To make it real.
Nigh on eight years, Ramsay had said, since he’d had a woman.
The woman Henrietta sent to spy on him.
Matilda. Phoebe’s mother who died in childbirth.
Phoebe had barely turned seven years old.
Cecelia wanted it to be true, and then she didn’t. She watched the little girl with new eyes. Phoebe wasn’t the right color to belong to the golden giant beside her. Her hair was honey, not flaxen gold. Her eyes hazel rather than blue. She was so little for her age.
And yet. She’d a dimple in her chin that might claim to match Ramsay’s. And strong, broad, handsome features.
“Mon Dieu,” Jean Yves whispered.
Cecelia glanced over to Ramsay who’d yet to move. To speak.
To even breathe.
He stared at the girl, who had risen to her feet and rubbed at a tiny stain on her pink pinafore.
Phoebe blushed, self-consciously aware she was the subject of rather intent conjecture.
Though his features didn’t so much as twitch, his eyes glittered with myriad things.
“Ramsay?” Cecelia ventured.
His hand lifted to silence her. “When is yer birthday, lass?” He whispered the question to Phoebe, but it carried through the house like a cannon blast.
“The fourteenth of June,” she answered brightly. “Next year, I’m going to ask Cecelia for a parasol, that is if I don’t get one for Christmas.”
Ramsay’s chest deflated drastically, as if he’d been kicked in the ribs by a rather powerful ghost.
Cecelia looked down at the codex, blinking a well of tears away as they blurred the last coded sentence. She needn’t bother with it. It didn’t take a genius or even a mathematician to figure out his secret.
Ramsay had fathered a bastard.
The Scot said nothing. He stood so quickly his chair toppled over, strode to the door, and slammed it shut behind him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was a blessed, blessed thing that Ramsay had something to butcher.
Every time he cleaved into the deer as he dressed and prepared it, he had to wonder whose bones he’d rather be breaking. Who most deserved the crux of his rage? The Lord Chancellor? Matilda? Henrietta?
Himself?
Once the meat was prepared, Ramsay bathed and swam alone, knowing no one would come looking for him.
A father.
His rage had no place to land. All his tormentors were not ghosts.
And if he was honest, he’d no one to blame but himself.
Ramsay remembered back to the day he’d found Matilda’s dark head bent over his desk after she had picked the lock to his home office. He’d railed at the beauty like a harbinger of wrath and righteousness. Had condemned her for all manner of things.
Even after she confessed that Henrietta had sent her. She’d asked him for his mercy, his forgiveness. But he’d allowed his pain at her betrayal to flare into fury. He’d looked at his lover, the woman he’d considered marriage for, and he’d thrown her out into the gutter. He’d told her she belonged there. Had vowed to her the next time he saw her, it would be in shackles. That he’d love nothing so much as to see her rot in a prison for a treacherous slag.
And, in the end, she’d reaped the greatest revenge. She’d given birth to his daughter, and let his enemy raise her.
This was his nightmare.
Every time he’d kicked the door to Henrietta’s establishment in, he’d put little Phoebe at risk. He’d been too blinded by his own self-importance, his distrust of women, and the vendetta he excused with ambitious ideals, to much care how his actions might affect those in his warpath.
If he’d have taken Henrietta down earlier, he’d have impoverished his own daughter.
And Cecelia.
Not to mention the employees of the gambling hell and the students beneath.
So why didn’t the old hag tell him? Why didn’t she come to him with this secret and do her level best to blackmail him out of his vast fortunes as was her wont?
Instead, she raised up his daughter.
Ramsay stood in the lake and heaved great swaths of water with his arms in a very uncharacteristic fit of temper. He roared to the sky and created waves of his ire.
He’d have to tell Phoebe who he was.
A pang of anxiety paralyzed him as the last of the sun dipped below the trees. In the silence, he could hear Cecelia’s and Phoebe’s voices filtering through the thin forest as they ventured near to pick berries from the overgrown forest. Even at this distance, the false brightness in Cecelia’s interaction plucked at him.
His daughter adored Cecelia already because she’d taken the girl in and shown her the love any motherless child would yearn for. She’d have made certain Phoebe’s dream of being a doctor was realized.
Cecelia. Who’d shown him to the gates of heaven, and then, with a few words, plunged him back into the cold depths of his own desolate hell.
After he bathed, Ramsay climbed to his hunting perch. From his vantage in the old oak, he watched as Cecelia took Phoebe inside. He followed their candlelight through the windows as the stars came out, knowing their routine by now. They ate their collected berries with clotted cream for dessert, then washed, cleaned teeth, braided hair, told stories.
And he sat outside as he always did. Apart.
Alone.
This time by choice, because life had taught him many things about conquering and survival but blessed little about connection.
Longing stole his breath as it banded around his chest. It fought with another emotion welling from within. He wished he wasn’t possessed of the acumen to identify it for what it was.
Fear.
What he feared most he could not say. Love? Loss? Humiliation and abandonment?
How sentiment might weaken him. Might render him vulnerable.
Eventually the night drove him from his watchtower, and he strode toward the woodshed. It was too late to reveal anything to Phoebe now, and he was too weary in every possible way.
She’d seemed ready enough to accept him as a father figure when he’d spoken to her earlier, but only inasmuch as he would make Cecelia happy.
And now that he couldn’t, would she be disappointed to call him Papa?
As he passed the house, Ramsay smelled the sweet pipe tobacco Jean-Yves was fond of smoking on the porch. He quickened his pace, hoping the old man would let him pass in peace.
No such luck.
“Fancy a smoke, my lord?” Jean-Yves held up a long pipe in greeting and offering.
“I doona smoke,” he answered shortly, nodding his head in respect for the elder.
“If anyone should ask, neither do I,” the Frenchman said with a shrug. “Cecelia doesn’t like it. She worries for my lungs. But she is putting young Phoebe to bed, and what she does not know, she cannot worry about.” Bushy brows waggled in the flaring light of a match as he lit a coal in his pipe.
Ramsay couldn’t say why he drifted to the dilapidated porch when all he wanted to do was retreat.
“Here.” Jean-Yves handed him a bottle of caramel liquid. “The whiskey is shit, but it does the trick.”
“The whiskey was meant to be used medicinally, not recreationally,” Ramsay muttered, taking the glass. “I didna buy it for the label.”
“If ever there was a medicinal use, this would be it,” Jean-Yves chuffed. “When I found out I was going to be a father, I drank an entire bottle of wine in one hour. But my liver was younger then.”