Following his lead, she faced him, her heart pounding out of her chest. She very studiously avoided looking in the direction of the rocking chair, keeping her eyes focused on the flowers.
Ramsay reached in and plucked the largest, most vibrant blossom from the bouquet and extended it toward her. He stepped closer in order to tuck the flower into her hair.
Rough-skinned fingers skimmed the shell of her ear, causing shivers of delight to erupt over her entire body.
Along with pulses of need in a few secret places.
Overwhelmed, Cecelia closed her eyes and breathed him in. His scent was a masculine undercurrent to the fragrant flowers, soap and earth and water and sky. A scent as delicious to her as a room full of books and leather furniture. Or the most sumptuous truffles.
“Scottish heather,” he murmured. “For an English rose.”
His voice vibrated through her, a now-familiar sensation. It lifted the fine hairs on her body and brought forward an awareness she found both exhilarating and alarming.
When she opened her eyes, he had thrust the bouquet to her, watching her with veiled expectation.
“Thank you,” she breathed.
He nodded, then moved away from the table.
“Where are you going?” Phoebe asked.
“To prepare the bath,” Ramsay said. “Jean-Yves and I will take the chairs onto the porch and share a port whilst ye ladies bathe.”
“Leave some port for me, if you please,” Cecelia called, claiming her seat at the dinner table.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” Phoebe pressed of Ramsay, holding up her own sandwich interrupted by one perfect crescent indentation of her teeth.
Ramsay may have hesitated, but then he continued toward the fire to retrieve the full cauldron of boiling water. “I’ll eat outside.”
Cecelia did her best not to stare as Ramsay hauled, heated, and prepared her bath with volumes of water no mortal man should have been able to carry at one time.
Jean-Yves caught her distraction at once and leaned over. “You’ve been chewing the same bite for ten minutes,” he whispered.
Cecelia swallowed, her denials all dying on her lips as she met the older man’s knowing gaze and blushed at the smile that told her he was vastly entertained.
Finally gathering the thoughts Ramsay had scattered like marbles, she said, “I’d regard anyone in the exact same manner were he to perform such an impossible feat.”
Jean-Yves grunted, but in French, the sound landing somewhere between disgust and amusement. “You’ve never in your life looked at anyone the way you look at him.”
To save herself from having to reply, she bit into her sandwich with a little too much gusto and avoided further conversation with Jean-Yves until he shuffled out with Ramsay to leave her to her bath.
She’d never been able to lie to him. And she was increasingly less able to lie to herself.
She didn’t just look at Ramsay, she saw him. She noticed him with her entire being. Her senses were so attuned to his presence, she wondered if he hadn’t some strange electrical current other creatures just simply didn’t possess. Some magnetism charged only to her, drawing her forward until she was unable to resist pressing against him.
Cecelia didn’t linger in the bath for long, as she couldn’t stand the idea of Jean-Yves’s discomfort out of doors. He’d been quite mobile today, but broken ribs did tend to wear on one. She shivered into her nightgown and wrapper and traded favors of brushing and braiding hair with Phoebe while Ramsay hauled away the bathwater.
She resolutely faced the fire, unwilling to be caught watching him a second time.
Jean-Yves settled into the couch next to her as she sat plaiting Phoebe’s hair, who in turn braided that of Frances Bacon and Fanny de Beaufort.
“Are you going to arrange my hair next, bonbon?” Jean-Yves teased Phoebe, rubbing at the fine gray fluff he usually kept beneath a hat.
Phoebe giggled. “Will you tuck me in tonight, Jean-Yves?”
The man tapped her on the tip of her button nose fondly. “If you think I’m climbing that ladder to the loft, you’re about to be sorely disappointed, mon petite coeur.”
“You can read to me here,” she offered. “Join us, Lord Ramsay?”
The Scotsman had finished hauling away the bath and had occupied himself by stomping about in the kitchen, setting it to rights. At her question, he hesitated, his gaze colliding with Cecelia’s.
He said nothing as three sets of eyes speared him, each with different sorts of expectations.
What was he thinking, Cecelia wondered, to cause his harsh, rawboned features to appear so cautious? Tentative, even. He blinked at those hunkered on his spare furniture as one might regard an unfinished puzzle if one held the wrong piece. She might have identified the look in his eyes as longing, were it less hollow and bleak. Or perhaps she read his expression completely wrong. Maybe his diffidence had nothing to do with longing, but aversion instead.
It was impossible to tell.
“You can sit next to Cecelia,” Phoebe offered magnanimously. “And we’ll all watch Jean-Yves make the most hilarious faces.”
At the mention of her name, all expression was carefully schooled from Ramsay’s face. “I’ve things to see to outside,” he said, taking a lantern and striding out of the room.
Cecelia pretended to laugh when Phoebe did at Jean-Yves’s antics, and couldn’t remember at all what they’d read. She kissed the girl’s forehead and tucked her into bed before seeing to Jean-Yves.
“You don’t have to tuck me in,” he groused. “I’m no child.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Go to him, Cecelia,” Jean-Yves said gravely.
“What?” she gasped.
“He is of two minds about you, and it is tearing him apart.” The wizened Frenchman grabbed her hand and stayed her with a gentle tug. “Snatch him up or shoot him down, mon bijou, but either way put the poor man out of his misery, oui?”
“His misery?” Cecelia huffed, wondering just how much Jean-Yves had guessed about what had transpired between her and Ramsay. “I’ve tried to talk to him. He won’t have any of it. He is so infuriatingly confusing, I want to rip my hair out, or his.”
“I think that is the most wrathful I’ve seen you in our lives.” Jean-Yves’s caterpillar brows climbed up his forehead as he sank deeper into his patchwork quilts.
Cecelia fluffed the man’s pillow and checked his sling. “He makes me doubt who I am and what I want,” she admitted. “I think he would love me if I were other than who I am.”
“Why do you say this?”
“I’m a chubby bespectacled spinster bastard who inherited an infamous gaming hell in which both my aunt and my grandmother have at one time or another worked as a prostitute. A connection with me would shame a man like Ramsay,” she lamented.
“And he is the unwanted elder son of a Scottish drunk who lost his wife to a duke and drowned to death in his own sick.” Jean-Yves shrugged and then gasped with pain as his shoulder protested. “Also,” he continued with a bit more strain, “it’s widely acknowledged his mother was nothing more than an expensive whore.”
“Jean-Yves!” Cecelia reproached without any true heat.
“I’m only saying, mon bijou, that this man, Ramsay, brought you here not only to keep you protected, but to show you his own shame,” Jean-Yves said with a sage nod. “He might not even know that he’s done it.”