“’Tis a thing we have in common,” he murmured. “My brother and I have a tainted legacy as well.”
She peeked at him through her fingers, curiosity igniting beneath the dismay. “You said your mother broke both of your fathers…” She trailed off, as if picking her way carefully through a patch made of emotional thorns, unsure of where the path led next.
“Aye and a good many other men.” His tone was singed with bitterness.
“Are you one of those men?”
“Do I appear to be broken to ye?” He held his hands out for her inspection. Of course, he was admittedly impressive, all heavy muscle fortified with Scottish bones and iron will.
But what of his heart?
“I’d hate to meet whatever was capable of breaking a man such as you,” she admitted.
“The things ye say…” He shook his head once again, gritting his jaw against what appeared to be some powerful words welling behind his lips. Finally, he said, “I believe people allow themselves to be broken, and I refuse to give those who’ve tried the satisfaction. If I’m knocked down, I rise. Always. I get back up. And I fight. I excel. I win. There’s no other option.”
“How very … Scottish of you.” A keen understanding lit within her. A commiserative appreciation. “Your strength is commendable, extraordinary even, but it’s impossible to be…” She paused a moment, her eyes shifting, as she searched her vocabulary. “Unaffected by your past. It’s intolerable to see someone you love broken and to not suffer a few wounds of your own.”
“What do ye know of it?” he scowled.
“Plenty,” she whispered.
It was his turn to contemplate her. “How many men have ye broken, Cecelia Teague?”
“None,” she answered honestly.
“That’s very hard to believe.” He gestured to the loft. “What about Phoebe’s father?”
Cecelia bit her lip. She’d almost forgotten he’d assumed Phoebe was her daughter. Should she tell him the truth? What would it accomplish? Better that he think her a whore and a mother, than a bumbling virgin who was terribly lost and utterly alone.
“Ah.” He made a bitter noise. “I forget. Ye donna remember who he is.”
“Why does that bother you so?” she asked.
His lips pressed into a thin line, his jaw working over thick emotion before he gritted out, “I canna say.”
Cecelia broke contact with his gaze once more under the guise of investigating their quaint surroundings. “It’s difficult to picture the previous Duchess of Redmayne as the mistress of this house. How did she come to know the duke?”
“They met at a gala in Edinburgh when I was about four. She was hired as a housemaid for the event and set about finding a lover. A keeper, I think, to make herself a mistress. That she became a duchess was nothing less than a miracle.”
“Where was your father?” Cecelia wondered aloud.
“He worked on merchant vessels and was at sea the entire time it took for her to seduce the duke into financing a divorce. So ye see, when people look at me, they doona see the son of a duchess. They find the unwanted get of a devious social climber and Scottish nobody.”
She studied him for the emotion this evoked and found nothing. He was utterly calm, closed, and collected. He recited the story as if it belonged to someone else.
“Surely your father was not a nobody,” she argued. “Just because he wasn’t someone extraordinary in the eyes of the ton. He lived in this house. He loved here, even though that love was a tragic one.”
An ancient disgust spread a hard mask across his brutal features, turning them stony yet brittle. As though someone would have to take a chisel to his skin in order for him to move again. “The duke paid my father three thousand pounds for my mother. And he took it, readily. She was naught but an expensive whore until the day she died. And he was a greedy drunk with no sense of integrity.”
“Three thousand pounds.” Cecelia gaped. Holy God, that was a staggering amount.
If Ramsay’s features were stone, then his eyes were now frosted with ice. “It only took him a handful of years to eat, drink, whore, and gamble it away. Did Redmayne or Alexandra ever tell ye how my father died?”
His expression indicated that the tale was heartbreaking, but Cecelia couldn’t stop herself from asking. Ramsay had begun to paint the portrait of his origins, and she desperately needed him to finish it. “How?”
“He was found facedown in a gutter where he’d choked to death on his own sick, not to mention the other filth that flows to the sewers.”
