“I’d noticed she wears violet often.” He gingerly took the flowers, hoping they’d not disintegrate in his big, unwieldy hands.
“Don’t you think she’s rather fetching in violet?” The girl’s countenance glowed with shy mischief. “In most colors, really. And I know some women look plain with spectacles, but not Cecelia. She’s lovely all the time.”
“She is lovely all the time,” he agreed before adopting a stern look. “Ye’re playing matchmaker, are ye?”
Phoebe shrugged, climbing up the bank to skirt the dam. “Do you think you’ll marry her?” she queried, disastrously portending nonchalance.
“Would ye mind?” he asked.
She plopped down on the line of grass that skirted the black pebbled sand of the loch and began to unlace her boots. “Will you let me go to university if she marries you?”
Ramsay couldn’t contain a smile. “If ye want to be a doctor, I’ll not stop ye.”
She paused for a moment, chewing on a troubling thought. “Do you think … you’ll kiss her?”
“I already did once,” he confided with a waggle of his brows.
She giggled and relieved her little foot of her second boot.
“But…” Her face was serious as she stood, brushing the sand from her skirts. “You won’t make babies, will you?”
Ramsay’s heart stopped, and he wanted to squirm out of his skin. “What do ye ken about the making of babies?” he hedged. She was raised in a gambling hell, after all, and he wouldn’t think of even approaching such a grown-up subject with a girl of seven.
She blushed and he wanted to gag. “I know that a man and a woman make babies when they’re sleeping.”
“Sleeping?” he cringed, wishing he’d left her at home.
She nodded sagely. “That’s what Henrietta said. A man and woman must sleep together to make babies.”
“Sleeping,” he echoed carefully. “That’s all Henrietta told ye? Nothing else?” He was afraid to be relieved.
She pressed a hand to her little belly. “I shouldn’t like to wake up with a baby,” she decided, and then pierced his heart with the fear in her eyes. “Moreover, I shouldn’t want one to take Cecelia like I did my mother. Perhaps you shouldn’t sleep with her until after I’m a doctor.”
A fond tenderness wriggled in between Ramsay’s ribs at the little girl’s distress.
He could neither lie to her nor tell her the truth.
What he would do with Cecelia had little to do with sleeping.
Instead, he held out his hand. “Let’s see if I can get her to marry me first, and then we’ll chat more about babies, aye?”
Tiny fingers wrapped around his palm and simultaneously he felt them clutch at his heart, as well. “All right.” They walked to the water’s edge and watched it sparkle in the late-afternoon sun for a moment. Tentatively, she touched her toe to the water and then pulled her foot back as though a viper had bit her. “Oh no!” she squealed dancing from foot to foot. “It’s too cold, I don’t think I can.”
Ramsay smiled a smile that reached all the way down to his chest. “Ye canna just dip in yer toe, ye have to plunge in with everything ye have.”
She looked up at him, her eyes sparkling with trust as she prepared herself for the deed.
Once Cecelia deciphered the code and provided him with evidence, he’d have to decide what to do.
To set them both free.
Or to jump in with everything he had.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A breakthrough dumped Cecelia out of her spell, and she leapt from her desk chair with a victorious sound of glee.
Out the window, forest shadows crept toward the house threatening evening, and she idly wondered why no candle had magically appeared on desk as it was wont to do.
Noise filtered through the door, a great deal of noise, in fact. Masculine voices, rich and animated. Phoebe’s contralto breaking through the rumble like sunshine through thunderclouds.
Drawn by the jolly din, Cecelia burst out of the bedroom, impatient to share her discovery.
“Excellent news!” she announced to the room at large.
“Did you solve your riddle book?” Phoebe’s head turned owlishly over her shoulder from where she stood by the roaring fire holding a large towel open like a highwayman’s cloak to catch its warmth. Her hair was plastered to her head and hung in wet gathers down her back.
Cecelia’s mouth twisted wryly. “Well, I haven’t solved it, no—”
“Did ye at least identify the code?” Ramsay queried from where hunched at the table, rubbing at his thick glossy hair with another towel.
“Not precisely,” Cecelia stalled, blinking back and forth from the handsome Scot to her ward. Why were they soaked through? Had it rained today? Surely, she’d have noticed.
Her eyes lingered upon Ramsay for inordinately longer than they ought. His cream shirt, only half dry, clung to the generous swells of his chest and shoulders, his nipples beaded against the chill of damp clothing. He appeared alert but relaxed, his skin rosy from the sun and his eyes gleaming in a way she’d never seen them before. A pleasant, loamy scent drifted about the room, like sun-warmed rocks and wildflowers, and Cecelia had to blink a few times, wondering if she’d fallen asleep at the desk and walked out into a dream.
When she’d last encountered Ramsay, he’d refused to look at her and spoken in monosyllabic grunts. He’d left as if he couldn’t escape her presence fast enough.
And now his gaze swallowed her whole as he intently scanned her from head to toe in a manner she considered most unsuitable with a child present. He caressed the curves of her with his eyes, as if she stood before him naked, rather than in a rich summer gown.
Her brain threatened to melt out of her ear into a puddle of simpering, preening female absurdity.
What had been his question?
Frazzled, Cecelia looked to Jean-Yves for help, and he set down the knife on the counter where he arranged sandwiches on a plate. The old man took pity on her, though he didn’t spare her from his look of droll disappointment. “If you did not decipher the codex, nor identify the code, what possible news could be excellent, mon bijou?”
Determined not to allow herself to be distracted by the previously petulant Lowlander, she brandished the book like an American preacher on the Sabbath.
“I’ve been looking at this all wrong.” She hurried to the table and flipped open the book to where the bevy of numbers made an odd-looking list. “I’d assumed Henrietta had used a Pollux code, which is usually dots and dashes, but I thought she might have replaced them with numbers. It was the only explanation for these repetitions.” She pointed to the numbers she referenced. “But no matter what I tried, the code remained indecipherable. So then I simplified it to a Caesarean code, which helped not at all, but somehow also seemed to make sense. Which could mean only one thing…”
She looked up expectantly, and met three identical blank looks.
Jean-Yves now stood over her, his arm slung to his body in an odd parody of a maître d’ as he held his tray aloft, waiting impatiently for her to finish.
“Don’t you see?” she prompted excitedly. “It’s bacon.”