Page 77 of All Scot and Bothered
Cecelia had always felt as though those hands belonged to a different man. One with an altogether more difficult life.
She looked around, absorbed the sparseness of the place. The one bed, the lone couch. The single set of dishes.
His bow and arrow.
A place no one will look for ye.
His father had died, and no one had looked for him. He’d raised himself on this property from a lad of nine years old to one of fifteen. Alone.
The duchess had left her firstborn here to rot for years.
“My God,” Cecelia whispered, a hollow pain lancing her breast. “You were here all by yourself, all but forgotten. And you survived on your own?”
“Doona be impressed.” He swatted at the air in front of him, waving her veneration away. “The well is good, the river full of fish, and a herd of deer live in the vicinity.”
Cecelia shook her head, seeing her surroundings as if for the first time. To her, this cottage was a refuge. To him, it’d been a place of exile. Her heart swelled with emotion for him. “I never realized what it must have cost you to bring us here. What horrible memories it must hold for you.”
He snorted, searching the beams as if they might collapse at any time. “It’s no great feat, I return here from time to time.”
“To escape the city?” she guessed.
His eyes speared through her, alight with a vibrant fire. “To remind myself how far I’ve come. To remember what I once was.”
Cecelia nodded, envying his fortitude. She’d never allowed herself to return to the Vicar Teague’s. Not even to the city from whence she came. “It’s difficult not to clingto memories,” she murmured. “I suppose our recollections define us all in some way.”
He shook his head with enough vehemence to expel a demon. “I’m proof they do not.”
She was taken aback. “You’re proof theydo. This place, it means something to you. It holds the ghosts of a different life. Of a lonely past and a future that could have been.”
“There was never any future for me here.”
“I don’t know.” She tried to picture a peasant couple here, young and happy. “You might have had parents that loved each other. Who shared this home, this life, in poverty, but happiness. This might have been land you worked and a simple legacy you could have been proud of. Instead you were abandoned here. And that has quite obviously made an impression upon you. I daresay it painted every relationship you’ve ever had.”
He made a disgusted sound in his throat and drank before wagging the neck of the bottle at her like a gavel. “Doona look at me and see some lonely child to be pitied. I am so far from that. Fromhim. I lifted myself from nothing, into a situation where I want for nothing, and for that I am proud. I am wealthy, educated, respected, and feared. I am powerful in every conceivable way—”
“Yes, but are you happy?”
He looked at her askance. “What does happiness have to do with anything?”
She shook her head, truly pitying him for the first time. “It has to do with everything.”
“Man is not meant to please only himself,” he stated rather piously. “Do ye ken why Matilda could find no skeletons, no secrets?”
Cecelia shook her head.
“Because I have none. I’ve done nothing of which I amashamed other than allowing myself to hope the one time that she could provide me an honest, contented life.” His jaw hardened and he set the wine down, pushing it away from himself as if it were as offensive as the memory of the woman who’d betrayed his one chance at trust. “She proved the one thing I’ve always known. That women are born with a weapon between their legs, and are willing to deploy it with as much collateral damage as any explosive.”
Cecelia shook her head, understanding his anger and also despairing at the abject wrongness of it. “Did you ever stop to consider that your offer of marriage might not have been what she wanted from life? You desired her companionship, her love, her body, and her fidelity, but did you ever stop to think that marriage to a Lord Chief Justice, or a Lord Chancellor, might be too much for Matilda?”
Her words took the wind from his sails. “I didna have to ask, she made it clear enough. She told me she’d rather suck a thousand cocks than shackle herself to a rigid, self-important arse like me. Is that what ye wanted to hear?”
“No. Because that was a terrible thing for her to say.” She lifted her chin, adopting a pose of matronly disappointment. “And so was what you said about women and… weapons.”
He looked both mulish and ashamed, but didn’t cede the point.
“Do you not think men use their sex as a weapon?” she pressed. “Most often a violent one? Men have claimed all rights to strength and money and power. What are we women left with? The responsibility of brood mares, to make more men, or to make life comfortable for them? If there must be a war between sexes, what weapons have you left us? What are we but objects to you? A collection of pretty orifices for your pleasure?”
Wintry eyes glittered at her. Not with censure but with wonder, admiration, and—dare she hope—respect. After a breathless moment, he leaned forward, capturing her uncertain gaze with his unblinking one. “I shouldna have said that.” One step closer to an apology. Two in one night, did wonders never cease? “I doona feel that way… about ye.”
