“Man is not meant to please only himself,” he stated rather piously. “Do ye ken why Matilda could find no skeletons, no secrets?”
Cecelia shook her head.
“Because I have none. I’ve done nothing of which I am ashamed other than allowing myself to hope the one time that she could provide me an honest, contented life.” His jaw hardened and he set the wine down, pushing it away from himself as if it were as offensive as the memory of the woman who’d betrayed his one chance at trust. “She proved the one thing I’ve always known. That women are born with a weapon between their legs, and are willing to deploy it with as much collateral damage as any explosive.”
Cecelia shook her head, understanding his anger and also despairing at the abject wrongness of it. “Did you ever stop to consider that your offer of marriage might not have been what she wanted from life? You desired her companionship, her love, her body, and her fidelity, but did you ever stop to think that marriage to a Lord Chief Justice, or a Lord Chancellor, might be too much for Matilda?”
Her words took the wind from his sails. “I didna have to ask, she made it clear enough. She told me she’d rather suck a thousand cocks than shackle herself to a rigid, self-important arse like me. Is that what ye wanted to hear?”
“No. Because that was a terrible thing for her to say.” She lifted her chin, adopting a pose of matronly disappointment. “And so was what you said about women and … weapons.”
He looked both mulish and ashamed, but didn’t cede the point.
“Do you not think men use their sex as a weapon?” she pressed. “Most often a violent one? Men have claimed all rights to strength and money and power. What are we women left with? The responsibility of brood mares, to make more men, or to make life comfortable for them? If there must be a war between sexes, what weapons have you left us? What are we but objects to you? A collection of pretty orifices for your pleasure?”
Wintry eyes glittered at her. Not with censure but with wonder, admiration, and—dare she hope—respect. After a breathless moment, he leaned forward, capturing her uncertain gaze with his unblinking one. “I shouldna have said that.” One step closer to an apology. Two in one night, did wonders never cease? “I doona feel that way … about ye.”
Cecelia tried to think of another time she’d been so pleased by a compliment, and simply couldn’t. What rubbish. That Lord Ramsay’s confession that he finally didn’t consider her a lying bitch would mean more than scores of poetry from other men.
Lord, but she was in trouble.
He stood so abruptly he had to save his chair from falling over backward. “It’s late,” he clipped. “I should turn in.”
Cecelia nodded, not wanting to poke at any more wounds. Not when her own were so raw. So ready to be reopened. Her heart ached for him. Bled for the lonely boy who spent silent years struggling for his own survival. For the man who’d fortified that lost child behind barbs of ice encased by a body of such capable strength that he could never be vanquished by vice nor villainy.
She understood the lunacy that accompanied forced solitude, and she’d only ever experienced it for several days at the maximum.
What would several years do to a person?
She swallowed pity and humility and a surge of desperate affection that threatened to escape from her in a bout of tears. “I suppose—” She cleared a husky lump of emotion from her throat. “I’ll sleep in the loft with Phoebe.” She went to her trunk in front of the supply crates by the door, intent upon finding her nightclothes.
“There’s barely enough room for a cat to curl up in the loft,” he said. “Nay. Ye’ll sleep down here on the couch. I’ve set it up for ye with clean linen and such.”
She blinked over at the worn but overstuffed furniture. It might be comfortable. “But where will you—?”
“Doona worry about that.” He went to the door, seeming to drag the weight of his past along with him, though he’d shuttered his every expression behind a fan of bronze lashes.
“Of course I worry.” She found her wrapper and fished deeper into her trunk for her nightgown. “You can’t simply sleep in a bed of raspberry thorns.”
He chuffed. “I’ve a hunting shed round the back.”
She straightened, clutching the silk to her bosom. “But—you’re the Lord Chief Justice of the High Court of England. A man such as you does not simply sleep in a shed by the river.”
He slid her a level look. “I never took ye for a snob, Miss Teague.”
“Well. I … I just…” She swallowed. How could she make him stay?
“Ye just … what?” He stood close to the door, close to her, as large as a titan and cold as a northern loch, gazing down with an odd illumination behind his pupils.
“I’d feel awfully guilty if your hospitality meant that we squeezed you out of your own home. Surely at your age you’re not about to sleep on the cold earth. Imagine the aches.”
The light behind his gaze dulled and his hand hit the latch. “Doona worry about me. I’m not yet so old and venerable, I canna yet sleep on the ground.”
Desperately, Cecelia threw herself in front of the door. “But … but … wouldn’t you be more comfortable if you had a pallet of some sort by the fire?”
He shook his head stubbornly. “It’s summer, it’s too hot for that.”
“Hot? This is Scotland.”
His jaw clenched, and when he next spoke it was through his teeth. “I ken that, lass. But I tend to run hot in the night.”
Cecelia swallowed. Hard. He didn’t run hot at all. He was cool and taciturn. So contained. Was that because beneath his surly surface some sort of volcanic heat flowed like lava through him, just looking for a vent through which to be released?
Bereft of any response, she stood between the door and his body, silently beseeching him to stay.
He released the latch and took a retreating step, putting space between them. “Christ, woman, ye canna have that much of an aversion to the out of doors.”
“It isn’t that.” She hesitated. Her entire torso quivered against the strength of her heart hurling itself against her ribs. “What … what if Jean-Yves needs help in the night?”
He glanced over his shoulder at the door to the bedroom. “Ye gave him enough of that damned tincture to tranquilize a horse. I’ll be surprised if he wakes in a week. That being said, if he does, ye can call for my help.”
Emotion clogged Cecelia’s throat once again, this time the tide accompanied by a strange well of anger.
“Aye, I shouldna stay in with ye,” he said with undue resolution, as if he were trying to convince himself. “Ye doona need me.”
Cecelia had no idea where the emotion came from, but it was powerful enough to sweep her away. A part of her realized it stemmed from something completely unreasonable, and yet she couldn’t seem to suppress it in the least.
“How do you know I don’t need you?” In an astounding fit of temper, she flung her wrapper back into the crate. “Because I am not constructed with delicate femininity, I am not allowed to be fragile?” She lifted her jaw and glared at him with all the mutiny she could summon. “Because I am intelligent, I am thereby not in need of assistance? Because I am capable, I have no need of protection, is that it?”