Liam stopped short of shoving his brother into his study, and he slammed the door behind him. His hands shook with dark needs and murderous impulses. Fury sizzled through his blood, riding the waves of the whisky he’d downed at dinner to keep from hurling his knife across the table at Thorne.
Pacing the room, he wrestled with the seething beast clawing its way through him. The study was too small. Why had he chosen to do this here? Oh aye, because this was the only room that didn’t carry the essence of that woman. She’d never been in here. Never left her sweet floral scent to invoke the enticing memory of her skin.
God, he felt as though he’d truly been possessed. A great number of the deadly sins surged within him and fought for supremacy when it came to Mena. Pride, envy, greed, lust. And at the moment … wrath.
He couldn’t even bring himself to look at his vainglorious brother for fear of what he would do. Gavin St. James was handsome in that disarming way the lasses melted for. He’d always been thus. Every time Liam looked at his brother, he imagined Mena Lockhart pressed against him.
Was that why she’d run from Liam after he’d kissed her? Why she had avoided him after that day in the chapel? Why she seemed so guilty and secretive tonight, as if she were frightened of discovery?
Was there something between his brother and his governess? Was he being lied to?
Again?
“Did ye fuck her in the woods, Thorne?” He posited the question in such a low register, he wasn’t even certain he’d heard himself correctly.
“What?”
“My governess, ye daft bastard, did ye put yer sullied hands on her?” he thundered. Had he tasted of her sweetness? Did her lips part for his plunder as they had for Liam’s? He had to know, even if the knowledge might just push him past the edge of his own sanity.
“Technically I’m legitimate, so not a bastard in the truest sense of the word.” The laconic flippancy in Thorne’s tone lit fire to the alcohol already in Liam’s veins.
“Stop saying nonsense to sound clever,” he barked.
“I doona know, brother, ye should try it sometime.”
Liam spun around. Thorne still hadn’t wiped that sly smirk away from his mouth. Though when Liam took a step forward, the smile quickly died.
“Mark me, Gavin, I will rip yer spine out through yer throat and not feel a thing—”
“All right.” The earl put his hands up in a gesture of surrender, knowing that when Liam used his real name, he’d hit his mark. “Nay, I left the woman as untouched as I found her, I promise ye.”
Liam leaned in; his generally uncanny ability to identify a lie with abject clarity had somehow become maddeningly obscure. “Then why talk to her like ye made her yer mistress in my house, at my table?” he demanded through clenched teeth.
Thorne’s shrug was meant to be conciliatory. “I was flirting is all, Liam. I’m a wee sweet on the lass. She’s a bonny lady with a pair of tits I’m not like to get a chance to—”
Liam seized two handfuls of his brother’s suit and nigh yanked the man off his feet. “Open yer filthy gob about her again and I’ll see yer guts spilled on the flagstones.”
Thorne’s verdant eyes widened, not just with fear, but with disbelief. “Ye want her,” he marveled.
“Haud yer wheesht.” Releasing him roughly enough to make his brother stumble, Liam turned to his desk, trying his best to slow the frantic hammering of his heart.
“My God, Liam. After all this time of self-imposed isolation, ye’re hard for the governess?”
“I said. Haud. Yer. Wheesht!” Unable to stand it, Liam lashed at the closest thing he could get his hands on. A sheaf of papers, their brass paperweight, and a box of writing implements flew into the bookcase behind the desk and clattered to the ground in chaotic disarray. Struggling to fill his lungs beneath the pressure tightening about his ribs like a vise, Liam stalked to the sideboard and grappled with the stopper in the decanter while looking for a glass big enough for his desperate thirst.
“Are ye starting to have a problem with the drink, brother?” Thorne asked coolly.
“My only problem is that I doona have any.”
Fuck the glass. Liam tipped his head back, taking a large gulp of the Scotch that bore his own title. He allowed the liquid fire to slide down his chest and ease the way for the subsequent inhales. At this point, his breath was likely flammable, but he didn’t care. It was drinking or fratricide, and he didn’t want Jani to have to clean blood off the study floor.
