Chapter 20
“Stop fidgeting with your gloves, you look wonderful. If you keep tugging at them, you will ruin the whole gown,” Beatrice murmured.
“I am not fidgeting.” Rosaline stopped fidgeting.
Her younger sister shot her a look. “You’ve been strange as a cat all evening. It is only Samuel’s soiree. The same forty dull people we always see, in Samuel’s drawing room, where nothing more exciting than the fish course has ever occurred. What on earth is the matter with you?”
“Nothing is the matter.” Rosaline smoothed her skirts, a deep midnight blue that Sarah had laced her into with an approving cluck, and told herself it was true.
Which was the precise moment the footman announced Magnus and he walked into her brother’s drawing room.
Rosaline’s whole body went tight as a plucked string.
“There.” Beatrice’s eyes narrowed, following her sister’s gaze across the room and back. “That. What was that? You went positively rigid.”
“I did no such thing. I am merely startled. I did not expect a duke to actually attend.” Rosaline forced herself to relax, one muscle at a time. “Everything is fine, Bea. Truly. Go and rescue Ivy before she talks Lady Prowse’s ear off.”
Beatrice went, though not without a backward glance that saw entirely too much.
Magnus kept his distance all evening, and it was somehow worse than if he had not.
He was faultless. He bowed to Samuel with exactly the deference his vanity required.
He complimented the music. He did not once cross the room toward her, nor let his gaze rest on her long enough for anyone to remark.
He had learned the steps so well that no one in the room would have guessed there was something between them.
But every time she glanced up, his eyes were already on her, dark and unhurried, and every time, her pulse answered before her good sense could stop it.
So she did what he had taught her. She turned the whole force of it on someone safe.
Lord Bracewell was easy. He had been half in love with her since the musicale, and it took only lowered lashes and a well-timed laugh to have him beaming.
When Lord Cathmore drifted over to see what he was missing, she did the same, tipping her head and laughing low at some witless remark about his hunters as though he were the cleverest man in England.
It was working beautifully. Two lords, warm and attentive, in full view of her brother, who watched with visible satisfaction.
She made the mistake of glancing across the room only once.
Magnus was standing by the cold hearth with a glass he was not drinking, and he was looking at her over the rim of it, nothing faultless in his face now. His jaw had set hard. Something dark and hot moved behind his eyes, fixed on her hand where it rested lightly on Lord Cathmore’s sleeve.
Rosaline understood, with a small illicit thrill she was ashamed of, that he was jealous.
Furiously, silently jealous.
A quarter of an hour later, a footman pressed a folded slip of paper into her hand as he passed with the ratafia, and was gone before she could ask who it was from.
She opened it below the table to see four words in that bold black hand.
The library. Ten minutes.
And beneath, smaller, as though added against his better judgment:
Before I say something to Cathmore that he will not forget.
She should not have gone.
She told herself so the whole length of the dim corridor, and she went anyway, slipping out while Samuel was deep in someone’s flattery. She let herself into the unlit library and shut the door on the distant hum of the party.
Magnus was already there, a dark shape against the tall shelves, and he turned when the latch clicked.
“This is madness,” she whispered. “This is my brother’s house, Your Grace. It is not the time nor the place for a lesson.”
“I didnae ask ye here for a lesson.” Magnus crossed to her, unhurried, until she had to tip her head back to hold his eyes.
“Tell me somethin’, Rosaline. Those men out there.
Bracewell, with his hunters. Cathmore, who couldnae find a thought if it were labeled.
Do ye truly believe, in yer heart, that either of them could make ye happy? ”
“Why on earth would you care?” She lifted her chin. “That is the entire arrangement, is it not? You teach me to charm men. You do not get to teach me the trick and then sulk when it works.”
“I’m nae sulkin’.”
“You are the most enormous sulk I have ever seen.” She stepped around him. “And I am going back, before I am missed.”
He moved, and his arm came up against the door, barring the way.
“A gentleman,” she said, her breath shallow, “would let me pass.”
“Aye, he would.” Magnus did not move his arm.
“But I’m nae a gentleman, Rosaline. I’ve been tellin’ ye that since the maze.
And I’m least of all a gentleman with ye.
” He looked down at her, the teasing gone entirely out of him.
“Ye deserve better than those soft men who hide behind their titles and count their consequence like coins. Ye deserve a man who kens what he’s lookin’ at when he looks at ye.
Nae the quiet, proper wee thing yer braither’s tryin’ to sell.
Ye. All of ye. Bold, clever, full to the brim with fire ye’ve spent yer whole life bankin’ so no one would see it burn. ”
“Stop,” she breathed. “You should not—”
“Ye deserve a man who’ll set that fire loose instead of smotherin’ it.
Who’ll let yer mind run wild and love ye the more for where it goes.
Who’ll stand up with ye in a room full of fools and challenge ye, argue with ye, want ye so badly that he cannae see straight.
” His voice dropped to something rough. “Nae a man who’ll only ever stand politely at yer side.
But a man who stirs yer soul, Rosaline. And every other wantin’ thing in ye besides. ”
The breath caught clean in her throat and would not come loose.
She did not step away. She could not have found the will for it if her life depended on it.
