It was impossible to tell.
“You can sit next to Cecelia,” Phoebe offered magnanimously. “And we’ll all watch Jean-Yves make the most hilarious faces.”
At the mention of her name, all expression was carefully schooled from Ramsay’s face. “I’ve things to see to outside,” he said, taking a lantern and striding out of the room.
Cecelia pretended to laugh when Phoebe did at Jean-Yves’s antics, and couldn’t remember at all what they’d read. She kissed the girl’s forehead and tucked her into bed before seeing to Jean-Yves.
“You don’t have to tuck me in,” he groused. “I’m no child.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Go to him, Cecelia,” Jean-Yves said gravely.
“What?” she gasped.
“He is of two minds about you, and it is tearing him apart.” The wizened Frenchman grabbed her hand and stayed her with a gentle tug. “Snatch him up or shoot him down, mon bijou, but either way put the poor man out of his misery, oui?”
“His misery?” Cecelia huffed, wondering just how much Jean-Yves had guessed about what had transpired between her and Ramsay. “I’ve tried to talk to him. He won’t have any of it. He is so infuriatingly confusing, I want to rip my hair out, or his.”
“I think that is the most wrathful I’ve seen you in our lives.” Jean-Yves’s caterpillar brows climbed up his forehead as he sank deeper into his patchwork quilts.
Cecelia fluffed the man’s pillow and checked his sling. “He makes me doubt who I am and what I want,” she admitted. “I think he would love me if I were other than who I am.”
“Why do you say this?”
“I’m a chubby bespectacled spinster bastard who inherited an infamous gaming hell in which both my aunt and my grandmother have at one time or another worked as a prostitute. A connection with me would shame a man like Ramsay,” she lamented.
“And he is the unwanted elder son of a Scottish drunk who lost his wife to a duke and drowned to death in his own sick.” Jean-Yves shrugged and then gasped with pain as his shoulder protested. “Also,” he continued with a bit more strain, “it’s widely acknowledged his mother was nothing more than an expensive whore.”
“Jean-Yves!” Cecelia reproached without any true heat.
“I’m only saying, mon bijou, that this man, Ramsay, brought you here not only to keep you protected, but to show you his own shame,” Jean-Yves said with a sage nod. “He might not even know that he’s done it.”
“You truly think so?” Cecelia pondered the implications of this.
“There are many safe places in this world he could have taken us.” He grimaced as he readjusted his position as he muttered, “And so many more comfortable.”
“I promise we can go home soon,” Cecelia said. “I do believe I’ll finish in a few days.”
“Finish your business with the Lord Chief Justice before you decipher that codex,” the old man advised. “Because you know you have enemies, but you’ll need to know where this man fits in your life before we leave here.”
Cecelia chewed on the inside of her cheek, appreciating the advice. “Should he—should we—would you be upset if I loved him? If he were to share his life with us?”
Jean-Yves’s expression softened, deepening the grooves around his features and aging him starkly. “I share my life with you, Cecelia, what’s left of it. Which means I share my life with the man you choose.”
“But what do you think of Ramsay? What if I were your daughter? What would you tell her to do?”
A faint glimmer of emotion entered his eyes as he reached up with his good hand to touch her face. “You know influenza took my girl when she was small. I’ve been blessed with more years with you than with her. I consider you as much my daughter as my employer and my friend. You have to know that.”
“Don’t make me cry,” she begged. “I’ve been nothing but a waterfall for days.”
“This Ramsay. He is a man of means and position, and that is desirable. Beyond that, he is a man who would protect you with his life, and any father would want that for you.” He hesitated. “Just … do not choose anyone who makes you consider yourself anything other than the treasure you are.”
Welling with tenderness, Cecelia smoothed the man’s brow as though he were a child. “I love you. I wish I could have called you Papa.”
He shooed her hand away, turning a bright color of pink beneath his olive-tinged skin. “Je t’aime,” he muttered. “Now let an old man sleep.”
