“Oh.” She blinked at him, as though he’d astonished the wits right out of her. “I suppose, if you were not so vigilant against me, then tonight might have been my last.” She took a step closer. “That man who … who would have … Well, he proved you right a bit, didn’t he? Henrietta must have been involved in something unthinkable to amass such enemies.” She shut her eyes for the space of a trembling breath. “If I’m honest, you were forgiven the moment I saw you in the alley. However, your apology is formally accepted, of course.”
“I … hadn’t apologized.” Had he?
A soft smile tilted her soft mouth. “You seemed to be working up to it. Am I mistaken?”
“Aye. Nay.” Ramsay turned around, dismayed to find nowhere to advance and no place for retreat. “Christ, I mean, I am attempting to apologize, I just havena … ever…” He trailed away. How did one go about doing this?
“You mean for me to believe you’ve never had to ask for forgiveness?” Her voice behind him wasn’t mocking, exactly, but his discombobulation seemed to incite a gentle note of amusement. “You’ve never made a mistake?”
None he’d readily admitted to. “I didna say that,” he quipped, turning back to face her. “I tend to avoid people unless I’m functioning as the Lord Chief Justice, and then it matters not if I offend. Furthermore, I doona have the luxury of making mistakes, let alone subsequent apologies.”
She observed him with clinical precision for a moment before declaring with unwarranted sympathy, “You must be very lonely.”
He flinched as if he’d been struck. “Must I?”
“Are you not?”
He didn’t used to think so.
Loneliness was abandonment. Lonely was being forgotten. It was not hearing the voice of another human being for months. Years. Lonely was no one caring if you lived or died.
He’d been lonely before in his life.
What was he now?
One of only several men who’d ever held his position in the world. He’d be chronicled in history texts, and the laws he wrote would govern the whole of Britain. He spent days in the company of important and powerful figures. How could such a man as he possibly be lonely?
How could he feel so hollow and bleak?
“You were a soldier,” Cecelia ventured, saving him from having to answer her previous question. “You didn’t happen to work with cryptography, did you?”
He shook his head. “Soldiering for me was mostly tedious marches through unforgiving terrain interrupted by bouts of frenzied bloodshed.”
“How awful,” she murmured.
Much of it had been awful. But as a youth he’d been so angry, so impossibly fuming that he’d relished in the feral violence of it. The regimentation. The fact that he’d belonged somewhere. To something greater than himself. His name was posted on a list with a rank that told him his place and importance. Gave him goals, aspirations. Medals and honor.
“The military.” She held up a finger up with an unspoken aha. “That must have been where you learned to see the worst in people.”
“Decidedly not,” he answered. “People are always more than ready to show ye their worst nature. They’re just begging for an excuse, it seems. For a rope to hang themselves with.”
“Not you.” She looked up at him with something like understanding. “And not I, despite what you may think.”
This time, it was Ramsay who looked away. “I fear, Miss Teague, ye’ve only seen the worst of me.”
She gave him a reprieve from her keen observation, bending down to retrieve an expensive leather-bound diary from her desk.
Ramsay took a careful step forward, aware of how small the room had become now that they both stood in it. How close she was. How easily she would become undraped. Undressed.
Undone.
He wasn’t lonely now. He felt hungry. Angry. Needy. Hot. His clothes seemed to scratch and bind. He was tired of talking. Tired of the questions she asked that revealed too much of him to her.
He was so. Fucking. Tired.
If only there was a soft place in which to lose himself.
His hand reached for her of its own volition. Suddenly she seemed like the answer to everything.
At the same time, she was one gigantic question mark.
“My aunt Henrietta left this for me upon her death.” Cecelia shoved the open book into the hand that had reached for her, interrupting … God knew what he’d just been about to do.
“It’s a codex of some kind,” she continued, unaware of his mood. “All her enemies, her nefarious deeds, and I dare think her ledgers and her secrets lie herein. Thus far I haven’t been able to make heads nor tails of it, though I have found this book on decryption of known ciphers. It seems she’s left me clues, somehow; I just need time to figure out what they are.”
