Chapter 26
“You must be quiet,” Rosaline whispered, her arms still locked around his neck as he shouldered through the door to her chambers. “The servants will hear. They will know.”
Magnus laughed, low and warm against her hair, and the sound of it moved through her.
“Rosaline, darlin’, we were wed this mornin’ before God, a parson, and half of the London gossips.
There’s nae a soul under this roof who doesnae ken exactly what I am about to do tonight, and nae one of them the least scandalized by it. ”
He set her down slowly, letting her slide down the whole length of him until her bare feet found the cool floor.
“Let them hear. Let them ken their new mistress is well and thoroughly wanted. It’s the happiest news this old house has had in years.”
Then he hooked one boot behind the door and pushed it shut.
The click of the latch closed the whole world out. There was only the low fire, the turned-down bed, and Magnus looking at her in the amber light as though she were the only thing in the world worth looking at.
Her nerve nearly failed her then. She had been undone on a dinner table moments ago, and still, standing here in the hush of her own chamber with his eyes moving over her, she felt the old wallflower rise in her throat: the girl who stood by pillars, who had never once in her life been looked at like this and did not know how to bear the wanting in it.
“Come here.” His voice had gone quiet and rough.
He did not reach for her. He waited, the way he always did, until she closed the small distance herself, and only then did he lift his hands to the laces at her back.
He unfastened her gown slowly. There was nothing hurried in it, no fumbling, only the patient work of his fingers loosening her stays one lace at a time. With each one, she felt herself come looser too, the careful armor of a lifetime unpicked lace by lace in the firelight.
He bent as he worked and set his mouth to the nape of her neck, to the knob of her spine, to each new bared inch of her, and she felt her head fall forward and a sound escape her that she did not recognize as her own.
The gown slid down her shoulders and pooled at her feet. Her shift followed, pulled off by hands that shook very slightly, she noticed, and the noticing undid her more than boldness ever could.
He was not unmoved. This great Highlander who had faced down her brother without a flicker was not composed at all.
“God above.” He said it on a breath, taking her in, bared to the firelight and to him. “Look at ye. And ye spent three Seasons hidin’ this behind a potted palm.”
His hand rose to trace her figure slowly, reverently, from her dark brown hair to the curve of her hip, and she trembled under it and did not look away.
“Ye’ve no notion, have ye? No notion at all what ye are. I’ll spend the rest of me days makin’ certain ye do.”
Rosaline reached unsteadily for the buttons of his shirt.
He let her, standing patiently under her clumsy fingers until she had bared the broad warm plane of him, the old white scars she did not ask about, the heat of him under her palms. Then he gathered her up against all that warmth, skin to skin at last, and the shock of it stole whatever she had meant to say.
He laid her back on the wide cool bed as though she were something precious and followed her down. He braced above her and looked at her for one long moment in the firelight with a question plain in his eyes even now, even here, giving her the choice.
In that suspended moment, she thought of every version of this she had ever dreaded, all the cold arranged futures her brother had held over her like a blade.
None of them had looked anything like this. Unhurried. Reverent. Hers to grant or refuse.
She had spent her whole life being taken from, but this was hers to give.
She answered by drawing him down to her.
Magnus pressed a hot kiss to her throat, then his lips trailed up to capture her mouth. She opened for his tongue and arched against him.
Magnus touched a fingertip to the valley between her breasts and trailed a fiery path past her belly button until he reached the damp curls hiding her sex.
Rosaline raised her hips, forcing his fingers to slip down and glide across her pearl, before they plunged into her.
“Yes,” she groaned, her head falling back.
“I cannae wait, lass,” Magnus whispered as he slid his fingers out of her, eliciting a whimper of protest, before he plunged them back into her.
Rosaline arched against him, craving more. Her hands slid down until they reached the top of his kilt. With trembling hands, she pulled it down his legs. When she finally freed him, he kicked them off.
She took his hot length into her hand, and he moaned. She moved her hand up and down, watching him from beneath her lashes.
“Ye’ll break me, lass, if ye continue.” He grasped her hand lightly, then put it above her head. Magnus leaned in and captured her mouth as he maneuvered himself to her center. He slid his fingers out and replaced them with his length. She parted her thighs to allow him better access, whimpering.
“Hold onto me, lass,” he growled as he thrust into her.
Rosaline bit back a cry at the burning sensation.
“I daenae mean to hurt ye.” Magnus lifted his head and gently kissed her. “I promise ye, it’ll only hurt for a moment.”
She curled her fingers against his shoulders and moved against him. The pain turned into bliss as he thrust into her once more. Her hips began to match his thrusts, meeting them with the same ardor.
White-hot pleasure spread through her veins, and she cried out as sheer ecstasy crashed over her. Magnus continued rocking his hips into her, each thrust deeper as her inner walls clenched around him, until he groaned and collapsed on top of her.
Afterward, she lay in the wreck of the bedclothes, with her cheek against his chest, and could not have said where she ended, and the warm dark of the room began.
She felt clean. Remade. Every careful line she had held her whole life had come undone in his hands, and she waited in the drowsy quiet for the shame to arrive, the way she had been taught all her life it must.
It did not come. There was only his heartbeat slowing under her ear, his hand drawing idle circles down the length of her spine, and a stillness in her chest so unfamiliar that it took her a while to realize it was peace.
“Ye’ve gone quiet on me.” His chest vibrated beneath her cheek. “Should I be worried?”
“I am thinking.”
“Aye, ye’re always thinkin’. It’s me favorite and least convenient thing about ye.” She felt him press his mouth to the crown of her head. “What is it, then? Tell me.”
She was quiet a moment longer, tracing an idle pattern through the hair on his chest, gathering the courage for honesty the way she was slowly learning she could, with him, in the dark.
“I did not expect that… that you’d be gentle with me,” she admitted.
“After. I did not know there was an after. I thought it was a thing that was done to a woman and finished, and she straightened her gown and went on being useful.” Her fingers stilled.
“I did not know a person could simply be held. That it did not have to be earned first. I… I just did not know that.”
His hand paused on her spine. When he spoke, the teasing had gone out of his voice.
“Then yer braither has a great deal to answer for.” His arm tightened around her, drawing her closer against his side.
“Ye’ll be held every night if ye’ll let me, Rosaline.
And a good many mornings besides. Ye neednae earn a moment of it.
That’s the whole of what I’ve been tryin’ to tell ye since the dinner table, and doin’ it very badly.
I expect I’ll go on doin’ it badly for a while yet.
Ye can be patient with me while I learn. ”
She turned her face up to his in the dark and found him already watching her.
For a moment, neither of them spoke, and that was somehow more intimate than anything else that had passed between them that night.
Something rose in her chest at that, warm, soft, and safe.
“You are not doing it badly,” she said, and felt him huff a quiet laugh.
“High praise, from ye. I’ll have it carved over the door in letters a foot high, so the whole of Greythorne kens that their duke did one thing right.”
His chest shook with a low laugh beneath her cheek, and then his fingers found her hair, sifting through it slowly, as though he had all the nights in the world to do it and meant to use every one.
“Sleep, wife. Ye’ve had a long day. Married, moved, ruined thoroughly twice over. Ye’ve earned yer rest, and I’ll be here when ye wake up, which ye may find ye have to grow used to.”
She should not have been able to sleep. She was in a new bed, in a new house, beside a husband she had truly known for less than a season, bound to him now past any undoing.
By every measure she had ever been given, she ought to have lain awake till dawn, cataloging her fears. Instead, she listened to his heartbeat, and felt his hand grow heavy in her hair, and breathed in the warm, unfamiliar dark of the first place that had asked nothing of her at all.