Cecelia crept out the door. She crossed the little cottage on silent slippered feet and snatched the candle from the tabletop. The bouquet caught her eye, and she picked up the flower he’d tucked behind her ear and put it back into her hair. She liked heather, she decided; it smelled of Scotland.
She turned a tankard into a vase for the wildflowers and drifted out the door in search of a gruff Scot.
Cecelia found him not in the shack but next to it, fully clothed and stretched out over his blankets beneath the stars. His hands locked behind his head, he glared up at the sky like it had done him an injustice.
Perhaps he cursed whichever star he’d been born beneath. The one that fated his life to be a battle against a fickle current, forever swimming upstream.
In the moonlight, his harsh features were smoothed and muted to a savage but golden beauty. He was brutality in repose. Distant. Remote.
A lion at rest.
The only acknowledgment of her presence was the tilt of his stern chin as he noted her approach.
He said nothing, his gaze remaining affixed to the sky.
She read a tension building in his body, however. Though he’d retreated from her in every way, she had no doubt he felt the same pull as she did. The same magnetic awareness. It electrified the night between them until she was certain it might be powerful enough to cause them both to glow like the streetlights on the Strand.
If only she could find him, wherever he went. Indeed, if eyes were the window to the soul, then his were walls of ice, opaque and unapproachable.
Blowing out her candle, Cecelia relied solely on the waxing moonlight as she sat next to his long, recumbent body, her wrapper creating a lake of crimson silk around her.
Tension began to creep into her own bones as the silence stretched as taut as a fiddle string between them.
Could he not have mercy on her? Receive her or reprimand her? Could he not make anything between them easy?
No, of course he couldn’t. He told her he was a man without mercy, and she should have listened.
She puffed out a breath and looked to the sky, wondering if they found the same constellations. If they perceived the darkness in a similar fashion.
The firmament wasn’t a pure black, not this soon after the summer solstice and with such a bright moon. A thin midnight-blue mist cast a fairylike glow upon the forest, and if Cecelia were a more fanciful woman, she could truly believe she’d been transported to some island of the Fae, out of time and space. Enchanted and mesmerized by the beauty of her surroundings, and yet tormented by a disdainful silence.
“Look!” she gasped, pointing just past Gemini and Orion. “A falling star. It’s supposed to be good luck.”
He twitched, but made no move toward or away from her. “The stars doona fall for men,” he muttered.
Cecelia chewed the inside of her cheek, wondering what to say next. Perhaps she shouldn’t have come out here … Maybe Jean-Yves didn’t know as much about Ramsay as he thought he did.
She felt tentative—no, nervous—and she had to swallow around a dry tongue as she fought for conversation. “Did you find what you were hunting for in the woods earlier today?”
“Aye,” he answered.
She waited for him to expound.
He didn’t.
“You promised you wouldn’t hate me,” she whispered, drawing her knees in close.
At this, he finally sat up. “What?”
“When I—when we—” She couldn’t bring herself to say
it as the memory of their shared pleasure plagued her into a painful blush. “I asked you if you would hate me after, and you promised you wouldn’t. And yet … here we are.”
His face softened. “Cecelia—”
“I didn’t ask for this, you know,” she burst out, turning on her hip to face him. A foreign fury built within her, welling past frustration and beyond aggravation into a new form of anger she didn’t understand. She flushed hot and cold, her limbs trembled with it, and she felt as though she needed to release it into the night. To do something uncharacteristically barbaric like throw or hit something.
“I’m trying so hard to keep up,” she lamented with helpless tugs at her hair. “To keep everyone happy. And alive. To understand this new world that’s been dumped into my lap and to make sense of enemies I never made and did nothing to deserve. Like you, for example!”
He reached out for her carefully, as one might attempt to soothe a madwoman.
She slapped his hand away. Unable to sit still any longer, she pushed to her feet, obliging him to do the same. “Half of me doesn’t even want to decipher that damnable codex, and do you know why?”
