Page 92 of All Scot and Bothered

Ramsay nocked an arrow, pulling it taut as she stopped and looked behind her.

A little fawn, no larger than a hound, toddled out from the safety of the thicket. It glued its little speckled body to its mother’s haunches, scampering to keep up with her careful strides toward the river.

They hadn’t spotted him above them, but they sensed danger was nearby.

Ramsay dropped his arm, resting the arrow at his side.

No matter how hungry he’d been in his life, he’d never killed mothers. Didn’t even set snares at rabbit burrows. Once, a fox had stolen some smoking fish, and he’d hurledrocks at it, stopping only once he’d realizedshewas quite obviously nursing kits.

Mothers should live to protect their young.

He thought of Cecelia. He always thought of Cecelia. His every stream of consciousness seemed to lead back to her. In this memory, she was desperately fighting to save her little ward. She’d been struck down in the alley, threatened, and witness to bloodshed, and still her first thought had been for Phoebe.

When she’d found the girl unharmed, her relief and tender joy had humbled him.

Cecelia.The girl had called her Cecelia that night. Not Mother, or Mama.

He generally had such an eye for detail. He certainly should have suspected then. But murder had been flowing through him at the time. He’d grappled wrath and fury back into the darkness in order to safely conduct the ladies home.

Another reason the woman was extraordinary. She mothered a child that wasn’t even her own. According to her, she’d been fancy-free before the death of Henrietta Thistledown. She’d traveled and gallivanted as one third of a trio of redheaded Rogues, had enjoyed an education and a small but comfortable fortune. But when a bevy of students and dependents and a motherless child had landed in her lap, she’d taken the responsibility for their employ and well-being upon her shoulders without a second thought. She became their champion against the likes of him.

And worse.

Ramsay shut his eyes and listened to the deer saunter beneath him as he contemplated the tight fist curling around his heart.

Cecelia Teague made him question everything.

Everything.

His stance on women, family, morality, integrity, the past…

The future.Theirfuture?

For so long he’d wanted nothing like a family. He’d striven only to attain the height of power that the common people were seizing every day from the old monarchy and hierarchical structures. Certainly, the aristocracy was giving way to men like him: men of industry, intellect, education, economy, and the means to shape an empire though the force of the rising democratic structures of government.

And now he was wrapping his fingers around Excalibur, as it were, poised and ready to pull the sword from stone and claim what was his due.

But at what cost? His soul?

His heart?

Are you happy?Her simple question bounced between his temples, taunting him like a ball thrown down a hill, forever rolling away.

Happiness had never been an expectation of his. His childhood had been a nightmare of drunken beatings, shouting matches between his parents, and an empty belly. When his mother left and his father died, survival had been his only goal. He worked day and night for heat, clean water, and food. Who had time to contemplate happiness when you had to fight the scourge of starvation, silence, and isolation? When every adult you came into contact with tried to either take advantage or take what was yours by right?

He’d perched up here some days shooting at anyone who dared approach. Not knowing if they were looters or neighbors.

Once in a while, they’d been both.

He forgot how to act or eat properly first. Then how to speak. In the years he’d lived in this cottage alone, an empty hole had opened up in his chest. This cold, silent void where a family ought to have been. Where mercy might have lived.

Where vagaries like happiness and love could have been nurtured.

He’d never succumbed to the silence or the emptiness, but he’d always carried it with him, even after he’d been taken to Redmayne Keep.

He couldn’t believe it. More than twenty years had passed since he’d been dragged from this place, feral and filthy. A bestial, inhuman creature driven by nothing but instinct.

And the process of civilizing him had been both painful and humiliating.