The darkness cleared a little to let him see Ainsley’s gray eyes, shining in the equally gray dawn.
“It’s not just what she did to me,” Cameron said with difficulty. “It’s what I might do to you. If you woke me suddenly, I might strike out and hurt you.”
He could tell she didn’t understand. Cameron went back to the bed and leaned down to her, resting his fists on the mattress.
“Daniel woke me up once, when he was about ten years old,” he said. “I threw him across the room. My own son. I could have killed him.”
The horror of that moment had never gone away. Daniel had lain still on the floor, unconscious, while Cameron had rushed to him, lifted his limp body in his arms. Resilient, Daniel hadn’t been badly hurt, thank God. Daniel had later said, cheerfully, that it had been his own fault. He’d forgotten that his dad was a little crazy.
Daniel taking the blame for the incident had kicked Cameron in the gut. Then Angelo had tried to blame himself for not realizing that Daniel had crept upstairs to his father’s bedroom. Cameron had wanted to shout at both of them, and ended up moving to a hotel, no longer trusting himself around those he cared about.
“Was Daniel all right?” Ainsley asked.
“Aye, but that’s not the point, is it?” Cameron’s fists tightened. “He was only a little boy. I could have hurt him. Do ye think I want to wake up and see I’ve done the same to you?”
Ainsley stared up at him, eyes unreadable. Cameron would never understand her. Just when he thought he knew Ainsley, the lively young woman who picked locks and ran about Paris in pursuit of cake, she decided to bring him off him in public, then tried to pry out the secrets of his soul.
“Perhaps if you grew used to it,” she began.
“Damn it, have ye heard nothing? There’s something wrong with me, understand? I can’t even think about settling down to sleep with you without the world going black. That’s why I wake up tossing people about. The blackness doesn’t let me go until it’s too late.”
Ainsley listened in silence. She was supposed to be afraid of him, of the terrifying, raging thing inside him. Some women enjoyed being afraid of Cameron, liking the danger, but they didn’t truly understand what Cameron was capable of. Cameron had never let them know.
He swung away and snatched up his clothes.
“I positively hate this woman,” Ainsley said behind him. “Your wife, I mean.”
Cameron gave a bitter laugh as he pulled on his trousers. “I’m glad you do. She wrecked me. She wanted her revenge, and now she has it.”
“Cam . . .”
Cameron shook his head. “No more talking. Go to sleep.”
He turned his back on the beautiful woman he’d do anything in the world for, shrugged on his shirt, and banged out.
Behind him, Ainsley hugged her knees, wiping tears on the sheet. “I do hope it is hot where you are, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish,” she whispered. “Very, very hot.”
Ainsley walked into Cameron’s bedroom the next evening while his Parisian valet readied him for another night of restaurants and cabarets. Cam glanced at the afternoon dress Ainsley still wore and frowned.
“Aren’t you coming out with me?”
“I’ll get dressed in a moment. Felipe, will you leave us?”
The valet didn’t even look to Cameron for confirmation. The servants, both Scottish and French, now obeyed Ainsley without question. Felipe simply left the room.
Cameron finished closing the collar stud Felipe had been setting in place. “I told you, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“How do you even know what I intend to say?”
He gave her an impatient look before he turned back to the mirror to slide his cravat around his neck. “Because you’re a ferret and can’t leave well enough alone.”
Ainsley went to him, took the cravat ends from his hands, and started to tie the knot for him.
“I came to tell you about my brother.”
Cameron tilted his head back so she could work. “Which brother? There are as many confounded McBrides as there are Mackenzies.”
“There are only four. Patrick, Sinclair, Elliot, and Steven. I want to tell you more about Elliot.”
“Which one is he, the barrister?”
Cameron knew full well which of her brothers was which, because Ainsley had talked quite a lot about each of them. Her brothers were a safe topic of conversation, plus she was proud of their accomplishments. Ainsley was willing to wager that Hart too had told Cameron about her brothers, likely with dossiers on each one. Cameron was trying to be difficult.
