Page 127 of All Scot and Bothered
Cecelia flinched. “I’m sorry if she was cruel to you, Genny. But I never would have been. I would have made this place a haven, you have to believe me.”
“Oh honey, I believe you. I have nothin’ against you, personally,” Genny rushed to assure her. “You’re an absolute peach, I declare. I wish we could have truly been friends. Business partners, even.”
Perplexed, bemused, Cecelia glanced at the men fanned out to Genny’s right.
Winston, almost unrecognizable without his Georgian costume, was younger than Cecelia had first assumed.
Next to him stood a big, bald man with no neck to speak of and an extra layer of bulge around his muscles. To his right, a lovely-skinned Indian man with a long, bushy beard clasped his hands in front of him.
“Genny.” Cecelia felt a flare of a different sort as she read a sort of sinister anticipation in their eyes. “Genny what are they doing here? What is going on?”
“You should have married, Cecelia, after your tenure at de Chardonne.” Genny acted as if she’d never asked a question. “You should have nursed fat babies and settled down, then Henrietta wouldn’t have been so goddamned proud of you.”
Cecelia shook her head, wishing she understood. “What does my getting married have to do with anything?”
Genny’s expression darkened from unkind to truly demonic. “Do you realize I worked for that woman nearly twenty years?” she hissed. “She thought she was above us. That she could outsmart every person in this godforsaken empire, and I’ll be damned if she didn’t almost do it.” Genny crept closer, brandishing the codex. “I licked that woman’s boots for twenty. Fucking.Years.I was her servant, her handler, her confidante, and her lover. And you know what the scum-sucking bitch left me?”
Cecelia took a step back against the woman’s advance. She couldn’t help herself; she’d never in her life been regarded with such abject hatred. Not from the Vicar Teague. Not from her fellow male students at university.
Not even from Ramsay when he thought she was responsible for the worst crimes imaginable.
“Nothing.” Genny tossed the codex to Cecelia’s feet, where it landed with an innocuous whump. “That woman left me not one goddamned thing else but a love note with instructions to look after you and that little brat with a promise thatyou’dtake care of me.” The last part of the sentence she forced between clenched teeth.
“Phoebe?” Cecelia rushed forward. “Tell me you haven’t hurt her.”
“You are so like that sanctimonious, undeserving cow!” Genny’s lips curled into a masculine sort of snarl. “No, no you’re worse. You never once had to lie beneath a rutting boar of a man to feed yourself. You never had to fight off drunk men and work on your feet for endless nights just to avoid working on your back.”
Her fingers turned to claws as she gestured her hatred. “Youwere educated, spoiled, coddled. I fucked half the ton while you went on holiday with them. And when Henrietta found me, I helped earn the money on the card tables. Money she sent to you. I built this empire with her, and she leaves it toyou?” She shook her head in abject disbelief. “What makes you think you deserve this?”
“I—I don’t!” Cecelia insisted. “I never wanted—”
“I don’t give a silken shit what you wanted,” Genny said. “I only care what you can do for me now.”
“What? What would you have me do?”
Genny pointed to the book at her feet. The dratted codex. The bane of Cecelia’s existence. “I know you’ve deciphered it. I saw the pages burning in the fireplace before I fished them out. There’s a fortune worth of information in there, and I need every word, do you understand?”
“Tell me something first.” Cecelia was stalling for time, wondering if she could get a message out somehow, her brain churning for anything to cling to that might help her escape this helpless, hopeless place. “Is Lord Ramsay alive? Jean-Yves? What about Phoebe? Is she harmed? Please tell me what happened to them!”
“You’ll get information when I get what I want from you,” Genny scoffed.
“No.” Cecelia shook her head, drawing herself up. “That’s not how this works. I will tell you what is in the codex when you assure me those I love are safe.”
“Love?” Genny sidled closer, her laugh long and low and unsettling. “What is it about fucking Lord Ramsay that shags a woman’s brain right out of her head? You and Matilda both. Spend a few nights with him and suddenly he’s wrapped those unwieldy paws around your heart and squeezed all sense out of it.”
Cecelia suddenly felt for poor Matilda. She’d been torn between two loyalties. That to her employer, and then to herself. How devastated she must have been when Ramsay had thrown her out of his house and his life.
“Don’t tell me you loved that horse-cocked lummox of a Scot,” the American spat, tugging at the lace sleeves of her nearly white gown.
Loved.Past tense. Did that mean Ramsay was no more?
Cecelia swallowed around a lump of despair. What if he’d died without knowing how she felt about him? What if she never had the chance to change his mind? She had fully intended to once she was through being peevish. It’d taken everything for her not to prostrate her pride and her principles at his gigantic feet and ask to be carried about like a damsel again.
What if she only ever received the gift ofoneof his smiles in her entire life?
If he was truly gone… she would even miss his frowns. The darling way he struggled to remain grumpy in her presence. The way tenderness and lust turned his wintry eyes a darker, warmer blue.
To lose him would be the greatest tragedy in her life. And for his daughter to lose him as a devoted father was the greatest heartbreak she could think of.
