All Scot and Bothered

by Kerrigan Byrne

  Ramsay shook himself from whatever thrall the recent violence had over him, and he reached her in three swift strides.

  “Give me the girl,” he ordered.

  “No.” The word escaped her before she had time to think about it. She had to fight the urge to bare her teeth at him.

  They were both creatures of instinct tonight, it seemed.

  His hand encircled her upper arm with his fingers, and Cecelia gaped at it, for her appendage was not slender.

  The grip was surprisingly gentle, coaxing, even though the stony familiarity returned to his expression. “Ye’re trembling hard enough to shake her loose.”

  Was she?

  Cecelia suddenly noted a curious weakness in her arms. Her knees seemed to have all but disappeared, threatening to fold her legs from beneath her.

  “Give her over, Cecelia.” Her name in his low, cavernous brogue vibrated through her, washing over the tremors of terror like a soothing balm.

  She loosened her grip on Phoebe, allowing the child to make the decision.

  To her astonishment, the girl levered away from her and turned her torso to stretch tiny arms out to Ramsay. The man had frightened her, once upon a time, but Phoebe was a canny child and recognized strength and safety when it was offered.

  She looked even smaller in the arms of the burly Scot. Her legs couldn’t span his ribs; nor could her arms reach the breadth of his shoulders. Instead, she hooked an elbow around his neck and rested her cheek on his shoulder, reaching her free hand for Cecelia.

  Doing what she could to stave off the trembling of her fingers, she threaded them with Phoebe’s and allowed Ramsay to lead them home.

  They navigated around the third body sprawled on the cobbles, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the chest. His was the shot she’d heard.

  Ramsay kept Phoebe’s face angled away, making certain she didn’t see any of the night’s carnage.

  “What … what about the police?” Cecelia hovered closer to his side when they passed the last alley before reaching her steps.

  How could he be both so calm and so vigilant at once? He’d just killed three men.

  “I’ll deal with them once ye’re safely inside,” he said. “For now, I’m not letting ye out of my sight.”

  What had once been a threat now became the ultimate comfort.

  Cecelia climbed her stairs after Lord Ramsay on legs made of quivering custard. Inside her, a maelstrom of thoughts and fears twisted and battered at her.

  He would be in her home, this man who hated her. Who’d kissed her.

  Who’d killed for her.

  For someone so practiced at calculating odds, Cecelia couldn’t even begin to predict what the outcome of this interaction would be.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Ramsay often woke with a violent jerk before dawn licked at the black ribbon of the Thames.

  This time, however, consciousness drifted over him in languid increments. He felt confused, befuddled, but didn’t want to give in to that just yet.

  A delectable scent enticed him into further awareness. Bread, but sweeter. And coffee. His hand rested on his chest, and a soft blanket slid back and forth over the wounded mounds of his knuckles with every measured breath.

  A wooden scratching sound permeated the languor. Repetitive, but not unpleasant.

  He cracked one eye open the merest slit, not ready to commit to cognizance.

  An etched-glass lantern flickered not far away. When had he lit it? He generally slept in absolute dark. Drapes drawn and …

  He yawned and scratched at his suit jacket.

  And naked. He always slept naked.

  Granted, he had taken three lives last night.

  He dropped his lid closed with a heavy breath. Killing or tupping always had the same effect on him. A weighty fatigue. Like a blanket that wanted to smother his thoughts. To douse his deeds and deliver him into the welcoming darkness.

  He must have arrived home and collapsed into bed still fully attired.

  Except … when had he?

  His memories churned behind his eyelids in a garbled array of images.

  He’d paid a private investigator often used by their office to watch Miss Teague’s home, but he’d arrived in the evening for reports to find the man had abandoned his post.

  As he’d settled in to surveil the cozy light pouring from her windows, a fracas had distracted him. Miss Teague had sent her little girl running up the cobbles before she’d been shoved into the alleyway by a brawny bastard.

  By a man who’d signed his death warrant by touching her.