“Elliot went to India with the army,” she said. “When he left the army, he stayed in India to start a business helping other colonials settle. Once when he was traveling in the northern region in the course of this business, he was captured. He was kept imprisoned for so long there that we were certain he was dead. But at last he managed to escape and make his way home.”
Cameron’s voice softened. “I remember. I’m sorry. What about him?”
“Elliot stayed with Patrick a while to convalesce, and he seemed to mend, but I could tell that there was something very wrong. Elliot made too light of his broken bones and the torture he’d suffered, almost joking about the whole thing.”
“I understand why,” Cameron said. “He didn’t want to think too much about it. Or talk about it.”
Ainsley gave Cameron’s knot one last tug. “I realize that. What he went through must have been horrible. One night, when I looked in on him, I found him huddled on the bed, shaking and unable to speak. When I went to see what was the matter, Elliot wouldn’t respond to me, wouldn’t even look at me. I was about to run for Rona and Patrick when he came to himself. He told me he was all right and begged me to say nothing.”
“It had happened to him before, then.”
Ainsley nodded. “He told me that sometimes, out of nowhere, even when he sat quietly in Rona’s front parlor, the world would . . . go away. He’d feel himself floating, and then he’d be back in the tiny hole where his captors had kept him. They sometimes didn’t feed him or even look in on him for weeks. Logically, Elliot knew that he was safe and whole and in Patrick’s house in Scotland, but his mind made him relive the entire horror of what had happened. He said he worried that the visions made him a coward, but that can’t be true—Elliot is one of the bravest men I know. He even went back to India—he’s still there—because he feared he’d be cowering in Patrick’s guest room for the rest of his life if he didn’t.”
Cameron looked down at her with an unreadable expression. He was delectable in kilt, shirt, and waistcoat, in undress only his valet or wife was allowed to see. “You are telling me this story because you think I feel about Elizabeth the same way your brother felt about being imprisoned and tortured.”
“Well, not quite, but it must be a similar thing.”
Cameron turned away from her. “Which I asked not to talk about, I remember.”
“I think we should talk about it. It’s our marriage, Cam. It’s our life.”
Still he wouldn’t look at her. “I told you, I don’t want rows with you. We rub along, or we don’t.”
“Then we ignore the fact that my own husband refuses to sleep in a bed with me?”
Cam dragged a hand through his hair. “Plenty of married people don’t share a bed. God knows my mother and father never did. They had separate rooms, separate spaces. It’s not unusual.”
“It is in my family. Patrick and Rona sleep together every night, and my parents did too.”
“I’m glad you had such an idyllic upbringing.”
“I even shared a bed with John.”
Cameron’s eyes flashed as he swung around again. “And I don’t want to hear you talk about you and John Douglas.”
“But we must talk about you.”
“Why?” His big hands clenched. “Why must we, Ainsley? Have you come into my life to fix every little problem? I don’t want a be-damned nanny, I want a lover.”
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br /> “So do I.”
“For God’s sake, Ainsley, what do you want me to say? That Elizabeth was insane? You’ve heard the stories. Eleanor must have given you an earful—Hart spilled all the family secrets to her. Eleanor ran far away from us, wise woman.”
“She told me that Lady Elizabeth hurt you.”
“Aye, she did.” Cameron ripped the button from his cuff and yanked the sleeve up his arm. “You were interested in these? All right, then, I’ll tell you. Elizabeth was in my bedroom, smoking a cheroot. Her lovers liked her to smoke them, so she did it to remind me that she didn’t belong entirely to me. Daniel was there, and she thought it would be interesting to see what kind of scars the ends left on a baby’s flesh.”
Ainsley’s mouth dropped open. Eleanor hadn’t mentioned that. She thought of the precious body she’d cradled to her bosom for one day, and rage that knew no end filled her. “How could she?”
