She blinked several times. “Very odd, indeed. I shouldn’t have thought we had anything in common.”
“I think if we looked deep enough within ourselves, we’d find glimpses of each other. I see a reflection in yer eyes, I think. A part of myself. One that might be kinder than the truth.” Christ. When had he become a bloody poet?
“Your reflection would only be in my spectacles, my lord.” She looked away, her hand toying restlessly in her hair.
What had gotten into him? Something about their conversation flirted with danger.
She assessed him as if he were composed of formulae she was intent upon unraveling. “It’s because of your mother, then, if I had to guess.”
Ramsay stiffened. “What in God’s name are ye referring to?”
Her words were measured, careful. “Alexandra shared with me what happened to the previous duke, Redmayne’s father, how he hung himself from the grand balustrade at Castle Redmayne when your mother abandoned him for a lover. That’s what you meant when you referred to your family’s disastrous marriages.”
He searched her features for pity, for judgment, and again only found her gentle curiosity. Something about it, about the way she picked him apart. Softly. Meticulously. With no apparent need for supremacy or seduction. No need to use information against him.
He found himself powerless against it, words spilling from lips famously locked. From a vault that hadn’t been opened since before he’d become a man. “The previous Lady Redmayne knew how to pick weak men. And she knew how to break them.” Or rather, they allowed themselves to be broken by her.
“Ah,” she murmured. “Did she do something similar to your real father?”
The wintry feeling bloomed into a frozen void, the one contained within him for so many years.
Decades. One opened by a length of time so dastardly, neither rage nor passion nor acquisition could heat it.
“My father died when I was a lad of nine or so.” The how of it didn’t matter. Neither did the why of it. He didn’t want Cecelia Teague to see the void. To find the vault. To know what he kept there.
“And so you were taken in by Redmayne’s father?” she asked.
“Aye. He sent me to Eaton at fifteen with Piers, then Oxford after that.”
She bit her lip in contemplation. “You say he was weak, but he also sounds like he was a kind man.”
He made a dismissive gesture, closing his heart to the pain. “Kindness can be its own form of weakness.”
“Not in my experience.”
“You are lucky then, if that is your experience.”
“Do you not have to be kind at times to perform your vocation?”
“Nay. Kindness … it’s not a virtue I’m afflicted with.”
“Afflicted?” For once, disappointment touched her expression. “And here I thought one must be kind in order to be good.”
“One must be fair and just.” How had they come to be speaking of this? He wanted to return to their repartee of before. He wanted to stop fortifying the wall he’d built years ago around his heart, his soul, his entire self, because she was somehow chipping away at it.
Not like a battering ram, but subtly. Like time, and water, and earth. If he wasn’t careful, she’d leave it in ruins, and then where would that leave him?
Exposed.
“My coach is just past this gate,” he said, resting his hand on the lock of an iron gate securing the back garden from the street.
“Wait.” Her hand landed on his arm and locked his feet to the ground like a shackled prisoner.
He felt her touch in every part of his body.
“I should like to see you again,” she said with earnest sincerity. “We’re practically family now. Don’t you think it’s very important we get on?”
“We arena related. Not by blood.” This felt particularly significant.
“No, but perhaps we could be friendlier. I’d like to know more about you,” she prodded. “And I’d like you to get to know me better. To understand certain things…”
Why? he wanted to ask. To what end if not matrimony? “Do ye have a confession to make, Miss Teague?”
“I might.”
Her answer mystified and exhilarated him. If he were to make a confession in this moment, it would be to desire. Would her confession be the same?
The atmosphere between them shifted from tentative challenge and merciless discovery to something softer and warmer.
Here she stood. Looking up at him with her eyes wide and open upon his face. Her lips relaxed, threatening to part.
Close enough to touch. To taste.
“As much as I hate to agree with Count Armediano upon anything, I must say, ye are an extraordinary woman,” he crooned.
Her lashes fluttered down over her cheeks, where he was glad to see her peachy blush return. “That is kind of you to say, my lord.”
A muscle released at the back of his neck, allowing his head to lower toward hers. “Ye doona have to call me that. Ye’re not in my court.”
Eyes as deep and blue as Loch Ness beneath the sun lifted to meet his. “What if I was in your court? Would you condemn me?”
“Never.”
“Never is a dangerous word.” Her breath smelled sweet, like chocolate and scotch.
“So is always.”
“If not my lord, what should I call you, then? Cassius?”
“Ramsay will do just fine.”
Her eyes darted away, but not before he caught a flash of something. Shyness? Or a secret? The night whispered a warning, but it was too late. The moon-drenched darkness had become his undoing, the gardens his prison. He couldn’t have escaped even if he’d wanted to.
“I like your names,” she whispered, swaying forward. “Ramsay. And Cassius.”
He hated his name. He hated it every day. “I like yers.”
She blinked. “Would you say it?”
“Miss Teague?”
“No, might you call me Cecelia?”
“Cecelia.” He drew out the syllables, letting his tongue linger over them. Learn them.
She closed her eyes, seeming to savor the word with the same vigor as the truffles. “Again?”
An invisible restraint shackled his bones, this one not of cold hard iron, but of velvet. It tugged him toward her. Drew her name out of his chest like a poem, and then a prayer.
“Cecelia.”
Her lips parted.
And he was lost.
Lost to the thundering of his heart. To the pull of her body, as powerful and unavoidable as the influence of the moon on the tides.
Their breath mingled. Her scent tangled with that of the lilacs, unbearably lovely.
His lips hovered. Met hers. Stilled.
For a heartbeat, or maybe an eternity, he stood like that. Paralyzed. Not from fear. Not exactly.
A hunger crawled through him like a beast with many claws. A beast locked away for a time longer than infinity. Raw, uncontained sexuality that had no place in such orderly, sedate gardens roared to life and threatened to rip his self-control to shreds.
As though she sensed the beast, Cecelia made a small, intimate sound.
One dangerously close to surrender.
Don’t, he silently begged. Don’t make me want you this much. Don’t give me something else to fight. To crush. To contain.