Unable to contemplate the indignity of it, to process the sorrow she felt for Ramsay, Cecelia stood to pace around the room a bit, taking a chocolate with her. “You and your father lived here alone, until you were nine?”
“Aye.”
A memory of a previous conversation with him puzzled her. “But you mentioned you didn’t attend school with Redmayne until you were fifteen?”
“Aye.”
“So … Where were you between nine and fifteen?”
“Here.”
“Here?” She stopped pacing to look at him. “Here with whom?”
He didn’t answer. Didn’t look up from where he contemplated his own hands spread on the cloth like the scarred relics of another time.
Cecelia had always felt as though those hands belonged to a different man. One with an altogether more difficult life.
She looked around, absorbed the sparseness of the place. The one bed, the lone couch. The single set of dishes.
His bow and arrow.
A place no one will look for ye.
His father had died, and no one had looked for him. He’d raised himself on this property from a lad of nine years old to one of fifteen. Alone.
The duchess had left her firstborn here to rot for years.
“My God,” Cecelia whispered, a hollow pain lancing her breast. “You were here all by yourself, all but forgotten. And you survived on your own?”
“Doona be impressed.” He swatted at the air in front of him, waving her veneration away. “The well is good, the river full of fish, and a herd of deer live in the vicinity.”
Cecelia shook her head, seeing her surroundings as if for the first time. To her, this cottage was a refuge. To him, it’d been a place of exile. Her heart swelled with emotion for him. “I never realized what it must have cost you to bring us here. What horrible memories it must hold for you.”
He snorted, searching the beams as if they might collapse at any time. “It’s no great feat, I return here from time to time.”
“To escape the city?” she guessed.
His eyes speared through her, alight with a vibrant fire. “To remind myself how far I’ve come. To remember what I once was.”
Cecelia nodded, envying his fortitude. She’d never allowed herself to return to the Vicar Teague’s. Not even to the city from whence she came. “It’s difficult not to cling to memories,” she murmured. “I suppose our recollections define us all in some way.”
He shook his head with enough vehemence to expel a demon. “I’m proof they do not.”
She was taken aback. “You’re proof they do. This place, it means something to you. It holds the ghosts of a different life. Of a lonely past and a future that could have been.”
“There was never any future for me here.”
“I don’t know.” She tried to picture a peasant couple here, young and happy. “You might have had parents that loved each other. Who shared this home, this life, in poverty, but happiness. This might have been land you worked and a simple legacy you could have been proud of. Instead you were abandoned here. And that has quite obviously made an impression upon you. I daresay it painted every relationship you’ve ever had.”
He made a disgusted sound in his throat and drank before wagging the neck of the bottle at her like a gavel. “Doona look at me and see some lonely child to be pitied. I am so far from that. From him. I lifted myself from nothing, into a situation where I want for
nothing, and for that I am proud. I am wealthy, educated, respected, and feared. I am powerful in every conceivable way—”
“Yes, but are you happy?”
He looked at her askance. “What does happiness have to do with anything?”
She shook her head, truly pitying him for the first time. “It has to do with everything.”
“Man is not meant to please only himself,” he stated rather piously. “Do ye ken why Matilda could find no skeletons, no secrets?”
Cecelia shook her head.
“Because I have none. I’ve done nothing of which I am ashamed other than allowing myself to hope the one time that she could provide me an honest, contented life.” His jaw hardened and he set the wine down, pushing it away from himself as if it were as offensive as the memory of the woman who’d betrayed his one chance at trust. “She proved the one thing I’ve always known. That women are born with a weapon between their legs, and are willing to deploy it with as much collateral damage as any explosive.”
Cecelia shook her head, understanding his anger and also despairing at the abject wrongness of it. “Did you ever stop to consider that your offer of marriage might not have been what she wanted from life? You desired her companionship, her love, her body, and her fidelity, but did you ever stop to think that marriage to a Lord Chief Justice, or a Lord Chancellor, might be too much for Matilda?”
