Page 102 of All Scot and Bothered

Perhaps he cursed whichever star he’d been born beneath. The one that fated his life to be a battle against a fickle current, forever swimming upstream.

In the moonlight, his harsh features were smoothed and muted to a savage but golden beauty. He was brutality in repose. Distant. Remote.

A lion at rest.

The only acknowledgment of her presence was the tilt of his stern chin as he noted her approach.

He said nothing, his gaze remaining affixed to the sky.

She read a tension building in his body, however. Though he’d retreated from her in every way, she had no doubt he felt the same pull as she did. The same magnetic awareness. It electrified the night between them until she was certain it might be powerful enough to cause them both to glow like the streetlights on the Strand.

If only she could find him, wherever he went. Indeed, if eyes were the window to the soul, then his were walls of ice, opaque and unapproachable.

Blowing out her candle, Cecelia relied solely on the waxing moonlight as she sat next to his long, recumbent body, her wrapper creating a lake of crimson silk around her.

Tension began to creep into her own bones as the silence stretched as taut as a fiddle string between them.

Could he not have mercy on her? Receive her or reprimand her? Could he not make anything between them easy?

No, of course he couldn’t. He told her he was a man without mercy, and she should have listened.

She puffed out a breath and looked to the sky, wondering if they found the same constellations. If they perceived the darkness in a similar fashion.

The firmament wasn’t a pure black, not this soon after the summer solstice and with such a bright moon. A thin midnight-blue mist cast a fairylike glow upon the forest, and if Cecelia were a more fanciful woman, she could truly believe she’d been transported to some island of the Fae, out of time and space. Enchanted and mesmerized by the beauty of her surroundings, and yet tormented by a disdainful silence.

“Look!” she gasped, pointing just past Gemini and Orion. “A falling star. It’s supposed to be good luck.”

He twitched, but made no move toward or away from her. “The stars doona fall for men,” he muttered.

Cecelia chewed the inside of her cheek, wondering what to say next. Perhaps she shouldn’t have come out here… Maybe Jean-Yves didn’t know as much about Ramsay as he thought he did.

She felt tentative—no,nervous—and she had to swallow around a dry tongue as she fought for conversation. “Did you find what you were hunting for in the woods earlier today?”

“Aye,” he answered.

She waited for him to expound.

He didn’t.

“You promised you wouldn’t hate me,” she whispered, drawing her knees in close.

At this, he finally sat up. “What?”

“When I—when we—” She couldn’t bring herself to say it as the memory of their shared pleasure plagued her into a painful blush. “I asked you if you would hate me after, and you promised you wouldn’t. And yet… here we are.”

His face softened. “Cecelia—”

“I didn’t ask for this, you know,” she burst out, turning on her hip to face him. A foreign fury built within her, welling past frustration and beyond aggravation into a new form of anger she didn’t understand. She flushed hot and cold, her limbs trembled with it, and she felt as though she needed to release it into the night. To do something uncharacteristically barbaric like throw or hit something.

“I’m trying so hard to keep up,” she lamented with helpless tugs at her hair. “To keep everyone happy. And alive. To understand this new world that’s been dumped into my lap and to make sense of enemies I never made and did nothing to deserve. Like you, for example!”

He reached out for her carefully, as one might attempt to soothe a madwoman.

She slapped his hand away. Unable to sit still any longer, she pushed to her feet, obliging him to do the same. “Half of me doesn’t even want to decipher that damnable codex, and do you know why?”

He appeared astonished. Lost. “I canna—”

“Because I’m terrified to find out what kind of woman Henrietta might have been. What kind of woman I might have to become to survive this world.” She could stand it no longer. Shehadmade a mistake coming out here. He distracted her. Spun her about. Perhaps she should have gone to Redmayne instead to keep her safe, to someone who didn’t hold of piece of her heart in his big, brutal hand.