“I grabbed for Danny, and while I was wrestling my own son away from her, she jabbed me with the damn cigar. She said she’d leave Daniel alone if I allowed her make a pattern on my arm, so I let her. She enjoyed it. Then I carried Daniel back to his nursery and stayed with him, in case she decided to come up there and try something more awful. Elizabeth hated Daniel, because she knew he was mine. I started making arrangements that very day to send her away, but before I had the chance . . .” He made an empty gesture as he wound down.
Ainsley pressed her arms to her chest, trying to stem her shivers. “Cam, I am so sorry.”
“It hurts, Ainsley. I loathed her, and still it hurts.” He dragged his sleeve back down and flipped the ruined cuff closed. “That’s why I don’t want to talk about it.”
Ainsley picked up the button he’d ripped off and rummaged silently through the dressing table for a needle and thread. Miraculously, he held still while she put the button back into place and started sewing, though she had difficulty seeing the needle through her tears. The cuff closed, hiding the round scars again.
“Cam,” she said softly. A tear fell to his wrist.
Cameron’s broad fingers tilted her face up. There was fire in his eyes, and anger, and pain. “Let me be, Ainsley. Don’t try to remake me in one night. I told you, I’m a wreck of a man.”
A man I’m in love with. Ainsley kissed his palm.
Cameron stared down at her a moment, thumb stroking the curls at the nape of her neck. Then he cupped her head in his hand and swiftly kissed her.
The kiss held passion, hunger, need. He dragged her up to him, the kiss turning deep. They’d not be going out that night.
Cameron didn’t speak of the matter again, but Ainsley refused to forget it. Cameron had said he didn’t like rows, and Ainsley didn’t either, but she also didn’t wish to pretend away the problem.
Meanwhile, during the whirl of life in Paris, Daniel was packed off to Cambridge to begin the Michaelmas term. Daniel wasn’t happy about leaving, but he kissed Ainsley good-bye, shook his father’s hand, and grudgingly boarded the train.
Ainsley’s heart ached to see him go, and she noticed that Cameron was more gruff and scowling as well. He missed his son, the son he’d endured torture to protect.
But a mere two weeks later, Daniel was back.
Chapter 22
Daniel walked in out of the rain, soaked and without the valise with which he’d left. Or the servant either. He’d left both, he said, in Cambridge.
Cameron was suffused with fury, his Highland Scots coming through with his rage. “Damnation, lad, can ye nae stay put?”
“At a bloody boring English university?” Daniel plopped himself on a sofa, his wet coat smearing one of the cushions Ainsley had finished embroidering. “While you’re here in Paris with Ainsley? Not likely. I don’t need to go to university, Dad, especially not with the same blokes I knew at Harrow telling me what they’ll do when they start running the country. God save us. I’m going to help train the ponies with you, anyway.”
Cameron swung to the window and glared out of it, breathing hard. Controlling himself, Ainsley realized. He didn’t want to burst out at his son.
Ainsley sat down next to Daniel and rescued her cushion. “Danny, the acquaintances you cultivate at university might be the very men who send you horses to train later.”
Daniel rolled his eyes. “I don’t want to cultivate acquaintances, I want to learn something. The professors at Corpus Christi are wheezy and talk a lot of philosophy and rot. It’s ridiculous. I want to learn good Scottish engineering.”
“Perhaps, but I imagine your father paid rather a lot of money to send you to Cambridge.”
Daniel looked marginally ashamed. “I’ll pay it back.”
Cameron turned to him, still tightly controlled. “That’s not th’ point, son. The point is I send ye off, and ye run away, again and again.”
“I don’t want to be sent off! I want to stay with you. What’s wrong w’ that?”
“Because my life here is not one a boy should live, damn you.” Cameron stopped short of shouting. “My friends are hard, and I don’t want you anywhere near them.”
“I know,” Daniel said. “I’ve met them. So why do ye want Ainsley around them?”
“I don’t.”
Observing Cameron’s anger, Ainsley realized he truly didn’t. Cameron’s Paris acquaintance were people who lived the idle life as hard as they could—staying out all night, sleeping all day, and spending money without noticing.
