The Many Sins Of Lord Cameron (MacKenzies & McBrides #3)(58)
Author: Jennifer Ashley

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 22

Daniel 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.

But there was no quiet happiness among these people. No reaching for a friend and finding one, warm and comforting, at the end of your hand.

“We should leave then,” Ainsley said.

“Why?” Cameron demanded. “Are ye tired of it already?”

“No, but you are.”

Cameron scowled at Ainsley’s all-knowing gray eyes. Did she have to understand everything about him? “Who the hell told you that?”

“No one had to tell me,” Ainsley said. “You’re not comfortable with this life, and you know it. When you’re out riding horses or even watching them, as we did at the horse fair the other day, you’re far more sweet-tempered and companionable. Too many nights under the gas lamps and you start growling.”

Cameron made a rumbling noise in response, and Ainsley smiled. “Exactly like that. Don’t stay here for me, Cam. Go where your heart is, and I’ll follow.”

Cameron looked out the window again, studying the Parisian rooftops. Daniel waited on the sofa, as tense as his father.

It had been bad of Daniel to run away from school, but Cameron secretly agreed with his reasons why. Cameron had sent Daniel to Cambridge because all the Mackenzies had gone there, and he’d had a place secured there when he was born.

Truth to tell, Cameron hadn’t minded Daniel underfoot on this trip. He’d enjoyed watching him and Ainsley laugh uproariously over whatever they found funny that day, the two of them trying every pasty in Paris or dragging Cameron to obscure parts of the city just to see what was there. Cameron knew he should be more strict about Daniel and Cambridge. A lad needed to go to university, and Cameron should be a parent in control of his son’s life. But he didn’t have the heart. If Daniel were truly unhappy, they’d think of something else.

Cameron looked back at the two of them waiting side by side on the sofa for his answer, his wife and his son watching him with the same intensity.

“Monte Carlo,” he said.

Ainsley blinked. “Your heart is in Monte Carlo?”

Cameron didn’t smile. “I’m tired of self-satisfied Parisians and artists full of their own genius. I put up with that enough with Mac. At Monte Carlo, you’ll meet a much more interesting mix of people.”

“I will?”

Cameron turned to them, fixing them both with his topaz gaze. “You’ll like it, Ainsley. Not one person there has pure motives in mind. A picklock might find such corruption entertaining.”

“That does sound more interesting than self-satisfied artists full of their own genius.”

“And the sunrise over the sea from the top of the city is beautiful.” That was true. Cameron wanted to show the view to Ainsley, to see her delight when she beheld it. He remembered Ian watching Beth watch the fireworks, finding more joy in her than the show of light. Cameron understood now.

Ainsley winked at Daniel and stretched her feet in her new patent-leather boots. “I have only one question about this oh-so-exciting Monte Carlo,” she said.