Ramsay did his best to compose himself. To stem the tide of yearning and focus his garbled thoughts on the task at hand.
God but she spun him about. Her scent. Her shape. Her sound. She was a delicacy—nay, a feast—for his senses, and the senses not currently occupied by her screamed for him to do something about that.
If only he could touch her.
Taste her.
He flipped through the book blindly. The symbols and formulae therein might as well have been written in hieroglyphs. “Ye think … ye can decipher this?” If so, she was a bloody genius.
She nodded. “I’m more determined than ever to understand what Henrietta was up to. I just need time.”
His fingers stilled upon the pages as he prepared to reveal to her what he’d learned. “Time ye may not have,” he said, welling with regret. “Yer enemies know as well as I do that ye’re Cecelia Teague and not Hortense Thistledown. They ken where ye live now.”
She chewed on her lip, thrusting a hip into her hand as she pondered this. “Yes, and who’s to say who they are?”
Ramsay grimaced. Wishing like hell he didn’t have to tell her this. “Those men I killed today … I knew them. I’ve hired them in the past.”
She shrank away, clutching at her wrapper and gown. “Hired them? Surely not to—”
“The one I gunned down in the street, I employed him to watch ye during the day whilst I was engaged elsewhere. I thought he was trustworthy. He’s often in the employ of other agents of the law, including my superior, the Lord Chancellor.”
“No.” She clapped her hand over her mouth.
“Aye,” he confirmed as her brow knitted into an expression of horror and disbelief. “I heard what those men said to ye,” he continued. “They intended to take yer little girl, to replace the one they’d lost. I believe they referred to Katerina Milovic.” He brandished the codex at her. “They asked for this book, and if there’s something in here that incriminates yer aunt as well as the Lord Chancellor, I need to ken what it is so I can crush him.”
Cecelia seemed to compose herself and drifted forward, reaching out for the diary. “My lord, you’ll need to consider this carefully. What is in this book could go to the very top of the chain. Even above Redmayne’s head, you understand? I saw a member of the royal family leave Henrietta’s establishment right before the bombing. And also the Count Armediano.”
“Armediano?” he growled. “That rat bastard could certainly have something to do with it.” He thought darkly of the count’s fingers on the soft white flesh of her arm.
“These revelations could be dangerous for the both of us.” She clasped his free hand between her two palms, imploring him to listen. “If that bomb was connected to a timing device, anyone in the world could have planted it. All of Henrietta’s records but this have been destroyed, and I wasn’t at Henrietta’s that morning to see who else might have left it.”
“Why not?”
She glanced away guiltily. “I didn’t sleep the night before.”
“I’m sensing ye’re not a grand sleeper.” He let his thumb drift over her fingers.
“I am, usually,” she argued. “This was your fault on both accoun
ts.”
His fault? He considered this. The morning of the bombing was right after the dinner party at Redmayne’s.
A carnal memory glistened in her eyes and stained her pale cheeks a dark, guilty shade.
Suddenly he knew exactly why she hadn’t slept.
Because she’d been up contemplating their kiss.
As had he.
“Ramsay.”
His name on her lips stopped his heart and corded his muscles. He became like a statue, his every marble molecule waiting for the chisel of her next words.
“I need you to believe that I’m neither criminal nor bawd. I need to you trust that I’m embroiled within this catastrophic mystery against my will and better judgment, and that I am as committed to doing what is right as you are. Even if we might disagree as to what that is. I need an ally, not an enemy. I have enough of those, and I promise you, I’ve done nothing to deserve them.”
The earnest intensity glowing on her heart-shaped face threatened to melt the steely cold center of him within a feminine forge.
He fought the rising molten wave of warmth. He could not afford to let her shape and mold him to her will. He could not—would not—be one of the men who undoubtedly fell to their knees before her, waiting to be anointed her knight in shining armor.