“A man like ye canna have a woman like her, Liam.” Not many people denied him and lived to tell about it. It surprised Liam his brother had the stones. “Any man can see that someone’s handled her roughly. In hands like yers, she’d be broken, just like every woman who dared love a Laird of Ravencroft.”
His brother’s words landed on his turned back like daggers. The truth shredded through his flesh, his bones, and into the heart they protected. A masterfully wielded blade, was his brother’s tongue. As it had ever been.
“Do ye not think I know that?” Liam asked darkly as he now took the time to find a whisky glass. “Do ye think she’d fare any better in yer hands? A gambler. A libertine. A fickle reprobate who collects women like trinkets. Who has no compunction about taking his own brother’s wife?”
The tightening in Thorne’s features told Liam his own blade had struck true. “Doona bring Colleen into this.” He pushed off the arm of the chair he’d been pretending to lounge against. “If ye remember, brother, ye took her from me first.”
“Ye know full well I didna ken she was yers. Father hid it from me, ye never said a thing, and that—” Liam had thought many terrible things about his late wife over the course of the years. But he never dared utter them, lest he escalate the dangerous hostility that had formed between them. Now, it would just be speaking ill of the dead. “That woman married me over ye because I was a marquess and ye merely an earl. She only wanted the brother who would inherit. How could ye still love her after that?”
Gavin looked away, a soul-deep pain cutting through his permanently sardonic expression. “There is no stopping yer soul once it finds its mate. We both know she wasna right. That she wasna … well. But there were days she was lucid. When she was … luminous.” Thorne’s eyes softened as they gazed into the past. “Those days were worth the pain I bore on her behalf.” He looked up at Liam. His hair gleaming the color of the malted barley they shoveled from the kilns, his eyes darkened with rare sobriety. “I like to think that if she’d been.… of sound mind, she’d have married me.”
“Think what ye want.” Liam turned and regarded his brother over another numbing sip. They’d already had this out a decade ago. Colleen had been mad, and that madness had turned her into something hateful. Spiteful. Someone … not altogether human. Or perhaps the constant duality of humanity had been too much for her. Maybe she’d just not learned to lock away the wretchedness of it like most tend to do. “Ye’d have been welcome to her,” he snarled. “Hell, ye helped yerself to her anyway.”
Thorne’s eyes flashed like a blanket of lightning over the emerald moors. “One night, Liam. Ye’d been gone so long. She was lonely and I was in love. It was only ever that night.”
“So ye say.”
“So. It. Is. We’ve been over this before, brother. I told her that we’d made a mistake. That I had to confess the sin we’d committed against ye.” Thorne’s teeth were clenched now, his handsome features contorting into something cruel and malicious.
“I bled for ye,” Liam said, so low it was almost a whisper. There it was. The bleak truth left to fester between them. Liam’s back bore the scars that should have been his brother’s. He had taken on so much cruelty, so much pain for the boy he tried to protect from their evil father. “I bled for ye and ye still betrayed me.”
“We all bled plenty.” Thorne’s register also dropped dangerously low.
“Ye doona ken the half of what I’ve done…” He couldn’t bring himself to say the words. “Ye were too young to remember—”
“Oh, I remember many of yer deeds, brother. I remember ye whipping that whore. I remember that no one has seen her since.”
“Are ye accusing me of—”
“I remember what happened to Colleen when I told her we had to confess. She was so afraid of ye, of the Demon Highlander, that she threw herself off the roof. What does that tell ye about what kind of husband you were to her? What does that say about what kind of man ye are?”
To Liam’s surprise, a bitter sense of amusement permeated the rage fueled by pain and alcohol. “I ken exactly what kind of man I am. I am a monster. A monster who has earned the title of demon. I’ve killed more men with my bare hands than most soldiers have the opportunity to shoot at. I have done every evil deed required of me without question. Without hesitation. I’ve wiped out bloodlines, Gavin, and ridden through entire cities like the angel of death. I’ve spilled enough blood to turn the sea red. I’ve heard enough screams to fill eternity with their echoes.” His grip tightened on his glass. “I am tired of being reminded of just who and what I am, not because I doona want to remember, but because I’ve never forgotten. And doona intend to.”
