Ainsley’s mouth dropped open. Eleanor hadn’t mentioned that. She thought of the precious body she’d cradled to her bosom for one day, and rage that knew no end filled her. “How could she?”
“I grabbed for Danny, and while I was wrestling my own son away from her, she jabbed me with the damn cigar. She said she’d leave Daniel alone if I allowed her make a pattern on my arm, so I let her. She enjoyed it. Then I carried Daniel back to his nursery and stayed with him, in case she decided to come up there and try something more awful. Elizabeth hated Daniel, because she knew he was mine. I started making arrangements that very day to send her away, but before I had the chance . . .” He made an empty gesture as he wound down.
Ainsley pressed her arms to her chest, trying to stem her shivers. “Cam, I am so sorry.”
“It hurts, Ainsley. I loathed her, and still it hurts.” He dragged his sleeve back down and flipped the ruined cuff closed. “That’s why I don’t want to talk about it.”
Ainsley picked up the button he’d ripped off and rummaged silently through the dressing table for a needle and thread. Miraculously, he held still while she put the button back into place and started sewing, though she had difficulty seeing the needle through her tears. The cuff closed, hiding the round scars again.
“Cam,” she said softly. A tear fell to his wrist.
Cameron’s broad fingers tilted her face up. There was fire in his eyes, and anger, and pain. “Let me be, Ainsley. Don’t try to remake me in one night. I told you, I’m a wreck of a man.”
A man I’m in love with. Ainsley kissed his palm.
Cameron stared down at her a moment, thumb stroking the curls at the nape of her neck. Then he cupped her head in his hand and swiftly kissed her.
The kiss held passion, hunger, need. He dragged her up to him, the kiss turning deep. They’d not be going out that night.
Cameron didn’t speak of the matter again, but Ainsley refused to forget it. Cameron had said he didn’t like rows, and Ainsley didn’t either, but she also didn’t wish to pretend away the problem.
Meanwhile, during the whirl of life in Paris, Daniel was packed off to Cambridge to begin the Michaelmas term. Daniel wasn’t happy about leaving, but he kissed Ainsley good-bye, shook his father’s hand, and grudgingly boarded the train.
Ainsley’s heart ached to see him go, and she noticed that Cameron was more gruff and scowling as well. He missed his son, the son he’d endured torture to protect.
But a mere two weeks later, Daniel was back.
Chapter 22Daniel walked in out of the rain, soaked and without the valise with which he’d left. Or the servant either. He’d left both, he said, in Cambridge.
Cameron was suffused with fury, his Highland Scots coming through with his rage. “Damnation, lad, can ye nae stay put?”
“At a bloody boring English university?” Daniel plopped himself on a sofa, his wet coat smearing one of the cushions Ainsley had finished embroidering. “While you’re here in Paris with Ainsley? Not likely. I don’t need to go to university, Dad, especially not with the same blokes I knew at Harrow telling me what they’ll do when they start running the country. God save us. I’m going to help train the ponies with you, anyway.”
Cameron swung to the window and glared out of it, breathing hard. Controlling himself, Ainsley realized. He didn’t want to burst out at his son.
Ainsley sat down next to Daniel and rescued her cushion. “Danny, the acquaintances you cultivate at university might be the very men who send you horses to train later.”
Daniel rolled his eyes. “I don’t want to cultivate acquaintances, I want to learn something. The professors at Corpus Christi are wheezy and talk a lot of philosophy and rot. It’s ridiculous. I want to learn good Scottish engineering.”
“Perhaps, but I imagine your father paid rather a lot of money to send you to Cambridge.”
Daniel looked marginally ashamed. “I’ll pay it back.”
Cameron turned to him, still tightly controlled. “That’s not th’ point, son. The point is I send ye off, and ye run away, again and again.”
“I don’t want to be sent off! I want to stay with you. What’s wrong w’ that?”
“Because my life here is not one a boy should live, damn you.” Cameron stopped short of shouting. “My friends are hard, and I don’t want you anywhere near them.”
“I know,” Daniel said. “I’ve met them. So why do ye want Ainsley around them?”
“I don’t.”
Observing Cameron’s anger, Ainsley realized he truly didn’t. Cameron’s Paris acquaintance were people who lived the idle life as hard as they could—staying out all night, sleeping all day, and spending money without noticing.
Ainsley had found it exciting at first, but she soon realized that there was no stillness in this life, no contemplation, no absorbing beauty for the sake of it, and no love. What Cameron’s friends called love was infatuation and obsession, which began with ferocity and ended in rows and drama, sometimes violence.
These were hot-blooded people, and Cameron was as hot-blooded as they were. He thought nothing of kissing Ainsley in public or holding her to his side, and his friends looked on with amusement rather than shock. Every night was another play or opera, or a party that lasted well into morning. Each night Ainsley wore a new gown, and Cameron draped her with more and more costly jewels.