Chapter 25
“Talk to me,” Magnus told her.
Rosaline looked up from the plate she had spent the last quarter hour rearranging rather than eating.
Down the length of the small table, the candles threw more shadow than light, and the servants had been sent away an hour past. They had been alone together before—a hedge maze, a rainy afternoon, a house after midnight—but never like this.
Married, in his own dining room, with the doors shut and nothing left to pretend at and no one left to pretend to.
“About what, Your Grace?”
“Anythin’ ye like.” He set down his wine. “The soup. The weather. Whether ye think the Regent’s a fool or merely dresses like one. I find I’ve married a woman I’ve never once had a plain conversation with, and it seems a poor time to discover we’ve nothin’ to say.”
“I… I do not know what to say.” She turned the stem of her glass, not drinking.
“That is the truth of it. I have spent my whole life being told what to say, when to say it, and to whom. Now, there is no one telling me, and I…” A small, joyless breath.
“It is a strange thing to be handed silence and not know what to do with it.”
Magnus had faced her brother without a tremor and stood before half of London in his father’s tartan without a qualm, and none of it had cost him a fraction of what this quiet supper was costing him now.
He wanted to get it right. He had never in his life wanted anything the way he wanted to get this one thing right, and he had not the first notion how.
He watched his wife sit there, straight-backed and careful in the candlelight, folded up small the way she had made herself small in every drawing room he had ever watched her endure, and he could not bear it. Not here. Not in his own house, at his own table.
So he did the only thing that reached her.
“Well, if ye’ve no opinions of yer own, I suppose I’ll have to lend ye mine.
” He leaned back, grave as a judge. “I’ve decided the soup is an insult, the fish a personal affront, and yer new home a drafty ruin fit only for owls.
I’m told the roof leaks directly onto the second-best bed, which is where I’d meant to put ye, so ye’ll have to make do with the good one, and I hope ye can live with the shame of it. ”
“The roof does not leak.” Her chin came up a fraction.
There it is.
“How would ye ken? Ye’ve been here for four hours.”
“Because a house this well-kept does not have a leaking roof, and you know it, and you are only saying preposterous things to get a rise out of me.” Her eyes had sharpened, and the color had come up in her face.
For the first time that evening, she looked entirely awake.
“It is a transparent tactic, Your Grace, and I will thank you not to use it on me as though I were one of your dull lords to be managed.”
“Aye,” he said, unrepentant and delighted. “It worked, though.”
“You are impossible.” There was no heat in it, only a reluctant warmth she seemed vexed to find in herself. “Genuinely impossible. I do not believe you have said one serious thing to me since the night I met you in that dreadful maze.”
“I’ve said a great many serious things. Ye were too busy bein’ clever to notice them.
” He propped his chin on his hand and looked at her.
“I made it plain enough that night that ye were the most interestin’ soul in the whole tedious garden.
I meant it then, and I mean it a great deal more now.
If ye took it for a jest, then ye’ve been listenin’ to yer braither for too long. ”
She almost laughed. Almost.
She pressed her lips together, and the set of her shoulders relaxed. Then she sighed, set down her glass, and looked at him straight.
“I do not know how to do this, Magnus.” His name in her mouth, plain, without the title.
It went through him like a sip of wine. “That is what I am trying to say and making a wretched mess of. A month ago, this was an arrangement. A bargain. Lessons for a purpose, with an ending we both agreed to. And now there is no ending, and no bargain, and no purpose I understand. We are married. It is not a deal anymore. I do not know what it is instead, and I do not know what you expect of me, and I am tired, so tired of guessing wrong.”
He rose without a word, and she tensed, but he did not let it stop him. He grabbed his chair, carried it the length of the table, and set it down beside her so that when he sat, he could see the pulse flutter in her throat and the flecks of gray in the blue of her eyes.
“Then let me tell ye plainly, and ye neednae guess at all.” He kept his voice low.
“There’s no expectation, Rosaline. There’s no ledger, no debt, no performance ye owe me for the roof over yer head.
Ye’re me wife. That means ye’re the mistress of this house.
All of it, top to cellar, and every soul under this roof answers to ye now, includin’ me on me better days.
” One corner of his mouth lifted. “It means ye do as ye please. Ye rise when ye like, and ye sleep when ye like. Ye want to learn to ride, I’ll teach ye.
Ye want to sketch, I’ll fill a room with paper.
Ye want to paint the whole east wing purple, take up the pianoforte, dig a great muddy pond in the south lawn to keep frogs in for yer sister, ye’ve only to say so, and it’s done.
Whatever yer heart’s been quietly wantin’ all these years, it’s yers now.
That’s what bein’ my Duchess means. Nae a cage, but the opposite of one. ”
She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke, her voice was low and careful.
“You say that now. On the first night, when it is all still kindness and candlelight. Men say a great many generous things before the newness wears thin. My father said them to my mother, I’m told.