Her words took the wind from his sails. “I didna have to ask, she made it clear enough. She told me she’d rather suck a thousand cocks than shackle herself to a rigid, self-important arse like me. Is that what ye wanted to hear?”
“No. Because that was a terrible thing for her to say.” She lifted her chin, adopting a pose of matronly disappointment. “And so was what you said about women and … weapons.”
He looked both mulish and ashamed, but didn’t cede the point.
“Do you not think men use their sex as a weapon?” she pressed. “Most often a violent one? Men have claimed all rights to strength and money and power. What are we women left with? The responsibility of brood mares, to make more men, or to make life comfortable for them? If there must be a war between sexes, what weapons have you left us? What are we but objects to you? A collection of pretty orifices for your pleasure?”
Wintry eyes glittered at her. Not with censure but with wonder, admiration, and—dare she hope—respect. After a breathless moment, he leaned forward, capturing her uncertain gaze with his unblinking one. “I shouldna have said that.” One step closer to an apology. Two in one night, did wonders never cease? “I doona feel that way … about ye.”
Cecelia tried to think of another time she’d been so pleased by a compliment, and simply couldn’t. What rubbish. That Lord Ramsay’s confession that he finally didn’t consider her a lying bitch would mean more than scores of poetry from other men.
Lord, but she was in trouble.
He stood so abruptly he had to save his chair from falling over backward. “It’s late,” he clipped. “I should turn in.”
Cecelia nodded, not wanting to poke at any more wounds. Not when her own were so raw. So ready to be reopened. Her heart ached for him. Bled for the lonely boy who spent silent years struggling for his own survival. For the man who’d fortified that lost child behind barbs of ice encased by a body of such capable strength that he could never be vanquished by vice nor villainy.
She understood the lunacy that accompanied forced solitude, and she’d only ever experienced it for several days at the maximum.
What would several years do to a person?
She swallowed pity and humility and a surge of desperate affection that threatened to escape from her in a bout of tears. “I suppose—” She cleared a husky lump of emotion from her throat. “I’ll sleep in the loft with Phoebe.” She went to her trunk in front of the supply crates by the door, intent upon finding her nightclothes.
“There’s barely enough room for a cat to curl up in the loft,” he said. “Nay. Ye’ll sleep down here on the couch. I’ve set it up for ye with clean linen and such.”
She blinked over at the worn but overstuffed furniture. It might be comfortable. “But where will you—?”
“Doona worry about that.” He went to the door, seeming to drag the weight of his past along with him, though he’d shuttered his every expression behind a fan of bronze lashes.
“Of course I worry.” She found her wrapper and fished deeper into her trunk for her nightgown. “You can’t simply sleep in a bed of raspberry thorns.”
He chuffed. “I’ve a hunting shed round the back.”
She straightened, clutching the silk to her bosom. “But—you’re the Lord Chief Justice of the High Court of England. A man such as you does not simply sleep in a shed by the river.”
He slid her a level look. “I never took ye for a snob, Miss Teague.”
“Well. I … I just…” She swallowed. How could she make him stay?
“Ye just … what?” He stood close to the door, close to her, as large as a titan and cold as a northern loch, gazing down with an odd illumination behind his pupils.
“I’d feel awfully guilty if your hospitality meant that we squeezed you out of your own home. Surely at your age you’re not about to sleep on the cold earth. Imagine the aches.”
The light behind his gaze dulled and his hand hit the latch. “Doona worry about me. I’m not yet so old and venerable, I canna yet sleep on the ground.”
Desperately, Cecelia threw herself in front of the door. “But … but … wouldn’t you be more comfortable if you had a pallet of some sort by the fire?”
He shook his head stubbornly. “It’s summer, it’s too hot for that.”
“Hot? This is Scotland.”
His jaw clenched, and when he next spoke it was through his teeth. “I ken that, lass. But I tend to run hot in the night.”