Liam took perverse enjoyment out of the darkness gathering across Thorne’s usually light features. “But I ken what ye are as well, and I will see ye hanged before I’d see ye with Miss Lockhart. So mark me when I order ye to leave her alone.”
“You mean leave her to ye?” Thorne spat, his own fire igniting behind the mask of geniality. “I’m not one of yer sycophantic soldiers, Liam. Ye canna sanction me. Ye canna fire me from the distillery. And ye sure as fuck canna order me away from whomever I wish to keep company with.”
He could kill the lad. This wasn’t the first time he’d considered it. “She is in my employ. Not only that, she’s under my protection.”
“How noble of ye,” Thorne mocked. “But I doubt ye’ve learned the difference between protection and command. If she seeks my company, ye canna very well physically stop her from doing so.”
“Ye’ll not take her,” Liam growled. “Not this time.”
Thorne’s smile showed entirely too many teeth. “What is that charming expression? Oh, yes. All’s fair in love and war.”
Liam advanced, prowling forward until he was toe to toe and nose to nose with his brother, whose usual smile had been replaced by a sardonic twist. But Liam was able to look past that. To see what his brother hid behind all his bravado and pride.
There was fear. And perhaps regret, if he looked deeply enough. But love?
“It would be the last mistake ye ever made, little brother, to go to war with me.”
The arrogant smirk returned. “The war would have ended before it even began, Liam. Though she’s a kind and good woman, Philomena Lockhart has secrets. A lass like her could never put her heart in hands like yers. And a man like ye couldna love a woman he didna trust. Ye would dominate her, smother her, and finally ye would break her, fail her, and ultimately ruin her.” Thorne drew himself up to his full height, the eyes he used to charm and disarm so many glittering with unmistakable meaning. “Just like ye ruined Colleen. Like ye failed Hamish. Just like our father broke both our mothers. Have another drink, my laird, ye grow more like him every day.”
Liam’s beast reared like a wild stallion. “Get out,” he seethed.
“With pleasure.” Thorne’s look of disgust preceded his lengthy stride to the door. He wrenched it open, pausing with his hand on the knob. Though he didn’t turn around, he touched his chin to his shoulder, obviously not comprehending how close to death he stood.
“There is treachery in this keep, Liam. Something nefarious is going on right beneath yer nose and ye’re too blind or too proud to see it. Someone’s trying to sabotage ye, to turn those closest to ye against ye. I’d look to my own. I’d be questioning whom I could trust.”
“Believe me, I already am.” Liam’s muscles tensed to the point of breaking. It was as though he turned to stone beneath his skin. His rage was a volcano, the lava dousing him and hardening, building upon itself until it had become a living thing.
“Ye sit on top of a lonely mountain, Laird,” Thorne continued. “Ye’ve fortified it well so ye keep out all yer enemies, and barricade yourself against the screams and blood in your past. But no one else is in there with ye, Liam, and ye’ll die alone. Just like our father did.”
“I said get. The fuck. Out,” he roared. The door closed behind his brother just in time for Liam’s whisky glass to shatter against it rather than the back of Thorne’s skull.
And then he was alone. Alone and seething. Like coals shoveled onto a boiler fire, a myriad of memories, needs, and failings heaped into the flames of his rage, fanning it into something familiar and lethal.
But there was no one here to kill.
Head swimming with the heady rush of intoxicated fury, Liam stared at the flames in his fireplace, the only sound the whoosh of the fire as it devoured the air surrounding it. Would that he could control his own inferno … contain it within a casing of mortar and stone. Feeding it just enough to keep those he protected, those he loved, warm and safe.