“Tell me you believe me,” she pleaded, her eyes going soft, gathering little jewels of moisture at her lashes. “That you believe I’m innocent.”
Remembering himself, Ramsay pulled his hand from hers. He believed she didn’t procure those missing girls.
Beyond that, he believed that she could quite easily make him a fool. Or a fiend. One of those empty-eyed addicts haunting the opium dens begging for their poison. He believed they were embroiled in the same dangerous conspiracy and that he needed the information in Henrietta’s book every bit as much as she did.
“I believe I need to get ye to safety,” he finally said, thrusting the book back into her grasp. “I will take ye somewhere they are not likely to find ye. I’ll buy ye the time ye need. Now get dressed and pack.”
All hope collapsed away from her features. “But my employees. The school. I have to make arrangements—”
“We will make them on our way out of the city.” Her silk-clad body blocked his way toward the door, so he backed away from her and took the route around the chair he’d napped in to avoid any dangerous physical contact.
He’d made it to the door latch before she stopped him with the simple weight of her hand on his wrist. Something about her touch shackled him, reminded him that not all restraints were iron.
Some of them could be velvet.
“What about Jean-Yves and Phoebe?” she fretted.
“We’ll take them, of course.” He flexed his hand on the latch.
“Take them? Take them where?”
Ramsay could stand it no longer. Not her scent, nor the outline of her body in that damned wrapper. He had arrangements to make and fortifications to construct if this was going to work.
He shook off her hand and wrenched to door open, managing to slide past her without allowing their bodies to touch.
“To Scotland,” he threw over his retreating shoulder. “Where else?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Cecelia winced as her fidgeting produced a loud protestation from the stool she occupied next to the bed where Jean-Yves snored softly.
To her utter relief, he remained asleep.
The poor man had been grim but enduring for the entire train journey from London to Dalkeith, a lovely Midlothian town south of Edinburgh. The bumpy carriage ride across the moors to the cottage had been a decidedly different story, and she’d had to double his dose of the opiate in order make the entire ordeal tolerable for everyone involved.
When Cecelia had quizzed Ramsay about their destination, he’d been disturbingly obtuse in his answer. “I’m taking ye to Elphinstone Croft.”
“What’s Elphinstone Croft?” she’d asked.
“A place no one will think to look for ye.” An odd note in his voice twisted something bleak inside of her, and Cecelia hadn’t pressed further.
And when they’d crested the gentle hill, she’d gasped with elation.
Elphinstone Croft had reminded her of a lost paradise. Or perhaps just a neglected one. The white cottage hid in a cluster of trees entirely too narrow to claim the title of forest along the bank of the River Esk. Overgrown ivy and a riot of thorny roses, berries, and wildflowers clung to the decrepit fence and crept up the walls, as though the garden had been trying to devour the edifice at its middle and was halfway finished with the meal.
Ramsay had to rip vines and such from the entry and pit his considerable weight against the oak door before it gave way.
At her questioning look, he explained. “I’ve not had the occasion to visit for a handful of years.”
Jean-Yves had gratefully landed in the first bed Ramsay had been able to provide. Subsequently, it was decided Cecelia could both sit sentinel at the tiny desk by Jean-Yves’s bedside and work on the codex in the remaining daylight.
Ramsay offered to keep Phoebe busy with him as they unloaded the food and supplies from the carriage they’d rented in Dalkeith. They would then set about airing the few rooms and uncovering the Spartan furniture.
The deep rumble of Ramsay’s voice contrasted with the high exuberance of Phoebe’s and became a pleasant distant cacophony by which she worked.
Cecelia was glad the girl hadn’t seemed to mind the damp dereliction of the simple croft. Phoebe had taken to the expedition like Francesca would an adventure, or Alexandra had to any less-than-luxurious archeological locales. She had her dolls, Frances Bacon and Fanny de Beaufort, and couldn’t be happier to venture beyond the tiny corner of the city that had been her entire world thus far.
