solving a puzzle in the dark with her dearest friend.

It was the freest she had felt in years.

“Left here,” she said, at a plaque marked with a third moon. “The pattern holds, every third turn we—Dove?”

Her hand had gone empty.

She turned. The path behind her stood dark and still, hedge on hedge, no white dove mask anywhere in it. Somewhere off to the right, a burst of laughter rose and faded, and she could not tell whether it was Abigail’s or not.

“Dove.” She kept her voice to a whisper. “Dove, where have you gone?”

Nothing answered but the hiss of the torches and the low music still playing for the house she had left behind.

“This is not amusing.” She pressed a hand to the hedge, and it gave up only the wet smell of yew.

She took the left fork, then a right, then stopped, because none of it looked like anywhere she had been. The torches had thinned. The dark had thickened.

“Dove. Ab—” She caught the name behind her teeth.

She stood very still and let out a slow breath. Panic would not find her a door. Panic never had.

So, she looked. Truly looked, the way she read a difficult page twice until it surrendered its meaning.

The plaques were not scattered by whim. Every third junction bore a moon, and every moon had turned her correctly so far.

The hedges were not planted at random either.

Where a wall was meant to fool the eye, its leaves grew a shade paler, younger, trained across a false gap in the older growth.

The whole clever cruelty of it revealed itself all at once, a thing designed to be beaten only by someone patient enough to stop and see.

“All right,” she said to no one, something in her chest loosening. “All right. You built this to be solved. So, I shall solve you.”

She counted turns under her breath. She trusted the moons, the odd numbers, the darker of any two paths, and the maze gave way to her one junction at a time.

The hedges pressed closer as she went, denser here, older, the torches set further and further apart until whole stretches ran only on moonlight.

The music was gone. The laughter was gone. There was only the crunch of her slippers and the sharp green wall on either side, drawing her toward the heart of the thing.

She rounded a final corner into a corridor of hedge so narrow that her skirts brushed both sides, so dim that she nearly missed the shape standing at the far end of it.

A man. Tall, broad through the shoulders, a mask across his eyes and the torchlight catching only the lower half of his face. He had been watching her come.

He tilted his head to the side.

“Well, well, well,” he drawled, his voice low and rough, a roll buried in it, an accent she had never heard in any London ballroom. “Aren’t ye a clever little fox?”