Would that it didn’t consume him, this unquenchable rage. That his very flesh wouldn’t burn with it, becoming mottled and red from the force of its heat.
His blood, it boiled. His wounds, they burned. The lashes on his back itched and stung as though flayed open once again.
His head pounded in time to the beating of his heart.
Unable to stare at the flames any longer, or allow his own demons to scream at him through the silence, Liam stalked to the sideboard and reached for more Scotch.
Finding the decanter empty, he surmised that the closest bottle would be in the library.
As he prowled his own keep, it seemed that the castle bent and swayed with malevolent shadows. The shades of his demons waiting impatiently to drag him down to his final judgment. They were behind every tapestry. Slithering beneath the carpets and the cold stones. They were in the rain, hurled at the castle turrets by an unforgiving wind. Lightning sliced through the storm, slashing into the hall and casting a nightmare in terrible white.
The specter of a black-cloaked figure with demon-red eyes lurked not two spans in front of him. The lightning passed, plunging the hall again into darkness.
Liam had a knife in his hand before the thunder shook the stones of the keep. “Are ye the devil come to take me?” he demanded. Or was it the Brollachan seeking shelter from the storm? The hair on Liam’s body lifted with awareness, with warning. The fetid stench of death cloyed about his senses as though the reaper breathed in his direction.
Those eyes. That form. They’d been familiar and yet so utterly foreign.
“I wondered if it would be ye who came to drag me to hell,” Liam slurred, feeling both relieved and unsteady, as the Scotch seemed to release into his blood all at once and cause his world to tilt on its axis.
A high, soft feminine voice permeated the darkness from the direction of the library, along with a gentle but unintelligible masculine reply.
The lightning flashed again, and Liam found himself alone in the hall, his blood pounding through his veins with the force and fury of a blacksmith’s hammer.
Had his sullied conscience begun to conjure apparitions?
“Father?” Rhianna called from the library. “Is that ye out there?”
Liam made the few steps to the library door and reached for the frame to steady himself.
Rhianna and Jani sat across a chessboard from each other. A cup of fragrant tea filled with Indian spices steamed at his daughter’s elbow, and a fire crackled in the hearth.
Jani leaped to his feet and away from the table with all the alacrity of a guilty scoundrel. Rhianna, completely relaxed, turned in her chair and smiled brilliantly.
Liam loved her so much it ached. “What are ye about?” He attempted to keep his voice gentle, though he’d yet to cull the fury swimming through him.
“Ye know I canna sleep in a storm,” she said with a saucy toss of her curls. “So Jani made me tea and I’m teaching him to play chess, which he’s hilariously deplorable at.”
“Is he?” Liam met Jani’s wide, dark eyes over the expanse of the library. The fire threw flecks of light into his black hair and gleamed off the cream and gold kurta he wore.
Liam had spent many a night playing chess with his valet, and Jani had long since learned to best him at it. His eyes narrowed at the boy he knew better than his own son. Another one of his sins he carried with him. A reminder of his own damnation, but one that he esteemed.
He’d thought the hatred had faded from the boy’s eyes over the years. But Jani was becoming a man. Had he just learned to hide it? It seemed unlikely, as Jani never was adept at keeping the emotion from his expressive features. Especially now, when his eyes shone brilliantly with guilt and not a small amount of anxiety.
“Is there anything you require, Laird?” Jani asked.
Suddenly Liam very much didn’t like the idea of his valet and his daughter being alone in the night together. “Where is Miss Lockhart?” He squinted around the room, wishing the shadows would cease their shifting dance. It made his Scotch-soaked head swim.
He’d thought if he found anyone here, it would be his prim governess. She came to this room often. Liam had spied her more than once, poring over titles and mumbling to the books as though they were old friends.
“Well, you sound intriguing,” she’d observe as she scanned the pages. “But perhaps I’m not in the mood for something so loquacious. What about you?” She’d select another title. “A mystery might be in order.” Liam watched her, unobserved, as she fastidiously returned every book to its proper place, lining the spines just so. She never read in the library, favoring the conservatory that looked out over the hill leading down to the sea.
