Chapter 9
“Ye want them to hang on yer every word. That’s the whole of it, aye? Ye want to walk into a room and have the men in it lean toward ye instead of straight past.”
Rosaline did not answer, which was answer enough.
Magnus leaned a shoulder against the doorframe and let himself look at her properly, now that the worst of her temper had banked.
She was a wreck, and she was worth looking at anyway, which struck him as a fact worth turning over in his mind.
Mud to the wrist on one hand, a smear of it dried along her jaw, her hair coming loose at one temple where she had shoved at it. And under all of that, still smoldering, was the thing that had flared up when she rounded on him a moment ago and called him arrogant to his face.
He had spent a fortnight among people made entirely of surface. Here was a woman with a banked fire in her, hidden so far down that half of London had decided she was made of marble, and the puzzle of that pulled at him more than any pretty face on the lawn outside.
That was all it was. A pull. He was not foolish enough to name it anything grander.
“You know nothing about what I want,” she scoffed.
“I ken ye read that whole maze by the roots of its hedges when a garden of clever men couldnae find the center. I ken ye cut me down to size in a corridor with three sentences. And I ken that the moment there’s an audience, all of that goes and hides.
” He tilted his head. “It’s nae that ye’ve nothin’ to say, lass.
It’s that ye’ve never once been taught how to say it where they can hear ye. ”
Her chin lifted a fraction. He had her attention now, whatever she meant to do with it.
“And I suppose you mean to teach me.”
“I mean to strike a bargain with ye.” He pushed off the doorframe.
“Here’s me trouble, and I’ll give it to ye plain, since ye gave me yers: I say the true thing when the room wants the smooth one, I insult an earl before the soup’s gone cold, and every misstep costs me somethin’ I cannae afford to lose.
I need to learn this town. Its rules. The wee coded nonsense the rest of ye drink in with yer maithers’ milk that marks a man an outsider the moment he gets it wrong.
” He spread his hands. “And ye ken all of it. Ye’ve spent three Seasons watchin’ from the wall, and I’d wager there’s nae a rule in that garden ye couldnae recite in yer sleep. ”
“Watching is not the same as—”
“So teach me the watchin’. The rules, the ranks, the whole daft dance.
” He held her eyes. “And I’ll teach ye the other half.
How to hold a man’s attention a beat past comfortable.
How to say less and make him lean in for more.
How to walk into a room and have every one of those fools forget their own name.
Ye want their attention, Rosaline. I can put it in yer hand. That’s me offer. Yer polish for mine.”
For a moment, she only stared at him, and he watched the whole proposal work through her, watched the clever part of her turn it over even as the proper part reared back.
Then the proper part won, as he had known it would, at least to start.
“Lessons.” She said the word as though it tasted of something spoiled.
“You are proposing that I take lessons. From you. Have you lost your senses entirely, or do you simply assume every woman you corner is desperate enough to be ruined by a man like—” She stopped, her color rising.
“I will not. I have no intention of letting you ruin me, Your Grace, for sport or for anything else.”
Magnus laughed; he could not help it, and the sound of it filled the small room.
“Ruin ye?” He shook his head. “Lass, I’ve no intention of ruinin’ anyone. Ye’ve me word on that, same as the rest. I’ll nae lay a finger on ye that ye daenae ask me to.” He let a beat pass, deliberate. “And if ye ever do ask, I’ll want it in plain words, so there’s no mistakin’ the matter.”
She gasped, an actual gasp, one hand going to her throat. “I never will.”
“Nay?” He took a slow step toward her, watching to see whether she would give ground.
She did not.
“That’s rather me point, ye ken.” He kept his voice low and easy, closing the distance by degrees.
“Ye’re proper. Ye’re the most proper woman in London, and it’s done ye no good at all, because proper doesnae make a man lean in.
Proper makes him look through ye to the next girl.
It’s the other thing that snares them. A woman who kens exactly how proper she is and lets him see her set it down for half a breath, just for him, and then pick it up again before he can lay a hand on it.
Tease. Promise nothin’. Leave him wantin’. ”
He was close now, close enough to catch her mud-and-rosewater scent, close enough to hear her breath grow shallow.
“Ye already ken how. Ye did it to me in a hedge a year past, and I’ve nae been right since.”
She was looking up at him, not moving away. And there it was again, that same current that had run between them in the dark of the maze. Heavens, it was sharp enough to make even Magnus forget for a moment what he had come to this room, this city, this country to do.
Intriguing. That was the word for her—only that.
“You are standing extremely close, Your Grace,” Rosaline managed.
“I am.”
He did not move.
Neither did she, God help her.
She ought to have stepped back. Every principle she had shrieked at her to use it. Instead, she stayed exactly where she was, with her face tilted up to his and her heart thundering like a struck drum, and let herself be looked at by a man who plainly knew how to look.
It was appalling. It was also the most alive she had felt since a garden maze a year ago, and she was honest enough, at least with herself, to admit the two facts were the same fact.
He was trouble. She had known it the instant the mask came off in that corridor.
A Scot under a cloud, a duke with a temper the whole of White’s was still whispering about, exactly the sort of man who could take everything she was trying to protect and burn it to the ground with one careless word.
Every sensible thing in her said refuse him, walk away, never be alone with him again.
And yet…
Three Seasons she had spent shrinking against walls. Three Seasons of Samuel’s disappointment and her sisters’ futures riding on a talent she did not have and had never been taught.
