Chapter 17
“You are certain, My Lady? Truly certain? Because once you are in that carriage, I cannot help you out of it.”
“I am certain, Sarah.” Rosaline was not certain of anything.
She drew her hood forward and let her maid steady her down the dark servants’ stairs.
“You have never seen me tonight. I am unwell, abed, and not to be disturbed. If Samuel asks, I took a sleeping draught and left orders. Can you hold to that?”
“To my grave, My Lady.” Sarah squeezed her hand once. “Only… come home whole.”
The carriage waited at the mouth of the mews exactly as promised, black and plain, crestless, nearly invisible against the night. The driver did not so much as turn his head. He said one word, low, into the dark: “Greythorne.”
She climbed in and closed the door behind her. The wheels lurched forward, and she rode past every sensible objection she had and did not turn back.
The carriage did not stop in front of a grand front door. It rolled down a narrow lane behind a great dark house. A plain door opened into lamplight, and a woman in a housekeeper’s cap and no expression whatsoever led her up a back stairs and down a silent corridor without once asking her name.
“His Grace is in there, miss.” She opened a door. “You will not be disturbed. There is no one in this wing tonight, but the two of you, and none of us has eyes.”
And then she disappeared into the dark of the house, soft-footed.
The room beyond was a parlor stripped nearly bare, the furniture pushed to the walls and the carpet rolled away, a wide expanse of polished floor gleaming in the light of a dozen candles.
In the middle of it, without his coat on, his shirtsleeves rolled to the forearms, stood Magnus.
“Ye came.” Something moved across his face at the sight of her that he did not trouble to hide. “I wasnae sure ye would.”
“Neither was I. Until I was in the carriage, and then it was rather too late for sense.”
“Aye.” His mouth curved. “That’s generally when I do me best thinkin’ too.” He gestured to the cleared floor. “We’ll start with me lesson. The dull one. Get the work done while we’ve the discipline for it, and save the dancin’ for when we’ve none left.”
She should have been relieved by that.
She told herself she was.
She made him rehearse for the better part of an hour, and he was, as ever, a maddening pupil.
“A man corners you at the Hartwell ball,” she said, circling him. “He smiles loud enough for others to hear and says, How novel it must be for you, Your Grace, to dine at a table instead of over one. What do you do?”
“I put his head through the nearest wall.”
“You don’t.”
“I ken I daenae. Ye asked what I want to do.” He exhaled. “Fine. I smile back and say, Aye, Me Lord, the chairs take some gettin’ used to. And I let him have his laugh.”
“Good. And when he presses, as a man like that always presses, and says something about your father?”
Magnus went still. “He’ll nae say something about me faither.”
“He might.” She kept her voice gentle, because she had felt the change in the atmosphere.
“Cruel men find the tender place, Your Grace. If you cannot stand to hear it, they will use it to unmake you in front of everyone you are working to win. You must have an answer ready that costs you nothing, even when it costs you everything.”
“I havenae got one,” he said, his voice low. “Every other jab in the world I can turn. That one I cannae.”
Rosaline set down the imaginary sneer and looked at him properly, this large frustrated man who could charm an earl and could not charm this one small thing out of his chest.
“Why do you do it?” she asked. “Any of it. You loathe the bowing, the lying, the whole gilded pantomime. I have watched it cost you every single time, and yet you keep walking back in. What is worth all this to you?”
He was quiet for so long that she thought he would not answer.
“Because the answers I need are kept in rooms I cannae enter any other way,” he answered at last. “There are things I have to ken, Rosaline. Things that happened a long while ago to someone I held dear. Things that have been buried by powerful men who are still powerful, still in those rooms, still dinin’ out on it.
The only road to them runs through every ballroom I despise.
” He turned an absent hand, an old gesture with nothing to hold.
“I’m nae learnin’ to bow because I’ve grown fond of it.
I’m learnin’ it because it’s the price of the door. ”
“And when you have your answers?”
“Then I’ll see justice done.” He said it simply, without a scrap of bluster, only a weight that made the words heavier than their size. “Justice for a man who never got any, and never will, unless I drag it out of these people one bow at a time.”
Rosaline said nothing for a moment.
He had handed her only a corner of something large and dark, and chosen not to show the rest. She found she did not need it.
It was enough to see that under the temper and the teasing, there was a man carrying a grief he had turned into a purpose, walking into rooms full of people he hated because someone he loved was owed a thing only he would fight for.
“That is a good reason,” she said quietly. “A better reason than most men in those rooms have for anything they do.”
His face relaxed, as though he had been braced for mocking laughter.
“Aye. Well…” He cleared his throat, and the shutter came down again. “Enough of that. Ye didnae risk yer reputation to hear a Scot feel sorry for himself. Come here. It’s time ye earned the fun half of the evenin’.”
He pulled her to the middle of the floor and took his position before her, and even that, the simple architecture of it, undid some of her composure.
“Posture first.” His hand came to the small of her back, warm through the thin muslin, the other lifting her right hand into his.
“Ye stand up out of the top of yer head, like there’s a thread pullin’ ye toward the ceilin’.
Aye. Chin level. Now, ye’re nae fallin’ into me, and ye’re nae holdin’ me off.
Ye’re just here, easy, breathin’.” He drew her the smallest degree closer.
“And ye look at me the way I taught ye, like there’s nae another soul in the world. ”
Rosaline lifted her eyes to his and tried.
Magnus waited a moment, then sighed. “Ye’re stiff as a fence post, lass.”
