“I’m not leaving you to do this alone!”
“I love ye, ye daft woman, and I canna do this if ye’re in danger!”
“If you love me, you know I will not leave these children down here, so hurry up, you stubborn Scot. We don’t have time for you to realize I’m right.”
His glare should have doused the flames with all its icy wrath, but he dragged open the door, seized the child behind it, and shoved her toward Cecelia before moving on.
Cecelia’s arms were full of clutching hands, braided hair, and tearful sobs. Her heart breaking, she pointed toward the stairs, instructing the girl to stay low beneath the billows of smoke gathering in the air.
They freed seven girls in all, the last two rooms proving empty.
As Cecelia opened every closet and searched all nooks and crannies, she was vaguely aware of someone bellowing her name. She ignored it until she was lifted like a flour sack and hauled toward the stairs. “We have to go,” Ramsay coughed out. “The fire is reaching the next story.”
Cecelia’s throat and eyes burned, her lungs threatened to seize, but she couldn’t leave. “Phoebe!” she sobbed, kicking her legs out. “We haven’t found Phoebe!”
Ramsay subdued her with his strong hold, speaking into her ear. “I pulled Phoebe from the loft in Scotland. She’s safe at my brother’s with Jean-Yves.”
Cecelia could have collapsed in relief. Genny had lied to her. Thank God. As it was, she allowed Ramsay to pull her up the stairs and propel her through the smoke-clogged foyer for the second time in as many weeks.
This time, though, Cecelia cared little that the palatial estate might burn to the ground.
Because everyone was alive. Safe.
And Ramsay had said he loved her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Ramsay stood on the vast lawn of Henrietta’s estate and watched the chaos of the conflagration unfold.
He didn’t just hold Cecelia against him, he enfolded her, curling his shoulders over her and pressing his cheek to the crown of her precious head. The flames engulfing the manor tossed incredible colors into her wild hair, and he let the vibrant hues mesmerize him as he did his utmost to compose himself.
His fury at the thought of what might have happened to her tonight had razed his control completely to ashes. That any man could have followed Genny’s order before he’d gotten to her set his very soul on fire.
He’d used that fire to kill for her.
How could he have allowed this? How could he have become so attached to her in such a short time that her presence was necessary for his very breath? Her smiles were the meat he fed on and her voice was the sustenance to his soul.
He tugged her closer, feeling every inch of her along his frame. Her head tucked between the mounds of his chest. Her belly round and soft against his hip. Her thighs pressed to his.
She belonged in his arms, now and always.
He only had to convince her to stay.
Their chaotic heartbeats had synchronized and were now finally beginning to slow. They’d helped the fire brigade contain the blaze, but in the end, there was nothing to be done but to let the manor burn until it was reduced to rubble.
The captive girls they freed had been carted to the hospital where their families would be contacted, and Ramsay knew he and Cecelia would make certain they would be not only compensated, but made entirely comfortable for life.
Chandler had dragged a humbled Genny away with a cheeky salute, and Ramsay was certain he’d not seen the last of the swarthy, stealthy bastard.
But none of that mattered at the moment. There was this woman in his arms, the one who’d stolen his heart, and he had to make her understand somehow that it was a heart worth keeping.
That he would be careful with hers if she would only give it to him.
Should he wait until she’d rested and eaten and had time to process the loss of her property?
Something told him it was the right thing to do.
But letting her go without making certain she understood his intentions also seemed untenable.
Christ, he really was terrible at this.
“What are you thinking?” Cecelia asked, pulling back to look up at him with eyes that were as deep as eternity. “You’re very serious.” She paused, feathering her audacious, elegant fingers down the muscles of his bare back. “More so than usual, I mean.”
Ramsay closed his eyes for a breath, basking in her touch. “I’m feeling an affinity to yer manse,” he stated honestly.
Her nose wrinkled adorably. “Aflame?”
“Destroyed.” He lifted a hand to rub at a smudge on her cheek, only serving to make it worse.
Instead of pulling away, she turned her cheek into his palm until her lashes fanned against his fingers in little arcs of barely there sensation. “What destroyed you?” she asked.
“Ye did,” he murmured. “Ye’ve ruined me, Cecelia. Ye’ve dismantled everything I thought I was, everything I’ve wanted to be. Ye ripped the bits of me that were festering and rotten away from myself, and now I doona ken what I am. Who I am.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her lashes gathering with little reserves of tears.
“Nay, I doona mind. Not anymore. I just … need ye to help put me back together.”
Her chest depressed with a hard breath as her eyes glittered up at him with emotion. But she said nothing, and the silence called forth an unprecedented tumble of truth from his lips.
“This world of ours has always been a hollow gray place for me. Empty and meaningless, like my name. But then I met ye, and ye were naught but vivacious color. Ye overwhelmed every sense I possess.” He filled his other hand with her cheek, framing her face, holding it like a precious, fragile thing. “Ye fill me to the brink, Cecelia. When we are together, I doona remember what loneliness is. And without you, I doona ken the point of anything.”
He pressed his lips to her forehead. Her eyelids. Her nose. The prominent bones of her cheek and the corners of her mouth, all the while pouring his heart out between tiny tastes of her. “I fought it, at first, thinking ye were a weakness. A vulnerability. But nay. Ye make me strong, Cecelia. Ye give me life. Ye provide me a purpose that is greater than my own ambition. Ye taught me what the word family might mean. I would have that family with ye.”
He caught a wayward tear as it leaked from her eye, smudging it away from her cheek. She gave a delicate sniff, her expression pinched with an anxiety that sent his heart plummeting to his stomach.
“I want that,” she said in an earnest, tortured whisper. “More than anything I want that. But, Ramsay, nothing has changed.”
A worried frown pinched his brow. “What do ye mean?”
“I know Miss Henrietta’s is currently burning to the ground, but I fully intend to rebuild.”
“I doona care,” he said. “I’ll help lay the fucking stones.”
She drew back, her eyes wide “But you said—”
“I ken what I said. And I’m telling ye I was wrong. I’ve spent too many years honoring the wrong ideals. Respecting the wrong men. It all means nothing, Cecelia. Not anymore.”
“But your position,” she argued.
“I’ll be a nameless pauper before I live without ye. I meant what I said at Elphinstone Croft. I was surrounded by the loneliest, most miserable place I’d ever known, and I was happier there than I’d ever been. And I’ve realized, it was because ye were with me. Cecelia, ye are my happiness. If I have ye and Phoebe, I need nothing else. If ye think well of me, then I’ve achieved the perfection I’ve striven for for so long.”