Here was a man offering to teach it to her and, for the first time in her life, offering her a way to be the thing they needed her to be, a way to do something for Ivy, for Beatrice.
If there was even a chance of that, a real chance, then perhaps she could hold her nose and take a lesson or two from the devil himself.
For them. Only for them.
“Suppose,” she heard herself say, her voice steadier than she had any right to expect, “purely as a matter of curiosity, that I did not refuse outright. How would such a thing even be conducted? We can hardly be seen with our heads bent together. One conversation too many and you will accomplish my ruin without any of the effort you claim not to want to make.”
The Duke’s eyes lit up, and she understood she had already lost the argument she had meant to win.
“We steal the moments.” He said it as though it were the simplest thing in the world.
“A corridor here. A terrace there. A quiet room, five minutes at a time, and everyone is none the wiser.” His mouth curved.
“And when ye’re ready for somethin’ more thorough than five stolen minutes, I’ve a very large house with a very discreet staff, and a garden door that opens without a sound. ”
Rosaline stepped back at last, one hand pressed flat against her breastbone. “Your house. At night. Are you mad? If anyone so much as suspected I had been in your house after dark, unchaperoned, there would be no coming back from it. Not for me, and not for my sisters. That’s too great a risk.”
“It’s a risk I’d never let touch ye.” His voice dropped, and for once there was no tease in it. “Night meetings. Staff paid well enough to have seen nothin’ and remember less. I’ve kept bigger secrets than a lady comin’ to learn her letters, Rosaline. No one would ever ken.”
“I do not trust you, Your Grace.” She said it flatly because it was true, and because saying it steadied her.
“Naturally.” He inclined his head, granting her the point.
“So, here’s how we’ll do it. We start where the risk is small.
Stolen minutes at the events ye’re already attendin’, where ye can walk away from me at any moment ye please with a hundred people around to see ye do it.
Ye learn what I’ve to teach and ye lose nothin’.
And if the day comes when ye decide ye trust me enough for the rest, the garden door will be there.
Nae before. Yer pace, from start to finish. I’ll nae push ye a step past it.”
It was, she thought, an alarmingly reasonable offer, and that alarmed her more than an unreasonable one would have.
She turned it over. She weighed the risk against the mud drying on her hand, the laughter still ringing in her ears, the look on Samuel’s face on the terrace, and she thought of Beatrice penned in that ring of bachelors with her chin up and her smile nailed on, and Ivy who wanted only to see the world and would never get the chance if the Tilcott name slipped one more rung.
She gulped, and hated herself a little, and made the decision anyway.
“Very well.” The words came out barely above a whisper. “The events only. For now. And the moment I say it ends, it ends, and you never speak of any of it to a living soul.”
“Done.” He bowed to her then, a proper bow, better than the tilt of the head she was used to from him, as though he were sealing a treaty between two nations rather than a scandal between a duke and a wallflower.
“We’ll begin at the next event ye attend.
Wear somethin’ ye can breathe in. Ye’ll want it. ”
Somewhere beyond the door, closer than was comfortable, a familiar voice called her name. “Rosaline? Rosaline, where are you?”
Beatrice.
Rosaline’s head whipped toward the sound.
When she turned back, the Duke was already moving, unhurried even now, toward the tall French doors that opened onto the garden. He paused with one hand on the glass and looked back over his shoulder at her. The smirk on his face promised a great deal more trouble than she had just agreed to.
“Until the next event, Lady Rosaline.”
Then the door was opened and shut, silently as he had promised, and he disappeared into the green.
The room held nothing but Rosaline, the wreck of her skirt, and the bargain she could scarcely believe she had struck.
The door behind her burst open.
“There you are. Oh, Rosaline.” Beatrice took in the mud, the ruined side of her gown, and her face crumpled on her sister’s behalf.
“That ringleted little viper. That is what she is, a viper in a bonnet, and I hope every seam of her gown gives out at once, and she is left standing in her shift before the whole party. Tripping you up like a common guttersnipe, then simpering for someone to help. I saw the whole of it. I would have flown at her if Samuel had not had my wrist in a vise.” She was across the room and at Rosaline’s side, plucking uselessly at the ruined silk.
“Are you hurt? Tell me you are not hurt. Tell me the only casualty is the gown, because the gown I can survive.”
“I am not hurt.” Rosaline let her sister fuss over her, strangely calm. “Truly, Bea. It is only mud. It will wash.”
“It is not only mud, but it is also a declaration of war, and I intend to answer it.” Beatrice pried the sodden, muddy cloth out of her sister’s fingers, dropped it into the washstand basin, and pressed a clean handkerchief into her palm in its place.
“You are far too forgiving. If it were me, I would have come up out of that flowerbed swinging.”
“I know you would.” Rosaline pressed the handkerchief to her filthy palm, not really seeing it.
Her mind was three feet to the left of every word her sister said, on a green-eyed man and a garden door and a bargain that any woman with an ounce of sense would already be regretting.
She waited to feel the regret. She turned her attention toward it, the way one probed a sore tooth, expecting the ache.
It did not come. What came instead, unbidden and entirely unwelcome, was the memory of how close he had stood and the low certainty in his voice when he had said she already knew how, and a small treacherous flicker of something that felt dangerously like anticipation.
She would begin at the next event. Heaven help her, she could hardly wait to.