Ainsley had found it exciting at first, but she soon realized that there was no stillness in this life, no contemplation, no absorbing beauty for the sake of it, and no love. What Cameron’s friends called love was infatuation and obsession, which began with ferocity and ended in rows and drama, sometimes violence.
These were hot-blooded people, and Cameron was as hot-blooded as they were. He thought nothing of kissing Ainsley in public or holding her to his side, and his friends looked on with amusement rather than shock. Every night was another play or opera, or a party that lasted well into morning. Each night Ainsley wore a new gown, and Cameron draped her with more and more costly jewels.
But there was no quiet happiness among these people. No reaching for a friend and finding one, warm and comforting, at the end of your hand.
“We should leave then,” Ainsley said.
“Why?” Cameron demanded. “Are ye tired of it already?”
“No, but you are.”
Cameron scowled at Ainsley’s all-knowing gray eyes. Did she have to understand everything about him? “Who the hell told you that?”
“No one had to tell me,” Ainsley said. “You’re not comfortable with this life, and you know it. When you’re out riding horses or even watching them, as we did at the horse fair the other day, you’re far more sweet-tempered and companionable. Too many nights under the gas lamps and you start growling.”
Cameron made a rumbling noise in response, and Ainsley smiled. “Exactly like that. Don’t stay here for me, Cam. Go where your heart is, and I’ll follow.”
Cameron looked out the window again, studying the Parisian rooftops. Daniel waited on the sofa, as tense as his father.
It had been bad of Daniel to run away from school, but Cameron secretly agreed with his reasons why. Cameron had sent Daniel to Cambridge because all the Mackenzies had gone there, and he’d had a place secured there when he was born.
Truth to tell, Cameron hadn’t minded Daniel underfoot on this trip. He’d enjoyed watching him and Ainsley laugh uproariously over whatever they found funny that day, the two of them trying every pasty in Paris or dragging Cameron to obscure parts of the city just to see what was there. Cameron knew he should be more strict about Daniel and Cambridge. A lad needed to go to university, and Cameron should be a parent in control of his son’s life. But he didn’t have the heart. If Daniel were truly unhappy, they’d think of something else.
Cameron looked back at the two of them waiting side by side on the sofa for his answer, his wife and his son watching him with the s
ame intensity.
“Monte Carlo,” he said.
Ainsley blinked. “Your heart is in Monte Carlo?”
Cameron didn’t smile. “I’m tired of self-satisfied Parisians and artists full of their own genius. I put up with that enough with Mac. At Monte Carlo, you’ll meet a much more interesting mix of people.”
“I will?”
Cameron turned to them, fixing them both with his topaz gaze. “You’ll like it, Ainsley. Not one person there has pure motives in mind. A picklock might find such corruption entertaining.”
“That does sound more interesting than self-satisfied artists full of their own genius.”
“And the sunrise over the sea from the top of the city is beautiful.” That was true. Cameron wanted to show the view to Ainsley, to see her delight when she beheld it. He remembered Ian watching Beth watch the fireworks, finding more joy in her than the show of light. Cameron understood now.
Ainsley winked at Daniel and stretched her feet in her new patent-leather boots. “I have only one question about this oh-so-exciting Monte Carlo,” she said.
Cameron’s gaze fixed on her ankle boots, primly buttoned against silk stockings. He imagined himself unfastening each button, licking the ankle that came into view, running his tongue all the way up to the back of her knee. Ainsley and her buttons.
“What question is that?” He managed to say.
She gave him a smile and Daniel a wink. “In Monte Carlo, do they have cake?”
They did have cake, and also the casino of which her moral majesty, Queen Victoria, vastly disapproved. When they reached their hotel in Monaco, Cameron asked Ainsley to wear the dark red velvet he’d picked out for her in Edinburgh, and he took her straight to the casino.
Ainsley found herself in a long, elegant, cupolaed building filled with glittering people. The foyer rose to a gigantic rectangular stained-glass window with classical-looking paintings and statues all around it. The game rooms opened from this rotunda, and Cameron strolled into them with ease.
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