Cecelia swallowed. Hard. He didn’t run hot at all. He was cool and taciturn. So contained. Was that because beneath his surly surface some sort of volcanic heat flowed like lava through him, just looking for a vent through which to be released?
Bereft of any response, she stood between the door and his body, silently beseeching him to stay.
He released the latch and took a retreating step, putting space between them. “Christ, woman, ye canna have that much of an aversion to the out of doors.”
“It isn’t that.” She hesitated. Her entire torso quivered against the strength of her heart hurling itself against her ribs. “What … what if Jean-Yves needs help in the night?”
He glanced over his shoulder at the door to the bedroom. “Ye gave him enough of that damned tincture to tranquilize a horse. I’ll be surprised if he wakes in a week. That being said, if he does, ye can call for my help.”
Emotion clogged Cecelia’s throat once again, this time the tide accompanied by a strange well of anger.
“Aye, I shouldna stay in with ye,” he said with undue resolution, as if he were trying to convince himself. “Ye doona need me.”
Cecelia had no idea where the emotion came from, but it was powerful enough to sweep her away. A part of her realized it stemmed from something completely unreasonable, and yet she couldn’t seem to suppress it in the least.
“How do you know I don’t need you?” In an astounding fit of temper, she flung her wrapper back into the crate. “Because I am not constructed with delicate femininity, I am not allowed to be fragile?” She lifted her jaw and glared at him with all the mutiny she could summon. “Because I am intelligent, I am thereby not in need of assistance? Because I am capable, I have no need of protection, is that it?”
Ramsay blinked down at her, his head cocked in a very doglike gesture of confusion. “I never said—”
Cecelia put her hand to her forehead, feeling feverish and strange. Breathless and a bit drunk. “Everyone always thinks I know what to do. But I don’t! I don’t know what to do.” She didn’t inhale so much as she sobbed breaths into lungs that seemed to refuse to inflate. “I’m so. Lost. So weary.
” She hated admitting it. Hated herself for her weakness. Hated that he’d see her as weak. “Absolutely everything is a disaster.” Blood rushed in her ears, and her vision swam. Her knees didn’t seem capable of supporting her weight anymore, and she reached out rather blindly, fearing collapse.
He caught her before she buckled, supporting her weight.
“Don’t leave,” she pleaded, surging forward against him. Burrowing into his chest and clutching at his arms. “Don’t leave me alone. What if someone comes for us in the night?” She did her best to keep her voice down, to make certain Phoebe wouldn’t wake to hear the hysteria bubbling within her. “What if you don’t hear me scream in time?”
His hand landed on the back of her hair and cupped her head to his chest. “Och, lass. I didna ken ye were so frightened.” He whispered this as though the discovery humbled him, then drew her close against his body. Curling over her, around her, he allowed the storm of her tears to break upon him as he sheltered her.
Somehow her spectacles disappeared, and he set them aside before his palm returned to glide up and down her spine in a slow dance as she gave in to her grief.
She cried for her mother. For Henrietta. Phoebe. For the souls who’d been lost in the explosion. For little Katerina Milovic and any girl who was missing, victimized, afraid, or unloved.
She cried for Ramsay. For the boy who survived alone in this cabin, who’d been mistreated. Forgotten. Abandoned.
She wept because people were so unkind. Because they preyed upon one another in ways she couldn’t begin to imagine, and that fact made her feel helpless and afraid. She wanted to reach out and heal the entire world, and yet she couldn’t even keep those in her household safe from faceless enemies.
“Breathe,” Ramsay murmured. “I have ye. Ye’re safe.”
“I know I am,” she gasped through humiliating hiccups. “Because you’re here. Because you saved Phoebe and me, even though you hated me. How can I ever begin to thank you for that? I cannot repay you for bringing us to a place that causes you pain by forcing you to sleep in the dirt! It’s unthinkable. Unconscionable.”
All Scot and Bothered Page 20