And then the door closed, and the generosity closed with it. ”
“I’m nae yer faither, Rosaline. And I’m nae yer braither.
” He did not look away from her. “I’ll grant ye that I’m askin’ ye to take it on faith tonight, and ye’ve no reason yet to give me any.
So daenae. Watch me instead. Give me a month, a year, whatever ye need of me, and let me prove it with me actions.
I’m a patient man, whatever else I am. I can wait for ye to believe I meant a single word of it. ”
She was very still. “My sisters—”
“Are well and mindin’ their books, and Lord Rivercourt has them.
” He did not let her finish because he had seen the guilt gathering and he meant to head it off.
“I spoke with him before we left. He’ll keep a quiet eye on Beatrice and the wee one while we’re away.
Heaven help Samuel if he tries a single cruelty with a marquess watchin’ the house.
As for our honeymoon, we’ll go wherever ye like.
Scotland, if ye’ve a mind to see the country that made me.
Hills, lochs, and me own dour kin who’ll adore ye on sight and pretend they daenae.
Or nowhere at all. A month of doin’ nothin’ in yer new house would suit me fine, so long as it’s spent with ye.
Leo’s bored, and he adores a cause. He’ll enjoy nothin’ better than makin’ himself an inconvenient guardian angel to yer braither.
” He tilted his head. “The girls are safe, Rosaline. For the first time in a long while, ye’re allowed to think of yerself.
So, I’ll ask ye once more, and I want an honest answer, nae a careful one. ”
She looked down at her hands in her lap.
He reached over, gently took her chin between his thumb and forefinger, and lifted it until she had to meet his eyes.
“Tell me, darlin’.” His voice was low and warm, and he watched her breath catch on it. “What do ye want? Ye’re me Duchess now, so ye shall have whatever ye desire. Anythin’ at all. Just say the word, and it’s yers.”
For a long moment, she only looked at him, and he let her. He held himself still while a lifetime of learning not to want anything warred behind her eyes with the astonishing fact of being asked.
He did not rush her. He had rushed her into a great many things already, a bargain and a hedge and a wedding, and this one small permission he would let her come to entirely on her own, or not at all.
Then she said it. Steadily. Her own choice, made freely, the first he had ever seen her make without counting the cost to someone else.
“I want you to kiss me.”
Magnus smiled slowly. “That’s me good girl.” He was already rising and reaching for her. “With pleasure, wife.”
And then he kissed her.
There was nothing careful in it. A year of wanting went into that kiss—the maze, the corridors, the cleared parlor, the library door. Every stolen minute they had ever had to steal and now none of it stolen at all, all of it theirs, licensed, blessed, entirely their own.
She made a soft, startled sound against his mouth, and he swallowed it as he drew her up out of the chair and into him. She came, her hands fisting in his shirt, rising onto her tiptoes to meet him the way she had learned to and the way, he understood now, she had always wanted to.
He slid an arm beneath her and swept the end of the table clear with the other.
The good porcelain, the ruined fish, and the whole of the interrupted dinner went to the floor in a loud crash neither of them heeded.
Then he set her on the bared wood in the candlelight, stepped between her knees, and kissed her until she was breathless and pliant.
There was a dish of strawberries that had survived the wreck.
He caught it up without breaking from her and slowly drew a strawberry across the seam of her lips until they parted for it.
He fed it to her and followed the sweetness with his mouth, tasting it off her lips, her chin, the soft line of her throat where her pulse ran wild.
“Magnus,” she gasped.
He tugged her bodice down, baring her to the candlelight, and reached for the little jug of cream. He poured a slow, cool ribbon of it across the swell of one breast and followed it with his mouth, unhurried, until the sound she made was one she had plainly never made in her life.
“Delicious…” he murmured, and then he did it again, to the other, chasing every trace of sweetness from her skin while she fell back on her elbows with her head thrown and her breathing ragged.
“Magnus…” It was half a plea and half a warning.
“Aye,” he murmured against the tender inside of her knee, drawing the last of the sweetness up her trembling flesh. “I’ve got ye, lass. I’ve got ye. Let go.”
His hand followed the curve of her thigh, higher, and settled where she most wanted him, and at the first slow, certain stroke of it her whole body went taut as a bowstring.
He circled her pearl with exquisite slowness. He coaxed her, patient and certain, over an edge she had never in all her careful life allowed herself to reach and felt her come apart under his hands and mouth in the guttering candlelight, gasping and shaking.
He had never in his life seen anything like the sight of her wanting, unafraid, and finally, gloriously free.
When the shudders had eased, and she lay boneless and dazed against the wood, he gathered her up off the table and into his arms. She turned her face into his neck with a small moan.
“Nae here,” he said softly against her hair, and felt her mouth curve against his throat. “The first time I have ye proper, wife, it’ll nae be on the dinner service.”
He slowly carried her out of the ruined candlelight and up the great dark stairs, toward the warm dark of her chambers and the night still ahead of them.