He was so close now that she could feel the heat radiating from him, could see his pulse fluttering hard in his throat.
And just like that, every careful, sensible wall she had built her whole life came down at once, silent as snow.
“Magnus,” she whispered.
It was not a protest; it was the opposite.
That was all he had been waiting for.
His mouth came down on hers, and there was nothing careful in it, nothing of the gentle question from the garden a year ago.
He had watched her smile at other men all evening and reached the end of his tether, and he kissed her like he meant to erase every one of them, one slow, thorough claim at a time.
She melted into him, her hands fisting in the fine linen of his shirt, and when he pressed her back against the library door, she went willingly, her whole body arching toward his.
“Ye’ve no notion,” he murmured against her mouth, “what ye do to me. Laughin’ with those fools, when ye’ve never once laughed like that with me.
” His lips moved to her jaw, the soft spot beneath her ear, the column of her throat.
She tipped her head back against the door and let him, helpless.
“This is mine. This blush. This breath. Say it’s mine, lass. ”
“It’s yours,” she gasped, past all pretence. “God help me. It has always been yours.”
Something in him came undone at that.
He took charge of her utterly, one broad hand cradling her jaw to hold her exactly where he wanted her, the other sliding down the length of her, learning the curve of her waist, her hip, and all the while his mouth worshipped her throat as though she were the only holy thing in the whole of England.
He murmured against her skin between kisses, praise and want tangled together, telling her how bonnie she was, how long he’d wanted this, how she undid him.
“Let me,” he breathed, and it was a command and a plea at once. “Let me show ye what ye’ve been missin’. Let me be the one, Rosaline. Just tonight. Let me.”
“Yes. Please, Magnus.” The words left her before she could think, and she felt him groan against her collarbone.
His hand gathered the midnight silk of her skirts and slowly drew it up, baring her stockings, the ribbons of her garters, the warm bare skin above.
He did not hurry. That was her undoing. That even now, with his breath ragged against her throat and his heart hammering under her palm, he took his time as though she were something to be savored rather than seized.
“Look at ye,” he murmured, and there was wonder in his voice, want, something close to reverence. “All that fire, and ye’d have handed yerself to a man who’d never once have gone lookin’ for it.”
His palm trailed, unhurried and sure, up the trembling inside of her thigh, tracing slow patterns against skin that had never been touched so, and every inch of the ascent drew a shiver from her she could not have stopped for all her pride.
She was coming apart by degrees, every careful thing in her loosening, and she heard herself make a sound she had never made in her life, low and pleading.
“Aye,” he breathed against her jaw. “There she is. Let me, lass. Let me unravel ye.”
His hand climbed higher to her aching heat that had wanted him since a dark garden a year ago, and she quivered before he had even reached it, undone by the promise alone.
When his fingers found her folds, she tensed.
“Already so wet for me. Heavens, Rosaline…”
His thumb teased the little pearl at the apex of her sex, and she felt pleasure gather low in her belly, sharp enough to steal the breath from her lungs.
She grabbed his shoulders as the pleasure grew, leaving her no room for modesty, and even less for thought.
Two fingers slid inside her. She moved against his hand before she could think better of it, drawn by the steady, intimate rhythm of his touch.
A moan slipped past her lips, and she buried her face against his shoulder as her pleasure tightened until she could scarcely breathe.
“Nay. Daenae hide from me.” His mouth found her ear, his voice low and rough at the edges. “Let me hear ye. Ye’ve been quiet yer whole life, lass. But nae here. Nae with me.”
She could not have refused him. The sound came out of her regardless, and he made a low approving noise against her hair that undid her further.
“That’s it. God, but ye’re bonnie like this.
” The words came between kisses pressed to her temple, her cheek, the corner of her mouth, and his hand never once lost its rhythm.
“Flushed and shakin’ and past carin’ who hears ye.
This is what they’ve kept from ye all these years.
This is yers.” His forehead came down against hers.
“Daenae fight it. Let it come. I have ye.”
He held her through every trembling rise, his touch patient and sure. It built past anything she had a name for, a pressure gathering in her core that climbed and climbed and would not crest, until she heard herself say his name.
“Magnus…”
Once, helplessly, like a prayer she had no business making.
“Aye,” he breathed. “Again. Say it just like that.”
She said it again, and the word broke in the middle, and everything careful in her broke with it.
The pressure snapped in a rush that arched her clean off the door and into him, her fingers fisted in his shirt.
Wave after wave of it rolled through her while he held her fast and murmured to her through all of it, endearments and nonsense and her own name, gentling her down as though she were something wild he had no intention of letting go.
“I have ye.” His mouth moved against her temple, her hair, the corner of her jaw, the words low and unhurried and steady as a hand on a frightened horse. “That’s it. Let it take ye. I’ve got ye, Rosaline, I’ll nae let ye fall. Bonnie thing. My bonnie, brave girl. Breathe for me now.”
A rough, wondering murmur, half a laugh against her skin.
“Look at ye. Come apart in my hands and still the finest thing I’ve ever seen. I have ye. I’m nae goin’ anywhere.”
When at last she sank back, her breath came in shallow, uneven gasps. Magnus remained close, one hand braced beside her, as though he would not let the world intrude until she had found herself again.