The question might not be if he loved her but, rather, if there was anything he didn’t love about her.
And the answer to that was no.
Even her reasons for keeping the gambling hell were noble.
In fact, the only thing he resented about her was her ability to live without him. Because she would carve out a happy life whether he was a part of it or not.
And he … well, he couldn’t rightly fathom going back to a world without her in it.
He might not love what she’d picked as her profession, but he could live with it.
Because he had to live with her. He wanted her to be the mother of his child. Children. He wanted her to teach them to be as kind and generous and moral as she was. As independent and adventurous.
He wanted her to teach them how to love.
And perhaps he could learn alongside them.
“Ye’re right,” he whispered. “Ye’re right, about everything. Do ye think I’ve lost her?”
“I think you should go and—”
Ramsay held up his fist for silence as a shadow caught his eye.
Something—someone—lurked in the glade beyond the gate.
As he squinted into the night, he thought he caught the outline of a man’s head and torso ducking behind the fence lined with overgrown berry bushes plagued with thorns.
All thoughts of the past dissipated as his military training snapped into the fibers of his muscles, readying them for violence.
He scanned the moonlit night, looking for others. No one else out in the open, but anyone could have been waiting in the trees.
“Get inside, take the rifle, and give Cecelia the pistol,” he commanded in a voice too low to carry. “Someone is out there, so I need ye to hole up in the bedroom and cover the window and the door. Shoot anyone who isn’t me. Now pretend to retire for the night.”
“I’m going to bed,” the Frenchman said without missing a beat. He sounded glib enough to be convincing. “I’ll leave you to your thoughts.” Sotto voce, he asked, “What about a weapon for you, my lord?”
“Kick my bow and arrows to me.”
Jean-Yves opened the door and sauntered into the cabin. Once he was inside the doorway, something fell on the floor.
“How clumsy of me.” Jean-Yves bent down and kicked the bow and arrows that had been resting next to the doorframe to Ramsay.
Wily old man, Ramsay approved, understanding why the Scottish and French had made such excellent allies over the centuries.
Still, he would have preferred a firearm to his bow, but if he went inside to do it, he’d lose his prey. A man—a warrior—made do.
Ramsay remained still for a moment, listening for the sounds of movement. A preternatural silence had overtaken the night, a certain proof that he was not alone.
The shadow had been lost between the fence and the tree line.
He dropped low, snatched his bow and arrow, and crouched behind his side of the blackberry bushes as he crept along the edge until he reached the gate. He knew the old hinges would creak if he were to open it, so the only option he had was to vault over.
This would leave him exposed to anyone with a gun.
Taking a bracing breath, he leapt up and dove over the hip-high gate, ducking to roll onto the other side, returning to the shadows.
Had it been a different moon on a different night, Ramsay wouldn’t have been able to see the shadow streak for the woods. He wouldn’t have been able to nock his arrow and let it fly.
The shadow stumbled as the arrow found purchase in his leg, but he limped forward, diving into the trees.
Ramsay hesitated; if this was a ploy to draw him away from the house, he shouldn’t take it. However, he had the upper hand on the interloper, because he could navigate these woods in the dark. He knew every tree by memory. He had no doubt he could cut the man off at the river if he ran now.
He scanned the night, searching for more shadows. The night was still, too still, but he could see nothing moving in the moonlight.
Ramsay launched toward the forest with his bow, staying low until he hit the tree line. He then angled west toward the bridge, knowing that it would be cleverest to make a tactical retreat that way if one wasn’t familiar with the territory.
He quickly neared the river and flattened himself to an ancient ash tree, pausing to listen.
Not a handful of rapid heartbeats later, he heard a branch snap in the distance. Then a soft muffled curse.
He waited, every muscle tense. Every breath even.
The other man’s approach was impressively quiet, but Ramsay was attuned to these woods. He knew the easiest path to take, had guessed correctly and hidden behind the right tree, which afforded him the chance to spring forward and chop at the man’s legs with his bow.
His opponent fell hard. Harder than he’d expected him to, as the man was quite a bit larger than he’d guessed judging by the sounds he’d made while approaching.
Ramsay fell upon him, his fist flying like the hammer of an ancient god.
His fist landed in the dirt as the other man rolled to the side fast enough to avoid the punch and returned a punishing elbow to Ramsay’s ribs.
Ramsay absorbed the blow with a sharp curse. This time, his jab caught the man in the mouth with a satisfying crunch.
His satisfaction was short-lived, however, as blood was spit right into his eyes, momentarily blinding him.
Fucking insufferable move.
Ramsay’s next punch was more to keep the blighter busy while he swiped his other sleeve across his eyes just in time to see the glint of a knife.
Ramsay leapt off the assailant in time to avoid a slash.
They circled each other. Two shadows in the dark, the full moon filtering through leaves in strange and eerie shafts of silver.
The blade made a lightning-fast slash and Ramsay stepped in rather than away, imprisoning his attacker’s wrist. He drove the man backward; the man’s few attempts at breaking his hold proved futile against his superior strength.
Then, through some feat of impossible acrobatics, his opponent tossed the knife from his captured hand into the air. He twisted his body to catch it with his free hand before Ramsay drove him back against a tree trunk with his elbow lodged in his throat.
