Chapter 16
“We cannot stay out here long. Someone will notice we are both gone at the same moment, and then it will not matter how many syllabubs I ruined myself over tonight.”
Rosaline stopped an arm’s length onto the balcony, her arms folded against the cold, the blue silk catching the light from the room behind her.
She had left the door ajar, Magnus noted, and stood well within sight of it, which was sensible and disappointing in equal measure.
“I only wanted a word.” He kept his voice low and stayed at the balustrade, hands hanging loose at his sides. “To tell ye that ye did well. That’s all. Ye earned it.”
“Oh.” Some of the wariness left her shoulders. “Well, thank you, Your Grace.”
He let himself look at her then, the way he had spent the whole dinner not allowing himself to, from the dark coil of her hair to the deep neckline she kept resisting the urge to cover and back again. He did not hurry it, even as the color rose in her throat.
“The gown was a good choice,” he praised. “A very good choice. Ye look like a woman who has decided to be seen, and it suits ye a great deal better than the wall did.”
“You are staring, Your Grace.”
“I am. It’s a fine thing, watchin’ the pupil outstrip the master.” His mouth curved. “Though ye wasted the whole of it on Denby, a man who cannae find his own opinion with both hands and a lantern.”
“Don’t.” Rosaline’s chin lifted. “You have no right. You made a fool of the poor man twice over in front of the entire table, when he had done nothing but be a little dull and a little vain, which describes half the peerage. It was cruel and reckless. If I had not stepped in, he would have known exactly who had done it to him.” Her eyes flashed.
“I am trying to build something, and you were kicking at the foundations for sport.”
“He was lookin’ at ye like a sweet he meant to buy.”
“That was the entire point of the exercise. You taught it to me.”
That landed because it was true, and Magnus had no answer he was willing to say aloud on a balcony.
“Ye can do better than Denby,” he said instead. “That’s all I’ll grant ye. A great deal better than that.”
“Can I?” She turned to face him fully, and there was something in it that was not quite the argument anymore. “Then tell me who, Your Grace. Who is it I ought to be doing so much better with?”
The question hung in the cool air between them.
He had a dozen deflections, and any one of them would have served. Instead, he looked at her, color high, eyes on his. The answer sat so plainly on his tongue that he had to press his lips together to keep it there. He was distantly aware of dragging his tongue across them as he did.
Her gaze dropped to his mouth and came back up.
For a moment, the balcony seemed a great deal smaller than it had, and the ajar door and the sensible distance and every good reason counted for nothing whatsoever.
Rosaline broke the silence first. He saw her reach for solid ground the way she reached for a clue in a maze—deliberate and a little desperate.
“Your meeting.” Her voice came out a little shaky. “With the lord you were seeking. How did it go?”
His jaw tightened before he could stop it. He did not want to talk about Ulverton, did not want to talk at all. But she had thrown him a rope and needed him to take it, so he took it.
“It went well,” he answered. “Better than well. I did everything ye taught me, and the old man never saw the join. I bowed too low and asked after his trees and let him think himself the cleverest soul in England. At the end of it, he offered to open a door I’ve been banging my head against for a year.
” He inclined his head, and meant the next part more than he’d meant anything all evening.
“That was yer doing, Rosaline. Thank ye for that.”
“I am glad.” And she was; he could see it. “I am glad it worked, Your Grace.”
“Magnus. My name is Magnus.”
“I couldn’t. It’s not proper.”
“Just this once, Rosaline. ‘Tis only ye and I here.”
She paused. “I… Very well, Magnus.”
Damn it.
She’d only spoken his name, and the entire world had shattered. Faded. Vanished. She’d become the world. She, and his name on her lips.
Then she drew a breath and stepped back toward the door. “I should go back in. Beatrice can only mend an imaginary hem for so long before—”
He moved without deciding to, a single step that put him between her and the glass, not touching her.
“There’s a ball next week,” he said quickly. “The Hartwell ball. Ye’ll attend it.”
“I expect so. Samuel lives for such things.”
“Then ye’ll want a lesson before it.” He held her eyes. “Dancin’.”
That startled a short laugh out of her. “I know how to dance, Your Grace. I have known how since I was nine. I can manage a quadrille without disgracing anyone.”
“I’ve no doubt ye can dance. I’m nae offerin’ to teach ye to dance. I’m offerin’ to teach ye to dance with a man, so he leaves the floor unable to recall his own name, let alone the figure. That’s a different thing entirely.”
“And how,” she asked, “is that different from ordinary dancing?”
“The difference is what he’s thinkin’ about when the music stops.” He let her make of it what she would, and watched her make rather a lot of it.
“I see,” she said, though she plainly did not, and the not-quite-knowing had her breath shallowing again.
“Now.” He stepped back half a pace, because he needed her clear-headed for what came next. “Have ye a maid ye can trust? One who’d hold her tongue against her own mother if it came to it.”
Rosaline blinked. “I… yes. Sarah. She has been with me since I came out. She would never—why are you asking me that?”
“Because a lesson like this cannae be had in five stolen minutes on a balcony.” He kept his voice quiet and even. “Come to my house. Tomorrow night. Alone.”
The color drained from her face and then flooded back. “Your house. At night. Have you the faintest notion what would become of me if—”
“No one will see ye.” He did not move toward her, only let the certainty of it sit between them.
“An unmarked carriage. A garden door that opens on a mews, not a street. Staff paid well enough and long enough to have gone blind and deaf. Ye’d come after midnight and be home before the birds, and no one alive would ever ken ye’d left yer bed.
” He held her gaze. “Ye said at the start that when ye trusted me enough for the rest, the door would be there. It’s there.
Yers to walk through or nae. I’ll nae say another word to persuade ye. ”
She stood very still, and he watched the conflict move across her face, everything sensible in her pulling hard for the safety of the drawing room and the life she knew.
And then something else came behind it, and he knew before she said it what had turned the scale, because it was the only thing that ever turned it for her.
She was thinking of her sisters. Beatrice, and Ivy asleep at home, and the whole freight of futures she had decided years ago were hers alone to carry.
“If I am caught,” she murmured, “it is not only me. It is all of them.”
“I ken. That’s why ye’ll nae be caught.” He let a beat pass. “I’d sooner cut off my own hand than be the thing that harms those girls. Ye have that too, for whatever a Scot’s word is worth to ye by now.”
It was worth something. He saw that it was in the way her shoulders lowered.
“After midnight,” she agreed at last, so quietly that he nearly lost it under the music. “Tomorrow.”
“After midnight.” Something eased in his chest that he did not examine. “I’ll send the carriage. Black, no crest. The driver will say nothin’ to ye but the one word, Greythorne, so ye ken it’s mine and nae some other devil’s.”
“Greythorne,” she repeated, and the sound of his title in her mouth did something to him he chose to ignore.
“Go in now.” He stepped aside, clearing her path. “Ye’ve been gone long enough to mend three hems. Go and be seen bein’ proper, and let no one guess ye’ve just agreed to something ye shouldnae do.”
She went.
At the door, she paused, one hand on the frame. She looked over her bare shoulder back at him and did the thing he’d taught her: the lashes and the slow lift of her eyes and the beat held too long. He could not tell whether she meant it as a lesson well learned or something else entirely.
Then she disappeared into the light and the noise.
Magnus stood alone on the balcony, his heart pounding like a green boy’s, and understood that he had just invited a great deal of trouble into his house.
Still, he could not bring himself to regret a moment of it.