  Ramsay hadn’t thought before reacting. His long legs chewed up an entire block by the time the man chasing Phoebe had caught her up. He’d grappled the fucker, shot him with his own gun, and leapt down the alley in time to see Cecelia go down beneath a sharp blow.

  It was all so clear after that. Slow and perfectly encased in his mind’s eye.

  A black, icy wrath had overtaken him, threading his blood with murder. He’d dismantled the brute with his bare hands before emptying the entire pistol into his scrawny comrade.

  Never had he taken lives so willingly.

  He’d escorted Cecelia and Phoebe to Cecelia’s surprisingly modest but tidy row house and followed her inside.

  She’d turned in the entry, cluttered with scarves, umbrellas, and outdoor attire of every color, and stared at him for a long and intense moment.

  Ramsay still couldn’t say why he’d done it, but he’d shifted the girl further to his shoulder and extended his arm to Cecelia Teague.

  She’d hesitated only for the space of a breath before collapsing against him. She didn’t speak or scream or dissolve into sobs. No one said a word or made a sound for an inexplicably long time.

  The two females merely clung to him and trembled. Their gratitude warm, unspoken, and absolute.

  Ramsay drowsily let his palm drift to the place on his pectoral where Cecelia Teague’s cheek had rested. It felt as if she’d branded him, the heat of it reaching through the flesh and the muscle and bone into the ticking center of him. Expanding along his veins. Surging emotions through him he couldn’t identify if he’d had a dictionary in hand and a hundred years to study it.

  The white-hot rage with which he’d dispatched those brigands had been washed away by a welling of protective tenderness. For a moment, he’d forgotten all about obligation and honor, about her past or his duty.

  Once he’d had Cecelia Teague and that child safe in his arms, nothing else mattered for a precious quiet moment.

  Surveying their foyer, he’d noticed that a door stood ajar to what might have once served as a comfortable parlor if not for the long bed upon which a short man reclined.

  Ramsay had locked gazes with the elder, recognizing him at once as the gentleman who’d been carried away from the wreckage of Henrietta’s manse. The man whose bedside Miss Teague hadn’t left until he’d been released from hospital that morning.

  Jean-Yves Renault.

  A strange communiqué had passed between the men as Ramsay had stood there encircling the two ladies in his protective, albeit entirely improper, embrace. The old man had eyed the exchange with extreme concern, then great interest.

  “Mon bijou? What has happened?” he’d croaked out in French.

  Cecelia had stiffened and stepped out of his hold with a graceful movement and a glance that managed to be both conciliatory and grateful.

  Ramsay had to force himself to let her go.

  Mon bijou? He found he didn’t care for that endearment at all. Or for the fact that any man had one for her. This troubled him more than a little.

  The night progressed quickly after that. He remembered releasing Phoebe into her care and listening to Cecelia’s explanation of events to Mr. Renault before he left to deal with the police and identify the dead.

  He’d immediately returned to the Teague household to start in on the many things in need of discussion. He’d thought to find them mopping at tears and asking t
housands upon thousands of questions.

  Instead he was admitted by Cecelia, who had changed into a serviceable gown. She explained in a somewhat harried manner that she was without proper staff, she’d only just settled Mr. Renault down with laudanum for his injuries and was in the middle of bathing Phoebe.

  Her vivacious hair had been tousled and curly with moisture, and her face glowed pink with a sheen of mist from the hot washroom.

  Ramsay had noted the red mark beginning to swell beneath her cheek, and a burst of rage had struck him dumb enough to allow himself to be ushered into her study, whereupon she’d pointed at the decanter of scotch, mumbled something about putting Phoebe to bed, and promptly disappeared.

  Her home was well decorated, he’d noted, but not well insulated. He could hear almost everything that went on in the rooms above. The splashes of a bath. The high-pitched sweetness of a distraught child’s many questions. The low, husky tones of Cecelia’s answers meant to comfort and reassure.