He appeared astonished. Lost. “I canna—”
“Because I’m terrified to find out what kind of woman Henrietta might have been. What kind of woman I might have to become to survive this world.” She could stand it no longer. She had made a mistake coming out here. He distracted her. Spun her about. Perhaps she should have gone to Redmayne instead to keep her safe, to someone who didn’t hold of piece of her heart in his big, brutal hand.
“Did you know I’m afraid all the time?” she asked. “Not just for me, but for Phoebe. For everyone I care about. For you.” She was nigh to panting now, pacing in front of him like a banshee, her red train trailing over the soft Scottish grasses.
“I don’t want to keep secrets anymore. I don’t want to know anything else about anyone’s sins. And do you know what’s the most ridiculous thing about it all, Lord high-and-mighty Chief Justice? I fear that you’ll hate me even more than you do now, once I find something in that codex to condemn those you venerate. I fear that worse than I fear the information that might cost me my life. Because I like you, Cassius Gerard Ramsay, Lord even knows why. You’re critical, grumpy, terrifying, and all sorts of wrong for me, but damned if I don’t think you’re the most beautiful human to walk the face of this earth—”
Ramsay surged forward and shackled his hands around her arms. Her arms, which were thick and soft and not even a bit dainty. And yet he might be the only man alive who could span their circumference.
And damned if she didn’t love that, too.
“Doona ye ken ye’re the only thing that matters to me?” he snarled, his eyes glinting with wrath that might have driven her to flee if her knees hadn’t melted on the spot.
Cecelia blinked up at him, her jaw unhinging.
She hadn’t kenned that. She hadn’t kenned that in the least. He’d never given her the foggiest notion.
“I could never hate ye, Cecelia, but ye’re changing every truth I’ve ever believed in. Ye’re making me wonder if I can actually trust a woman for the first time in my life.” He held her fast, his fingers tightening and yielding on her arms, as if he couldn’t decide whether to pull her close or set her away from him. “Before I met ye in Redmayne’s parlor I had no room for a wife or a child, but damned if it’s not what I want, now.”
Cecelia’s heart stopped. Had he said … wife?
“Ye’re soft where I am hard,” Ramsay continued with a vehemence that belonged to the same fury simmering in her own blood. “Ye’re kind when I am cruel. Ye remind me that there’s mercy along with justice and that the world is not just black and white but shades of gray.
“Elphinstone Croft has been my personal hell for years. But ye.” He shook her a little, then turned her away from him to face the dilapidated cottage glowing white and in the moonlight. “I could stay here with ye, with Phoebe, with that fucking Frenchman who doesna like me, and I’d be content. Here. The one place I thought I’d forever detest. For the first time in my entire hopeless life I’m … I’m at peace, Cecelia. I am content. I doona care about anything that awaits us back in London. And the fault is yers.”
He didn’t at all seem like a man at peace. He was a wall of muscle and wrath behind her. His body hard and unyielding and endlessly warm. “But—” she said, puzzling. “But you’ve been so … distant. So callous. How can I believe—?”
“Doona ye think I’m plagued by the same fear?” he thundered. “Someone out there wants to take this from me. To take ye from me. It is more important than ever that I not be distracted by temptation, do ye ken? I canna allow myself a moment’s peace, because though no one yet knows about this place, someone might find out. And there’s a chance they’ll come for us. I have to be on my guard. I have to keep ye alive.”
He turned her back around to face him, and she could feel the restraint quelling his strength. Stretching his muscles to the breaking point.
That fact sparked an answering heat within her.
Yes, this was what she yearned to hear, what she wanted to know. A reason for his cruelty.
Kindness.
At least, the fear of it.
