Page 101 of All Scot and Bothered
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?”
“Hismisery?” 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,” sheadmitted. “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.”
“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 beupset 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.