  He’d stood in the middle of the room for what might have been an eternity, staring at the ceiling. The foreign and wondrous sounds of a home conjured a strange ache in his middle. He rubbed at the hollow wound as he listened to what a childhood might have been like. Comforting words, reassurances, encouragements, warm baths, and gentle touches: These things existed only for others.

  As a child, he’d bathed in a freezing loch.

  Eventually Ramsay had drifted to the scotch at the sideboard, searching for a refuge from his uncharacteristically maudlin thoughts. He didn’t normally imbibe, but the night’s revelations needed their edges dulled. He’d sip only one drink until she’d finished.

  They had much to discuss.

  Because pondering the implications of what he’d found outside had been entirely disturbing, Ramsay had busied himself with inspecting her study.

  A decidedly female study if one had ever heard of such a thing. In his experience, women had parlors and solariums with which to … do whatever it was women did.

  Cecelia Teague had books.

  He’d folded into a high-backed leather chair across from the brick fireplace and let the scotch burn down his throat, lighting a small fire in his belly.

  Cecelia’s lullaby drifted through the night from somewhere else in the house, and his breaths instantly deepened and slowed, becoming languid as his muscles unraveled.

  What a different life she led than he’d expected. Her study was crowded by bric-a-brac, random travel souvenirs and mementos. She’d done it in dark, exotic carpets and blond wood. The desk beneath the window looked out onto a street that was little more than a tucked-away square of Chelsea one might not even realize as part of a bustling capital.

  Not the lair one would attribute to the Scarlet Lady, or even her heir. The woman that until tonight he’d suspected of the foulest deeds.

  Cecelia’s innocence in the disappearances of the girls had been validated, and he had to stay until he could inform her of how. Until he could plan their next move, because now their fates were entwined …

  Ramsay’s last memory had been of her bookshelves.

  She’d begun another lullaby at Phoebe’s request, and so he’d settled in to wait even longer. Examining the titles of her literary collection in the light of the lone lantern, he’d feared its contents to be as inflammatory as the pornographic scripts in Henrietta’s residence. Instead, he found titles such as The Matrices of Spherical Astronomy. And further texts on Boolean algebra, standard deviation, classic cryptography, ciphers of the ancient world, and—

  Wait a fucking minute.

  The lone lantern?

  Jesus bloody Christ.

  Ramsay’s eyes shot open, and found what he feared the most.

  The Matrices of Spherical Astronomy.

  Nine kinds of curses splashed against the back of Ramsay’s lips as panic flushed the last vestiges of slumber from him.

  He’d fallen asleep in the Scarlet Lady’s study, as soothed by her lullaby as a child of seven.

  God’s blood, he’d never done such a ridiculous thing in his life. He could only hope he hadn’t been out long. That she hadn’t noticed his blunder.

  Ramsay’s hand moved. The blanket snagged again on his roughened knuckles. He squeezed his eyes shut, awash with … shame? Mortification? Something very like it.

  Cecelia Teague had happened upon him slumbering in her chair like a gigantic useless git, and—sweetheart that she was purported to be—she’d left him to his repose.

  But not before covering him with a bloody blanket.

  The image of it trapped his breath in his throat. Cecelia bending over him, draping the soft knit over his slack body. Had she touched him? How close had her body been—close enough to draw her into his lap?

  Oh, that she’d woken him. That she’d made some sort of din, slammed a book or two and spared them both this very awkward situation.

  At that troubling thought, he sat up and drew the blanket down his chest, running a hand over his hair to slick any strays back.

  It took the cessation of the rhythmic scratching for him to truly identify it.

  A pencil.

  “You’re awake.”

  Ramsay’s heart kicked against his ribs. His head turned stiffly on his shoulders, unwilling to face what he was certain to find at the desk behind him.

  Or rather, whom.

  That husky voice. The lower harmonics of which were laced with such sensual tones, they could barely be reconciled with the dulcet sweetness of her corresponding melody.

  Mother of all that was good and holy, but her voice did things to him. Hardened his sex and softened his heart. Weakened his will and his walls and filtered through the cracks in his fortifications.