“One more move and I’ll slice your artery and let you fertilize the forest with your corpse,” threatened a voice as smooth as the blade now lodged against his upper thigh.
“Not before I snap yer neck,” Ramsay vowed, leaning his elbow in, demonstrating the leverage he had against the other man’s spine.
An impasse, it seemed.
“My lord Ramsay?” the man asked in disbelief.
He froze.
Dark eyes glinted at him from an all-too-familiar, far-too-handsome face.
“Count Armediano?” Ramsay tried to reconcile the insufferable Italian with his flawless accent with the voice that now hied from somewhere south of the Scottish border, but north of Hadrian’s Wall. Newcastle or Northumberland, perhaps.
Finally, their enemy had a face. Homegrown British.
“How did ye find us?” Ramsay leaned his superior weight against the man.
“I followed the past,” he answered cryptically.
“If ye’re an Italian count then I’m an English debutante,” Ramsay growled. “So who the fuck are ye?”
“If you were an English debutante, I’d be shoving something else between your thighs.” The insolent fool made a lewd motion with his hips.
“Now is not the time to be glib,” he warned.
“All right, all right, my name is Chandler, and I’m … well, let us say that I am employed by the Home Office.”
“Ye’re telling me ye’re a spy?” Ramsay dug his elbow deeper into the man’s neck. “Horseshit.”
“Your brother will vouch for me,” the man gasped, his knife inching higher on Ramsay’s thigh.
“That’s hardly a recommendation,” Ramsay retorted, though he quickly alleviated some of the pr
essure so Chandler could speak.
The agent laughed as if they might be at a garden party, his teeth flashing white in his swarthy face. “I could be Italian,” he claimed blithely. “My parentage has yet to be specified.”
“I care not where ye’re from, I only want to know what ye’re doing on my land and how my brother is caught up in all of this.”
“He’s not that I can tell,” Chandler answered. “However, I requested an invitation to the Redmayne dinner party because two of my open investigations happened to intersect, and the duke was all too happy to oblige.”
“Which investigations?” Ramsay demanded. “And how do they involve Cecelia Teague? Is that why ye wanted to get her alone? To interrogate her? To implicate her? Do ye work for the Crimson Council?”
His opponent stilled, his lithe muscle still strung tight enough to strike. “What do you know of the Crimson Council?”
“Ye first.”
The man grimaced as Ramsay ground his back against the tree. “All right! I’ve been digging into the background of Lady Francesca Cavendish, the Countess of Mont Claire, who as you know was a school chum of your lovely Miss Teague’s and Lady Redmayne’s. I’m told they are part of a society they call the Red Rogues, and I wondered if the Red Rogues had aught to do with the Crimson Council, as all of the women are shrouded in mystery and have led very odd and fascinatingly singular lives.”
“To say the least,” Ramsay muttered.
“Furthermore, Her Majesty has heard increasingly alarming accounts regarding this Crimson Council, and she requested that I, personally, investigate the matter. My findings have led me to none other than the Lord Chancellor, which was why you and I had the misfortune of meeting each other at Redmayne’s soiree.” He shrugged, as though giving himself over to the vagaries of fate.
“What accounts?” Ramsay asked.
Chandler’s eyes darkened further. “We at the Home Office think someone is stealing young immigrant girls and using them for sport. I’d received intelligence that Henrietta Thistledown was their procuress, but upon further investigation, I was unable to verify.”
Ramsay wavered, taken aback. He’d received the exact same intelligence.
“Who gave ye this information?” he asked, afraid he already knew the answer.
“A nameless source of someone employed by Miss Thistledown, herself. I was sent a letter.”
Ramsay had received just such a letter. He’d like to further compare notes with the man, but time was of the essence, especially tonight.
He needed to return to Cecelia.
“What about Henrietta’s?” Ramsay shook him once, hard enough to rattle his teeth. “Ye were there the day the explosive went off.”
“Pure coincidence, I assure you,” Chandler claimed with a quick, disarming smile. “I had been assigned to follow a certain member of the royal family and was sidetracked by a pretty pair of…” He paused, making a big gesture in front of his chest. “… eyes.” Despite his being seconds from certain death, he winked and flashed a cocksure grin.
Ramsay made a face but released the man, all the while remaining on his guard.
He knew better than to take anyone at his word.
“Now.” Chandler slicked a hand through his ebony hair and sheathed his dagger in his boot. “I’ve told you what I can. Care to share what you know of the Crimson Council?”
“I ken next to nothing about it,” Ramsay said, which was not altogether a lie.
“I have it on good authority that Cecelia Teague might, but she disappeared right about the same time you did,” Chandler said with a sly look toward him. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
Ramsay didn’t answer. “If Cecelia is in possession of any information regarding the Crimson Council, that makes her important to ye and to the Crown. Important enough to warrant protection.”
“Categorically,” Chandler agreed. “She’s in no danger from us, but I have it upon good authority that Henrietta was Miss Teague’s maternal aunt, and that she was also in possession of a number of secrets that may not have died with her … some of which could be dangerous to the Home Office and even Buckingham Palace. Did she ever mention anything about such things?”
