“Aren’t you coming out with me?”
“I’ll get dressed in a moment. Felipe, will you leave us?”
The valet didn’t even look to Cameron for confirmation. The servants, both Scottish and French, now obeyed Ainsley without question. Felipe simply left the room.
Cameron finished closing the collar stud Felipe had been setting in place. “I told you, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“How do you even know what I intend to say?”
He gave her an impatient look before he turned back to the mirror to slide his cravat around his neck. “Because you’re a ferret and can’t leave well enough alone.”
Ainsley went to him, took the cravat ends from his hands, and started to tie the knot for him.
“I came to tell you about my brother.”
Cameron tilted his head back so she could work. “Which brother? There are as many confounded McBrides as there are Mackenzies.”
“There are only four. Patrick, Sinclair, Elliot, and Steven. I want to tell you more about Elliot.”
“Which one is he, the barrister?”
Cameron knew full well which of her brothers was which, because Ainsley had talked quite a lot about each of them. Her brothers were a safe topic of conversation, plus she was proud of their accomplishments. Ainsley was willing to wager that Hart too had told Cameron about her brothers, likely with dossiers on each one. Cameron was trying to be difficult.
“Elliot went to India with the army,” she said. “When he left the army, he stayed in India to start a business helping other colonials settle. Once when he was traveling in the northern region in the course of this business, he was captured. He was kept imprisoned for so long there that we were certain he was dead. But at last he managed to escape and make his way home.”
Cameron’s voice softened. “I remember. I’m sorry. What about him?”
“Elliot stayed with Patrick a while to convalesce, and he seemed to mend, but I could tell that there was something very wrong. Elliot made too light of his broken bones and the torture he’d suffered, almost joking about the whole thing.”
“I understand why,” Cameron said. “He didn’t want to think too much about it. Or talk about it.”
Ainsley gave Cameron’s knot one last tug. “I realize that. What he went through must have been horrible. One night, when I looked in on him, I found him huddled on the bed, shaking and unable to speak. When I went to see what was the matter, Elliot wouldn’t respond to me, wouldn’t even look at me. I was about to run for Rona and Patrick when he came to himself. He told me he was all right and begged me to say nothing.”
“It had happened to him before, then.”
Ainsley nodded. “He told me that sometimes, out of nowhere, even when he sat quietly in Rona’s front parlor, the world would . . . go away. He’d feel himself floating, and then he’d be back in the tiny hole where his captors had kept him. They sometimes didn’t feed him or even look in on him for weeks. Logically, Elliot knew that he was safe and whole and in Patrick’s house in Scotland, but his mind made him relive the entire horror of what had happened. He said he worried that the visions made him a coward, but that can’t be true—Elliot is one of the bravest men I know. He even went back to India—he’s still there—because he feared he’d be cowering in Patrick’s guest room for the rest of his life if he didn’t.”
Cameron looked down at her with an unreadable expression. He was delectable in kilt, shirt, and waistcoat, in undress only his valet or wife was allowed to see. “You are telling me this story because you think I feel about Elizabeth the same way your brother felt about being imprisoned and tortured.”
“Well, not quite, but it must be a similar thing.”
Cameron turned away from her. “Which I asked not to talk about, I remember.”
“I think we should talk about it. It’s our marriage, Cam. It’s our life.”
Still he wouldn’t look at her. “I told you, I don’t want rows with you. We rub along, or we don’t.”
“Then we ignore the fact that my own husband refuses to sleep in a bed with me?”
Cam dragged a hand through his hair. “Plenty of married people don’t share a bed. God knows my mother and father never did. They had separate rooms, separate spaces. It’s not unusual.”
“It is in my family. Patrick and Rona sleep together every night, and my parents did too.”
“I’m glad you had such an idyllic upbringing.”
“I even shared a bed with John.”
Cameron’s eyes flashed as he swung around again. “And I don’t want to hear you talk about you and John Douglas.”
“But we must talk about you.”
“Why?” His big hands clenched. “Why must we, Ainsley? Have you come into my life to fix every little problem? I don’t want a be-damned nanny, I want a lover.”
“So do I.”
“For God’s sake, Ainsley, what do you want me to say? That Elizabeth was insane? You’ve heard the stories. Eleanor must have given you an earful—Hart spilled all the family secrets to her. Eleanor ran far away from us, wise woman.”
“She told me that Lady Elizabeth hurt you.”
“Aye, she did.” Cameron ripped the button from his cuff and yanked the sleeve up his arm. “You were interested in these? All right, then, I’ll tell you. Elizabeth was in my bedroom, smoking a cheroot. Her lovers liked her to smoke them, so she did it to remind me that she didn’t belong entirely to me. Daniel was there, and she thought it would be interesting to see what kind of scars the ends left on a baby’s flesh.”