Page 23 of Lord Ramsey's Red-Headed Ruin
“Vaillancourt threatened it.” She sank back against Ram’s oh-so-welcome comfort. “The deputy police chief is not a man of many words.”
“Does he want your network? Names? Methods? Or does he seek something else?”
“Me,” she said so low she doubted Ram heard her.
But he growled deep in his throat, and the arms that possessed her grew strong as iron.
“He told me he will have me. For his bed. For his reputation. For his glory. He’ll make me his whore and his prisoner. I know not which would come first, but I know he wants my agents’ names. The one who reports to me and the one to whom I report. He knows how we transfer information. He told me so the night he threatened me. And if I don’t give him all he wants…”
Ram buried his lips in her hair and tightened his arms around her so securely that she could barely breathe. “I won’t let him have you. Never.”
She spun to face him and cupped his cheek. “I trust you. I have trusted so few in my life. But you, I believe.”
“Thank God.” He smiled, though the look had pain in it—and she knew not why.
But, she concluded, as he took her hand and led her inside and up to their bedroom, that he knew not how to cope with his issue.
As he undid the laces of her gown and performed the service of a maid and imagined husband to undo her corset, then turned his back as she stripped and donned her muslin night rail, he expressed his simple, gentlemanly devotion to her as he always did.
Yet something ate at him.
Tomorrow, she must learn. For to make him happy was a goal she now had. To do any less would be miserly when he’d given up his whole life to guard her.
In turn, she owed him much to show him her thanks.
She would have to think on what that was.
Chapter Seven
The country fairreminded Ram of those his parents had hosted when he was a boy. Mummers on parade, funny costumes, long feathers in their hats. Young girls in muslins, the colors of the rainbow. The village tradesmen in their lean-to stalls, hawking their wares. The revelry of those hoisting high their mugs of fermented cider, beer, and wine.
Ram and Amber strolled through the throng along with Georges. The two young girls trailed behind the three adults. Georges’s son Edouard walked along with a young friend.
Ram tried to throw himself into the gaiety. In a quandary, he had no other choice but to do the next most logical thing.
He took in Amber’s delight in the festivities. Her carefree attitude had grown in her each day since they left Varennes. Today, it had come upon her in fuller flush, as if dawn slowly appeared over the mountain of her fear and fortitude. It suffused her, mind and body, and endured. In the sunlight that illuminated her flawless skin and dancing, dark eyes, amid the music that had her humming or singing along in a joy he imagined she’d not felt in a long time, she sparkled like a rare ruby.
He warned himself, as he usually did nearly each hour, to take his gaze from her. To fake circumspection. To appear polite. A gentleman. To act as most husbands would to their wives, attuned, bored—indifferent.
He had pretended false emotions before. Apathy, silliness, or enchantment all came easily to him. He could not say why, other than his mother had always enjoyed plays and invited troupes to their country house with such regularity that he could recite Shakespeare’s monologues, badly but nonetheless recognizably, by age ten. Such expertise had befitted him in his work for Scarlett.
He could render expert aspects of libertine, misfit, misanthrope, miser, and even clown. He’d polished his impressions of such behavior when he attended Eton. His acting skills were later confirmed by his friend Ashley and that man’s cousin, Fournier. Those two men’s descriptions of the buffoons, charlatans, and overly righteous who attended Heidelberg University had inspired Ram to further heights. Furthermore, he was no fool about the characteristics, in particular, of men who seduced women for pleasure or on wagers or just for the challenge of it.
Here with Amber, however, over the weeks, he realized he’d been stripped down. He had become invested in her survival. Dedicated to her welfare. Appreciative of her character. Minus the façade of paid guard, he was naked to her. A man who could not let her go. A man who would not leave her. No matter the price he had to pay.
She was a woman who valued truth. Valor, yes. But honesty was her core essential. For him to hide from her that he revered her was wrong. To hide from her that he admired her was sad. To hide from her that he wanted to taste her was vital to his mission and hers. And yet he ached in his bones to take her in his arms and cradle her there. Spirit her away to the coast, or to Flanders, or up the Rhine to Amsterdam and home.
But she would not go.
He had broached the subject in the past, and she had flatly refused. She had no logic for it. She had run from Parisbecause she was marked for death. But she remained. And Ram wondered if, in her quiet moments, she pondered returning to challenge Vaillancourt, if only to call herself valiant. If only to lose…and call herself martyr.
That last was foolhardy.
That last he would not allow. She was much too noble to surrender to blackguards who had no higher goal than power. She was too much woman to allow her to sacrifice herself on an altar of politics.
So as she reflected, he served as her guard, her friend—and her fake husband. Each day, he yearned to be more. Each day, he sublimated what he must do to report to Ashley about the muskets, to care instead for his duty to Amber.
Yet there was nothing for it. He was caught in a web he could not escape.
