Page 100 of All Scot and Bothered

“Scottish heather,” he murmured. “For an English rose.”

His voice vibrated through her, a now-familiar sensation. It lifted the fine hairs on her body and brought forward an awareness she found both exhilarating and alarming.

When she opened her eyes, he had thrust the bouquet to her, watching her with veiled expectation.

“Thank you,” she breathed.

He nodded, then moved away from the table.

“Where are you going?” Phoebe asked.

“To prepare the bath,” Ramsay said. “Jean-Yves and I will take the chairs onto the porch and share a port whilst ye ladies bathe.”

“Leave some port for me, if you please,” Cecelia called, claiming her seat at the dinner table.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” Phoebe pressed of Ramsay,holding up her own sandwich interrupted by one perfect crescent indentation of her teeth.

Ramsay may have hesitated, but then he continued toward the fire to retrieve the full cauldron of boiling water. “I’ll eat outside.”

Cecelia did her best not to stare as Ramsay hauled, heated, and prepared her bath with volumes of water no mortal man should have been able to carry at one time.

Jean-Yves caught her distraction at once and leaned over. “You’ve been chewing the same bite for ten minutes,” he whispered.

Cecelia swallowed, her denials all dying on her lips as she met the older man’s knowing gaze and blushed at the smile that told her he was vastly entertained.

Finally gathering the thoughts Ramsay had scattered like marbles, she said, “I’d regard anyone in the exact same manner were he to perform such an impossible feat.”

Jean-Yves grunted, but in French, the sound landing somewhere between disgust and amusement. “You’ve never in your life looked at anyone the way you look at him.”

To save herself from having to reply, she bit into her sandwich with a little too much gusto and avoided further conversation with Jean-Yves until he shuffled out with Ramsay to leave her to her bath.

She’d never been able to lie to him. And she was increasingly less able to lie to herself.

She didn’t just look at Ramsay, shesawhim. She noticed him with her entire being. Her senses were so attuned to his presence, she wondered if he hadn’t some strange electrical current other creatures just simply didn’t possess. Some magnetism charged only to her, drawing her forward until she was unable to resist pressing against him.

Cecelia didn’t linger in the bath for long, as she couldn’t stand the idea of Jean-Yves’s discomfort out of doors. He’d been quite mobile today, but broken ribs did tend to wear on one. She shivered into her nightgown and wrapper and traded favors of brushing and braiding hair with Phoebe while Ramsay hauled away the bathwater.

She resolutely faced the fire, unwilling to be caught watching him a second time.

Jean-Yves settled into the couch next to her as she sat plaiting Phoebe’s hair, who in turn braided that of Frances Bacon and Fanny de Beaufort.

“Are you going to arrange my hair next,bonbon?” Jean-Yves teased Phoebe, rubbing at the fine gray fluff he usually kept beneath a hat.

Phoebe giggled. “Will you tuck me in tonight, Jean-Yves?”

The man tapped her on the tip of her button nose fondly. “If you think I’m climbing that ladder to the loft, you’re about to be sorely disappointed,mon petite coeur.”

“You can read to me here,” she offered. “Join us, Lord Ramsay?”

The Scotsman had finished hauling away the bath and had occupied himself by stomping about in the kitchen, setting it to rights. At her question, he hesitated, his gaze colliding with Cecelia’s.

He said nothing as three sets of eyes speared him, each with different sorts of expectations.

What was he thinking, Cecelia wondered, to cause his harsh, rawboned features to appear so cautious? Tentative, even. He blinked at those hunkered on his spare furniture as one might regard an unfinished puzzle if one held the wrong piece. She might have identified the look in his eyes as longing, were it less hollow and bleak. Or perhaps she read his expression completely wrong. Maybehis diffidence had nothing to do with longing, but aversion instead.

It was impossible to tell.

“You can sit next to Cecelia,” Phoebe offered magnanimously. “And we’ll all watch Jean-Yves make the most hilarious faces.”