Ramsay devoured her with his gaze, but he finally mustered the strength to set her firmly away. “So help me, woman, it matters not to me what is in that fucking book. Not anymore. Not when it comes to ye. All I want to do is throw ye over my shoulder, take ye to the village, and make ye my wife. I’d not let ye leave my bedchamber for an entire week until I’ve worshiped every brilliant beautiful inch of ye.” This was hissed out between teeth that refused to separate. “But because of where we are and who we’re with, I’ve vowed not to touch ye again, and I swear to Christ it’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. So pardon me if I’ve been a bit distant, but it’s taken every drop of willpower I possessed not to finish what we started on that fucking chair. And once I begin, the world might burn to the ground before I’m through and I’d not even notice.”
He threw his hands up and whirled away, stalking over to his pallet, obviously intent upon putting distance between them.
“So if ye’d hie yerself inside and stop tormenting me, I’d consider it a kindness.”
Suddenly Cecelia couldn’t stop smiling. In fact, the smile spread all the way through her, thrilling her to her very toes with happiness.
He wanted her. He’d wanted her all along. He thought she was beautiful and brilliant. She, pudgy, bespectacled Cecelia Teague, tempted the Vicar of Vice to the brink of his iron will.
A heady knowledge, that.
Instead of going inside, she went to him. Pressing her hand against his back, she felt the column of muscle bracketing his spine tense and twitch beneath the thin fabric of his shirt.
Stimulated, encouraged, and intensely curious, she slid both hands to the front of him, encircling his torso. The fingers of one hand splayed on the corrugated mounds of his abs and the other on the place where his heart hurled itself against his ribs.
“Cecelia.” Her name was half a groan and half a plea. “Please. I canna bear—”
“You could guard me here, you know, in the garden,” she invited in a timid voice.
He placed his hands over hers, the rough fingers trembling as he peeled her away before turning to face her. His mouth opened as though to admonish her, but no words escaped.
His eyes were no longer shards of ice. They’d kindled into something else entirely. A flame hot enough to burn through her clothing and scorch the flesh beneath.
Cecelia allowed her wrapper to slip off her shoulder, and watched his control disappear with every increment of skin unveiled to the moonlight. “You could thoroughly guard every inch of me beneath the stars.”
“Ye’re killing me, woman,” he said through increasingly harsh breaths.
She sidled closer, her face to the sky. “I’d rather be kissing you.”
He stood still. His no
se flaring, his every muscle locked as though he violently grappled with invisible shackles. “Ye should run, Cecelia.” His voice became impossibly lower. More growl than groan.
More animal than human.
Her loins bloomed at the sound, a delicious thrill of excitement mingling with her arousal. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“Ye would be if ye understood what I wanted to do to ye.”
A bizarre instinct overtook her, much like that of conquered prey about to be devoured. She felt both powerful and passive. Like a lioness surrendering to her mate. She wanted him to unleash the beast growling through him and devour her. She yearned to be his prize, his temptation.
His indulgence.
Instead of reaching for him, she watched him through lids half closed as she lifted her hand to the collar of her wrapper, drawing her fingertips down to separate the folds in a move both bold and bashful. As she undid the garment, she unbound the man, and as soon as it pooled into a puddle of silk at her feet, she knew the last shreds of his control joined it.
Before she could breathe, his arms clamped like steel around her, his hands bunching in the thin lace of her nightgown. His hips and mouth crashed against her at precisely the same moment in an ardent, almost violent claiming.
His tongue burrowed past her lips in an erotic intrusion as he fused their mouths and their bodies. The ridge of his sex ground against her belly. The heat and girth and taste of it a scorching memory she yearned to reacquaint herself with.
His restless hands splayed on her back, creating a gentle counterpoint to the ardent kiss as they slid down her spine, dipping into the dramatic curve of her waist and shaping over her hip. He stopped there, toying at the curve as though searching for something.
“Yer drawers,” he whispered against her mouth.
“I don’t wear them to bed,” she admitted shyly.
He said a few things in a language she’d never before encountered and fisted her shift in his hand. “If ye keep surprising me like this, woman, tonight willna last long.”
All Scot and Bothered Page 26