“You truly think so?” Cecelia pondered the implications of this.
“There are many safe places in this world he could have taken us.” He grimaced as he readjusted his position as he muttered, “And so many more comfortable.”
“I promise we can go home soon,” Cecelia said. “I do believe I’ll finish in a few days.”
“Finish your business with the Lord Chief Justice before you decipher that codex,” the old man advised. “Because you know you have enemies, but you’ll need to know where this man fits in your life before we leave here.”
Cecelia chewed on the inside of her cheek, appreciating the advice. “Should he—should we—would you be upset if I loved him? If he were to share his life with us?”
Jean-Yves’s expression softened, deepening the grooves around his features and aging him starkly. “I share my life with you, Cecelia, what’s left of it. Which means I share my life with the man you choose.”
“But what do you think of Ramsay? What if I were your daughter? What would you tell her to do?”
A faint glimmer of emotion entered his eyes as he reached up with his good hand to touch her face. “You know influenza took my girl when she was small. I’ve been blessed with more years with you than with her. I consider you as much my daughter as my employer and my friend. You have to know that.”
“Don’t make me cry,” she begged. “I’ve been nothing but a waterfall for days.”
“This Ramsay. He is a man of means and position, and that is desirable. Beyond that, he is a man who would protect you with his life, and any father would want that for you.” He hesitated. “Just … do not choose anyone who makes you consider yourself anything other than the treasure you are.”
Welling with tenderness, Cecelia smoothed the man’s brow as though he were a child. “I love you. I wish I could have called you Papa.”
He shooed her hand away, turning a bright color of pink beneath his olive-tinged skin. “Je t’aime,” he muttered. “Now let an old man sleep.”
Cecelia crept out the door. She crossed the little cottage on silent slippered feet and snatched the candle from the tabletop. The bouquet caught her eye, and she picked up the flower he’d tucked behind her ear and put it back into her hair. She liked heather, she decided; it smelled of Scotland.
She turned a tankard into a vase for the wildflowers and drifted out the door in search of a gruff Scot.
Cecelia found him not in the shack but next to it, fully clothed and stretched out over his blankets beneath the stars. His hands locked behind his head, he glared up at the sky like it had done him an injustice.
Perhaps he cursed whichever star he’d been born beneath. The one that fated his life to be a battle against a fickle current, forever swimming upstream.
In the moonlight, his harsh features were smoothed and muted to a savage but golden beauty. He was brutality in repose. Distant. Remote.
A lion at rest.
The only acknowledgment of her presence was the tilt of his stern chin as he noted her approach.
He said nothing, his gaze remaining affixed to the sky.
She read a tension building in his body, however. Though he’d retreated from her in every way, she had no doubt he felt the same pull as she did. The same magnetic awareness. It electrified the night between them until she was certain it might be powerful enough to cause them both to glow like the streetlights on the Strand.
If only she could find him, wherever he went. Indeed, if eyes were the window to the soul, then his were walls of ice, opaque and unapproachable.
Blowing out her candle, Cecelia relied solely on the waxing moonlight as she sat next to his long, recumbent body, her wrapper creating a lake of crimson silk around her.
Tension began to creep into her own bones as the silence stretched as taut as a fiddle string between them.
Could he not have mercy on her? Receive her or reprimand her? Could he not make anything between them easy?
No, of course he couldn’t. He told her he was a man without mercy, and she should have listened.
She puffed out a breath and looked to the sky, wondering if they found the same constellations. If they perceived the darkness in a similar fashion.
The firmament wasn’t a pure black, not this soon after the summer solstice and with such a bright moon. A thin midnight-blue mist cast a fairylike glow upon the forest, and if Cecelia were a more fanciful woman, she could truly believe she’d been transported to some island of the Fae, out of time and space. Enchanted and mesmerized by the beauty of her surroundings, and yet tormented by a disdainful silence.
“Look!” she gasped, pointing just past Gemini and Orion. “A falling star. It’s supposed to be good luck.”
He twitched, but made no move toward or away from her. “The stars doona fall for men,” he muttered.
Cecelia chewed the inside of her cheek, wondering what to say next. Perhaps she shouldn’t have come out here … Maybe Jean-Yves didn’t know as much about Ramsay as he thought he did.
She felt tentative—no, nervous—and she had to swallow around a dry tongue as she fought for conversation. “Did you find what you were hunting for in the woods earlier today?”
“Aye,” he answered.
She waited for him to expound.
He didn’t.
“You promised you wouldn’t hate me,” she whispered, drawing her knees in close.
At this, he finally sat up. “What?”
“When I—when we—” She couldn’t bring herself to say it as the memory of their shared pleasure plagued her into a painful blush. “I asked you if you would hate me after, and you promised you wouldn’t. And yet … here we are.”
His face softened. “Cecelia—”
“I didn’t ask for this, you know,” she burst out, turning on her hip to face him. A foreign fury built within her, welling past frustration and beyond aggravation into a new form of anger she didn’t understand. She flushed hot and cold, her limbs trembled with it, and she felt as though she needed to release it into the night. To do something uncharacteristically barbaric like throw or hit something.
“I’m trying so hard to keep up,” she lamented with helpless tugs at her hair. “To keep everyone happy. And alive. To understand this new world that’s been dumped into my lap and to make sense of enemies I never made and did nothing to deserve. Like you, for example!”
He reached out for her carefully, as one might attempt to soothe a madwoman.
She slapped his hand away. Unable to sit still any longer, she pushed to her feet, obliging him to do the same. “Half of me doesn’t even want to decipher that damnable codex, and do you know why?”
He appeared astonished. Lost. “I canna—”
“Because I’m terrified to find out what kind of woman Henrietta might have been. What kind of woman I might have to become to survive this world.” She could stand it no longer. She had made a mistake coming out here. He distracted her. Spun her about. Perhaps she should have gone to Redmayne instead to keep her safe, to someone who didn’t hold of piece of her heart in his big, brutal hand.
“Did you know I’m afraid all the time?” she asked. “Not just for me, but for Phoebe. For everyone I care about. For you.” She was nigh to panting now, pacing in front of him like a banshee, her red train trailing over the soft Scottish grasses.