  If the sound of her was dangerous, the sight of Cecelia was almost his undoing.

  The lantern light gilded her with an angelic aura often depicted in the paintings of Catholic saints. She could have been a Pre-Raphaelite muse. Her eyes so wide and full of light, even without her spectacles. Her cheeks round, ivory, and peach. Her chin dimpled. And her hair—those glorious curls—escaped a loose and hasty braid that fell over her shoulder, longer than was fashionable.

  She appeared a cherub but for the midnight-blue silk wrapper turning her every generous curve into a dark sin. The lace of a high-necked nightgown hid any hint of flesh, but he knew the garment was a summer one, thin and gossamer.

  Were he to unbelt the robe, he’d see right through it in the lantern light.

  Ramsay’s mouth went dry.

  Simultaneously, Cecelia made a nervous noise in her throat before gesturing to the side table with her writing instrument. “There’s coffee and biscuits. Croissants, if you prefer. My cookmaid is absent, so if you require heartier fare, I could suggest a café nearby with an excellent breakf—”

  “That willna be necessary.” He held up a hand, cursing every god of Eros he could think of. He was almost forty-goddamned-years-of-age. Could he go at least once in this woman’s presence without an unwelcome erection? He shifted uncomfortably in the chair, grateful she couldn’t see his lap from her angle at the desk.

  Not that she was looking. She’d returned to the book she’d been hunched over, making swift notes on a paper.

  It was only then that Ramsay noted the evidence of strain tightening her features, even in the immensely flattering golden light. She was more pale than peachy. Her full mouth compressed into a line, shadows smudging the delicate skin beneath her eyes. Eyes that were both focused and a bit frenzied.

  “Ye should have woken me,” he admonished gently.

  She didn’t look up. “I apologize for keeping you waiting for so long, I had a deuced time putting Phoebe to bed.”

  A pang, sharp and powerful, pierced him at the thought of the wee lass. Her tiny trusting arms and her large hazel-gray eyes. “Entirely understandable,” he said. “How is she?”

  “Alive, thanks to you.” Cecelia glanced at the closed door to her study, as though she could check on the chil
d through the walls. “Resilient,” she proffered further, her eyebrow tilting as though the fact surprised her. “She seems so delicate, but I’m learning that she and I are more alike than I realized. The more information she has, the easier it is for her to process. That being said, I don’t exactly know what or how much information is proper for a child of seven.”

  “She’s a lucky girl,” Ramsay murmured before he meant to.

  “Lucky how?” She sighed, digging her fingers into exhausted eyes. “In less than a week she’s been witness to a fatal bombing and a shooting. It’s a wonder she’s not entirely traumatized. As it is, I shouldn’t wonder if she will bear the scars of this night for ages.”

  Ramsay wanted to call the tight ball in his chest respect, but there was a great deal else jumbled up in there. Worry, admiration, wariness, protectiveness, possession?

  “She’s lucky ye’re a good mother to her,” he said lamely.

  Her gaze flicked to him, and then quickly away. Her auburn lashes fluttered down over her cheeks as she pretended to study the work beneath her. “That remains to be seen,” she murmured.

  He’d pleased her. Ramsay was glad to see some of her color return.

  “Unlike me, ye’ve not slept,” he noted.

  She shook her head, tapping her pencil on the desk. “I won’t sleep. I can’t. Not until I’ve figured out what Henrietta’s done. Not until those I love are safe.”

  Guilt made an oily slick down Ramsay’s spine. He’d been so blinded by enmity, by what he considered to be lies, that he’d missed the truth. A truth that might have cost her life.

  He opened his mouth to reveal what he knew when she tossed her pencil into the spine of the book and stood, obliging him to do the same.

  He buttoned his suit coat, hoping she didn’t look down. “I must admit that I might have been … unduly brutal, earlier.”

  She shook her head. “I would say you were brave. Brutality was necessary against those men, I’m afraid.”

  “Nay.” He fought the very juvenile urge to squirm. “Nay, I mean with ye. The things I said when last we met…”