“I am concentrating.”
“That’s the whole trouble. Ye’re up in that clever head of yers, workin’ out the angles, and yer body’s standing down here forgotten like luggage on a platform.
A man dancin’ with ye can feel ye thinkin’.
” He guided her through a slow turn, and she went through it exactly, correctly, wrongly.
“There. Every step right and nae a scrap of life in it. Again.”
They tried again.
She counted the steps and executed them flawlessly and felt him feel her do it. Again. And again. Each time he told her, not unkindly, that she was somewhere above her shoulders, watching herself dance. And each time she reached for the thing he wanted and could not find where in herself it lived.
At last, he stopped. He did not let her go. He leaned in close to her, so close that his breath stirred the hair at her temple, and lowered his voice until it was almost nothing.
“Ye have to come down out of yer mind, Rosaline. Just for a while. Live in the body ye’re standin’ in. Feel the floor through yer slippers, feel my hand on yer back, feel the air on yer skin. Be here, in it, and stop watchin’ it from a shelf.”
“I like being in my mind.” It came out smaller than she meant. “It is safe up there. Nothing can reach me.”
“I daenae doubt it.” His thumb moved once against the small of her back, and she felt it in places other than her spine.
“But ye have every right to experience the pleasures of the body too, lass. Ye’ve spent twenty-one years bein’ told the body’s a thing to be managed and hidden and married off tidy, and no one once told ye that it’s yers. To live in. To enjoy.”
“You should not say such things to me.”
“Someone should.” He drew back just far enough to see her face, and there was no teasing in his now, only a steady frankness that was somehow far more dangerous.
“Ye’re a grown woman, Rosaline, nae a girl.
Ye ken the heat I mean. It rises in ye when ye least want it, at a dinner table, on a balcony, and ye push it down and call it improper and go back to countin’ the panes in the window.
Aye?” He held her eyes. “It doesnae have to drive ye to distraction. Ye can answer it. Alone, in yer own room, in the dark. Ye can learn yer own body and what it wants, and there’s no shame in it, whatever they’ve told ye. It’s yers. It has always been yers.”
The heat he described flooded her face and her throat and, mortifyingly, a good deal lower, and she knew he could see every scrap of it.
“You are a scoundrel, Your Grace,” she managed, but there was no bite in it.
“So I’ve been told.” His gaze caught on the color burning in her face and stayed. He drew his lower lip slowly between his teeth. “God help me, but ye look so pretty when ye blush for me. Like that. Just like that.”
The hand on the small of her back spread wider, and his voice dropped to a low register.
“D’ye ken what ye do to a man, standin’ there with yer chin up, pretendin’ ye’re made of marble?
There’s nae a woman in this town fit to stand in a room with ye, and nae one of them has ever had the wit to see it.
” His thumb moved once along her spine. “I’ve thought about yer lips since that night in the maze, lass.
Every night since. And I’m done bein’ a gentleman about it. ”
And then, the thread that had held Rosaline above her own shoulders her whole careful life simply snapped.
His hand on her back closed and drew her in, the whole distance he had kept all evening gone between one breath and the next.
She rose onto her toes with it, her free hand catching at the open collar of his shirt.
His mouth came down on hers as though he had waited the whole hour for her to spend the last of her sense.
His lips were warm and unhurried, and for one suspended moment, the kiss was gentle, a question, the same careful question she remembered from a maze in the dark a year ago.
Then she answered it, made a small sound against his mouth she would be scandalized by later, and everything careful in it burned away at once.
His hand slid from the small of her back to draw her fully against him, and she came, all thought abandoned, her body doing precisely what he had spent an hour begging it to do, present and alive and greedy at last.
His other hand cradled the back of her head, tilting her up to him, and she gripped his shirt in both fists as the floor tilted, the candlelight swam, and the whole careful world she had built dropped away beneath her.
He kissed her as though he had all night and meant to use every minute of it, slow and deep and thorough, and she felt it everywhere—in her mouth, in her throat, in the tips of her fingers, low in her belly where the heat he had named pooled and ached.
She had thought she understood what this was; she had a year of remembering to go on.
She had understood nothing.
The memory had been a sketch, and this was the whole burning painting—the scrape of his beard against her jaw, the low sound he made in the back of his throat when she pressed closer, the taste of him, the sheer solid warmth of him under her hands.
She gave herself over to all of it and, for one glorious reckless stretch of minutes, stopped being anywhere at all but exactly here.
It was Magnus who gentled it in the end, easing back by degrees, resting his forehead against hers while they both dragged in air. His heart was beating as hard as her own; she could feel it where her fist was still clenched in his shirt.
“Rosaline,” he said, low and wrecked, and she did not know whether it was a warning or a prayer.
The sound of her own name in that ruined voice brought her crashing back down into her mind, into the cold clear knowledge of exactly where she was and whose house this was and everything she stood to lose lying asleep and trusting across the dark city.
She let go of his shirt and stepped back so fast that she nearly stumbled.
“I have to go.” Her voice was not her own. Her lips were swollen, her whole body strung tight and tingling. “It is late. I should never have—I have to go, Your Grace. Please. The carriage.”
“Rosaline—”
“Please.”
He did not stop her. Whatever was in his eyes—and there was a great deal in them—he only stepped aside and let her pass.
Rosaline pulled her hood up with shaking hands and went out through the silent door, down the back stairs, and into the mews, where the black carriage waited to carry her to her own bed and her own dark.
Yet she already knew that she would not get a single moment’s sleep.