Page 35 of All Scot and Bothered
“Love and marriage have little to do with each other, I’ve noticed,” she replied. “And I don’t think I shall ever be shackled with a husband, thank Jove. But I fully intend to fall in love.”
When he didn’t reply, she examined him intently, as though she attempted to read the answers in his bones. “I’m interested to learn the reason you inquired about my marital status at all, my lord,” she challenged. “It’s either a cruel inquiry or a meaningful one.”
He both admired and was irritated at her direct assertion because… it was both cruel and meaningful.
“It’s a question ye still havena answered,” he prompted.
She crossed defensive arms over her breasts, deepening the cleft between them. “My answer might offend.”
“I promise to remain unoffended,” he vowed, valiantly keeping his gaze from drifting beneath her chin.
She made a sound of disbelief in the back of her throat before conceding. “For a woman of my means, marriage is inexorably less beneficial in all ways than my life as a spinster.”
“How so?”
“My property and my money remain my own. My will and reputation, as well. I am not a part of the aristocracy and so I am able to move more freely about the world. I ask permission from no one, and take nobody’s opinions, emotions, or”—she lifted meaningful eyebrows at him—“judgmentsinto account when I make decisions. I am free, my lord, and have not yet met a man to whom I am inclined to give up that freedom.”
“Freedom.” Ramsay’s satisfied nod seemed to baffle her. “How incredibly odd, Miss Teague, that our reasons for remaining unattached so closely resemble each other’s.” Stranger still, that he’d never felt freer to be himself than in her presence.
She blinked several times. “Very odd, indeed. I shouldn’t have thought we had anything in common.”
“I think if we looked deep enough within ourselves, we’d find glimpses of each other. I see a reflection in yer eyes, I think. A part of myself. One that might be kinder than the truth.” Christ. When had he become a bloody poet?
“Your reflection would only be in my spectacles, my lord.” She looked away, her hand toying restlessly in her hair.
What had gotten into him? Something about their conversation flirted with danger.
She assessed him as if he were composed of formulaeshe was intent upon unraveling. “It’s because of your mother, then, if I had to guess.”
Ramsay stiffened. “What in God’s name are ye referring to?”
Her words were measured, careful. “Alexandra shared with me what happened to the previous duke, Redmayne’s father, how he hung himself from the grand balustrade at Castle Redmayne when your mother abandoned him for a lover. That’s what you meant when you referred to your family’s disastrous marriages.”
He searched her features for pity, for judgment, and again only found her gentle curiosity. Something about it, about the way she picked him apart. Softly. Meticulously. With no apparent need for supremacy or seduction. No need to use information against him.
He found himself powerless against it, words spilling from lips famously locked. From a vault that hadn’t been opened since before he’d become a man. “The previous Lady Redmayne knew how to pick weak men. And she knew how to break them.” Or rather, they allowed themselves to be broken by her.
“Ah,” she murmured. “Did she do something similar to your real father?”
The wintry feeling bloomed into a frozen void, the one contained within him for so many years.
Decades. One opened by a length of time so dastardly, neither rage nor passion nor acquisition could heat it.
“My father died when I was a lad of nine or so.” The how of it didn’t matter. Neither did the why of it. He didn’t want Cecelia Teague to see the void. To find the vault. To know what he kept there.
“And so you were taken in by Redmayne’s father?” she asked.
“Aye. He sent me to Eaton at fifteen with Piers, then Oxford after that.”
She bit her lip in contemplation. “You say he was weak, but he also sounds like he was a kind man.”
He made a dismissive gesture, closing his heart to the pain. “Kindness can be its own form of weakness.”
“Not in my experience.”
“You are lucky then, if that is your experience.”
“Do you not have to be kind at times to perform your vocation?”