As much as Cecelia was charmed by the fairy-tale allure of the croft, she had to admit it wasn’t at all what she’d pictured when Ramsay had informed them that their destination was his childhood home in the Scottish Lowlands.
She felt a certain sense of shame to have assumed the elder brother of a powerful duke had loftier origins than herself. It couldn’t be more to the contrary.
Even the Reverend Teague’s humble vicarage boasted two bedrooms in addition to the cellar, and they’d enjoyed the patronage of wealthy parishioners to keep them fed and clothed.
As far as she could tell, she and Jean-Yves currently occupied the lone bedroom of Elphinstone Croft, above which was a tiny loft Phoebe had immediately claimed as her own.
Cecelia had spread out her volumes of ciphers and references beneath the open window, and had quickly succumbed to her curiosity, dragged into the world of Grecian and Etruscan cryptology.
Before she knew it, her pen dropped from fingers suddenly stiff with abiding cold. She applied the icy hand to the back of her aching neck, kneading at the knotted muscles there as she blinked around the bedroom.
When had night fallen? Had Ramsay left that candle on her desk?
Oh dear, she’d done it again. Alexandra had teased her endlessly about her predilection at university. Mesmerism by maths, she’d called it.
The entire world would drop away, cease to exist, for hours upon hours until she was able to solve a particularly perplexing problem.
Except … this time, she’d solved nothing. Her only notable progress was the alarmingly long list of codes and ciphers she knew were not applicable to the codex.
Cecelia drew in an exhausted breath and was suddenly aware of a miracle.
Or rather, a miraculous aroma. The distinct mélange of garlic, onion, and rendered succulent meat underscored with—she sniffed once again. Was that thyme?
Her stomach made a rude and rather insistent noise that drove Cecelia to venture out of the cupboard-sized bedroom. She turned to close the door behind her as quietly as she could, though it would probably have taken an entire symphony of off-key bagpipers to wake Jean-Yves at this point.
Once she turned to the main room, Cecelia
had to swipe off her spectacles, shine them with her handkerchief, and replace them on her nose in order to process the mighty transformation the cottage had undergone.
When she’d arrived, it’d been a graveyard of ghostly furniture covers and grimy windows. With the application of the supplies Ramsay had sent ahead for in town, the tiny windows now sparkled. The one rough, wooden table—which she’d previously feared would leave anyone who approached it speared by several splinters—had been covered by a clean blue cloth.
A rocking chair hunkered in the corner, as though being punished for a slight, and an old but sturdy couch faced the modest fireplace. Tools and sundries were piled neatly next to the door, while a few scattered around the corner that seemed to function as a kitchen complete with an antique water pump that must draw from an old well.
Cecelia found herself utterly charmed by the entire room. One could believe that fairy-tale gnomes had once lived there. Or perhaps witches.
A cauldron even simmered over a cookfire in the stone hearth, and she couldn’t imagine a better-smelling brew.
A large and surly Scot perched on said hearth and whittled at a long thin stick with a knife long enough to rival that of the kukris Alexandra had brought back from subcontinental India.
Cecelia caught her breath and pinned her feet to the floor. The firelight gilded his hair with every conceivable fine metallic hue. Copper and bronze sifted like sands beneath the desert sun on the shorter strands near his neck and above his ears. A forelock of gold fell over a brow pinched with concentration, and even threads of silver dusted the thick hair at his temples.
Resting his elbows on knees thrust high by the low hearth, Ramsay appeared to be almost squatting rather than sitting as he worked intently, and Cecelia found the pose both indecent and intriguing.
He’d shucked all but his shirtsleeves and a pair of fawn trousers stretched over thighs tensed to hold his weight and spread so he could hold his work between them. His sleeves had been rolled up to the elbows, revealing muscled forearms dusted with a down of gold hair.
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