Page 65 of All Scot and Bothered
It was all so clear after that. Slow and perfectly encased in his mind’s eye.
A black, icy wrath had overtaken him, threading his blood with murder. He’d dismantled the brute with his bare hands before emptying the entire pistol into his scrawny comrade.
Never had he taken lives so willingly.
He’d escorted Cecelia and Phoebe to Cecelia’s surprisingly modest but tidy row house and followed her inside.
She’d turned in the entry, cluttered with scarves, umbrellas, and outdoor attire of every color, and stared at him for a long and intense moment.
Ramsay still couldn’t say why he’d done it, but he’d shifted the girl further to his shoulder and extended his arm to Cecelia Teague.
She’d hesitated only for the space of a breath before collapsing against him. She didn’t speak or scream or dissolve into sobs. No one said a word or made a sound for an inexplicably long time.
The two females merely clung to him and trembled. Their gratitude warm, unspoken, and absolute.
Ramsay drowsily let his palm drift to the place on his pectoral where Cecelia Teague’s cheek had rested. It felt as if she’d branded him, the heat of it reaching through the flesh and the muscle and bone into the ticking center of him. Expanding along his veins. Surging emotions through him he couldn’t identify if he’d had a dictionary in hand and a hundred years to study it.
The white-hot rage with which he’d dispatched those brigands had been washed away by a welling of protective tenderness. For a moment, he’d forgotten all about obligation and honor, about her past or his duty.
Once he’d had Cecelia Teague and that child safe in his arms, nothing else mattered for a precious quiet moment.
Surveying their foyer, he’d noticed that a door stood ajar to what might have once served as a comfortable parlor if not for the long bed upon which a short man reclined.
Ramsay had locked gazes with the elder, recognizing him at once as the gentleman who’d been carried awayfrom the wreckage of Henrietta’s manse. The man whose bedside Miss Teague hadn’t left until he’d been released from hospital that morning.
Jean-Yves Renault.
A strange communiquéhad passed between the men as Ramsay had stood there encircling the two ladies in his protective, albeit entirely improper, embrace. The old man had eyed the exchange with extreme concern, then great interest.
“Mon bijou?What has happened?” he’d croaked out in French.
Cecelia had stiffened and stepped out of his hold with a graceful movement and a glance that managed to be both conciliatory and grateful.
Ramsay had to force himself to let her go.
Mon bijou?He found he didn’t care for that endearment at all. Or for the fact that any man had one for her. This troubled him more than a little.
The night progressed quickly after that. He remembered releasing Phoebe into her care and listening to Cecelia’s explanation of events to Mr. Renault before he left to deal with the police and identify the dead.
He’d immediately returned to the Teague household to start in on the many things in need of discussion. He’d thought to find them mopping at tears and asking thousands upon thousands of questions.
Instead he was admitted by Cecelia, who had changed into a serviceable gown. She explained in a somewhat harried manner that she was without proper staff, she’d only just settled Mr. Renault down with laudanum for his injuries and was in the middle of bathing Phoebe.
Her vivacious hair had been tousled and curly with moisture, and her face glowed pink with a sheen of mist from the hot washroom.
Ramsay had noted the red mark beginning to swell beneath her cheek, and a burst of rage had struck him dumb enough to allow himself to be ushered into her study, whereupon she’d pointed at the decanter of scotch, mumbled something about putting Phoebe to bed, and promptly disappeared.
Her home was well decorated, he’d noted, but not well insulated. He could hear almost everything that went on in the rooms above. The splashes of a bath. The high-pitched sweetness of a distraught child’s many questions. The low, husky tones of Cecelia’s answers meant to comfort and reassure.
He’d stood in the middle of the room for what might have been an eternity, staring at the ceiling. The foreign and wondrous sounds of a home conjured a strange ache in his middle. He rubbed at the hollow wound as he listened to what a childhood might have been like. Comforting words, reassurances, encouragements, warm baths, and gentle touches: These things existed only for others.
As a child, he’d bathed in a freezing loch.
Eventually Ramsay had drifted to the scotch at the sideboard, searching for a refuge from his uncharacteristically maudlin thoughts. He didn’t normally imbibe, but the night’s revelations needed their edges dulled. He’d sip only one drink until she’d finished.
They had much to discuss.
Because pondering the implications of what he’d found outside had been entirely disturbing, Ramsay had busied himself with inspecting her study.