“Do ye think I’d tell ye if she did?” Ramsay challenged.
“Yes.” Chandler stood straight and met his glare with frank assessment. “Because I know you are a good man, Lord Chief Justice, an honest one.”
“How do ye ken that?”
The emissary adopted a sly look. “I have my ways.”
“I doona ken what sort of man ye are,” Ramsay challenged.
To his surprise, Chandler laughed. “Fair point. Fair point.” He scratched his head and slapped at the earth and leaves on his pants. “Though one didn’t have to be a spy to notice your protective instincts toward the voluptuous Miss Teague.”
“Use more respectful descriptors, or I’ll take that knife from ye and slice yer bollocks off,” Ramsay warned.
“My case in point.” Chandler only grinned again, rubbing at a dark evening stubble and wiping blood from a split in his lip. “May I ask you what brought you both all the way to the edge of Blighty?”
“Two attempts were made upon Cecelia’s life,” he decided to admit to the man.
Interest arrested Chandler’s expression. “The explosion and…”
“And a contingent of the Lord Chancellor’s personal staff who accosted her near her house in Chelsea.”
Chandler’s dark winged brows rose. “You mean, the ones they found dead in the street? Did you have anything to do with that, Lord Chief Justice?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny…” Ramsay picked up his ruined bow and rose, eyeing the man skeptically. “If ye’re after the Crimson Council, why are ye all the way out here?”
“I followed one of the Lord Chancellor’s men.”
Ramsay was stabbed by a jolt of alarm. “Where are they now?”
“Lost them a few miles back,” Chandler said, abashed. “Fucking bog almost claimed my horse.”
“I have to get back and warn Cecelia.” Ramsay claimed his bow. “Can ye make yer way back to Elphinstone Croft even on yer leg?”
“You didn’t crack me that hard,” Chandler said defensively. “More surprised me, is all. Well done, by the way, it’s not often I’m taken down.”
“I meant when I shot ye with my arrow back in the glen.”
“What glen?” Chandler’s forehead furrowed. “I’ve never been shot by an arrow in my life.”
The stab of alarm turned into a knife of terror twisting in Ramsay’s guts. He had been a fool to leave her. The hope he hung his entire soul on was that he’d not yet heard a gunshot.
“Run,” he said as he bolted for home, desperation turning his feet into agents of Icarus. “They’ve already found us.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Cecelia swam in a soupy fog, weightless and boneless. She might have been a blob of jelly for all she could tell. Was she awake? Locked in a dream?
Or a nightmare.
Every now and again, an image would be summoned from the miasma of darkness, adding to the primal scream locked wherever her chest belonged.
Were these images memories? Or were any of these strange things happening right now?
Glacial eyes melted into a lake of lust. Brutal hands caressed her gently as they made love beneath the stars.
We have not yet spoken of love.
Pain pierced where her heart should be. Tears leaked where her eyes should be. Her vision refused to clear.
Blood also leaked from a man’s leg as someone stitched it closed. Voices were harsh. Male. Excitable.
Fire. She remembered fire. She’d thrown pages into said fire and it had burned them all up. Pages with her handwriting. But the book? Had she burned the codex? Surely not.
Phoebe hid in the loft and locked the hatch as she’d bade her to.
Did they find her? The enemies she’d let in the house?
Why
had she done such a stupid thing? Who had she let in the house? Why could she not remember?
Jean-Yves was on the floor at Elphinstone Croft. Still. So still. Had they killed him this time? Oh God!
The pain in Cecelia’s chest became a torturous flame. It singed her with shame. Her face hurt, too, this wound sharp and throbbing.
She’d been hit. Again.
Where was Ramsay?
Had she shot someone?
Is that who bled from the leg?
Awareness returned to her body incrementally, and she realized that the blood in her veins did not reach the arms tightly tied behind her. The ground below rocked softly, clack-clack-clacking in her ears.
A train. How had she gotten on a train?
Where was Ramsay?
“I do believe she’s awake.”
Cecelia knew that voice. She’d thought it belonged to a friend once. But who? Who? What was wrong with her?
“Should I give her another dose?”
Winston! Henrietta’s butler … Had he been an enemy this entire time?
“Better not. The Lord Chancellor said we needed her alive,” answered an unfamiliar man.
“Can’t have her waking up and screaming, though,” Winston said dispassionately.
“I’m more likely to scream if my bloody leg festers,” whined the stranger with a waspish voice. “We could gag her, I suppose.”
Winston made a heartless noise. “Just a small dose. If it’s too much and she doesn’t wake again, I don’t think it’ll be that much of a tragedy for anyone.”
Cecelia was screaming already, she just couldn’t seem to get her throat to work. She desperately wanted to struggle but hadn’t the strength. The needle pricked her arm and she could feel the liquid oblivion course through her. She struggled against it like a swimmer in a riptide. Quickly, as she was overtaken by the darkness, her last thought was of Ramsay. Could he be counted among those who would mourn her?
Or had the way she’d left things truly turned his heart back to stone?
* * *
When Cecelia next woke, she knew exactly where she was, in a manner of speaking.
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