A creature of the sunlight was Miss Lockhart. The very memory of her voice calmed and inflamed him at the same time.
“Miss Lockhart took Andrew up to bed right after you left,” Jani informed him.
“Aye,” Rhianna confirmed. “He said he wasna feeling well, which solves a mystery because they disappeared twice today and I couldna find them. They were likely down in the kitchens going through the apothecary cabinet.”
Liam nodded, speared with a pang of guilt that he’d been too preoccupied to notice that his son may have been ill. “I’ll go look in on him,” he muttered, his notice snagging on the intimate coziness of the room. The crackling fire, the soft light, the fragrant spices.
The glow in Jani’s eyes when he looked at Rhianna.
“I trust that ye’ll not be up late,” he said carefully. “I’ll send Miss Lockhart down to keep ye company.”
To make certain they weren’t alone together for too long.
“We can stop now, if you would rather,” Jani said alertly.
“No!” Rhianna protested. “Ye only want to stop because ye’re losing. Miss Lockhart says ye’ll never learn unless ye see it to the end. Now sit back down and take yer medicine like a man.”
Jani remained standing, his eyes locked on Liam’s as he awaited his orders. As always deferential. Faithful. Suspicion melted into a gruff sort of affection and Liam cleared his throat, cursing the fact that drink always brought the emotion that constantly roiled within him bubbling to the surface and threatening to overflow.
“Take it easy on him, nighean.” Liam summoned a smile for his daughter.
“Ha! Never!” She pointed to Jani’s vacated seat. “I’m going to wallop ye, see if I don’t.”
Liam turned away, thinking morosely that no one had ever regarded him with the patient tenderness the evening fire illuminated on Jani’s sharp, young features when he looked at Rhianna.
Concern for Andrew propelled him up the grand staircase and to the west wing of the castle where his family slept. Where his governess resided. His stride faltered when he passed her closed door. Candlelight slanted over the dark hall from beneath it, and Liam found himself wondering, not for the first time, what she did in the privacy of her own chamber. He would picture her there, letting her hair down and brushing it with long, thoughtful strokes. Or perhaps she’d be in the bath, soaping her creamy skin, her shoulders, her breasts, her white thighs.
And higher. Running her fingers through soft auburn curls, shades darker than her hair and slipping into the folds of—
Liam growled as a twinge of lust seized the muscles beneath his belt and drove blood south until he clenched his teeth against the swelling beneath his kilt.
Now was not the time for that. In fact, it would never be time for that. Not when it came to her.
Andrew’s suite was three doors past the governess’s, and Liam knocked first, in case the boy was still awake. When no response was issued from inside, he swung the door open.
“Andrew?” His voice echoed in the quiet darkness. Venturing forward, he made a quick perusal of the disheveled sheets of his son’s vacant bed.
A deep intake of breath followed the paroxysm of an illogical suspicion. Liam tried to push it away, but it embedded in his skull like the sharp end of a pick, driven with such force he winced.
Since that day in the distillery yard, when the Scotch barrel … escaped, Andrew and his lovely governess had been thick as thieves. They thought Liam didn’t notice their surreptitious glances. The warmth and pleasure that touched Mena’s pretty mouth when she smiled and winked at his son had, on more than one occasion, licked him with troubling and unreasonable notions.
He’d thought the covetousness had been aroused by the obvious fondness blooming amid the two. Because of the distance between Liam and his son, and the intensity between him and Miss Lockhart, the ease and affection with which Andrew and she treated each other these past few days had been enviable.
But what if he’d been blind to something altogether more illicit? What if, in his own desire for the luscious woman, he’d missed a blooming dynamic that was not only troubling, but predatory?
Liam’s own initial sexual experience had been with an older woman. Like Andrew, he’d been a tall boy. Pretty, angular, and rapacious. He’d drawn the attentions of girls and women alike, and had learned quickly what they’d wanted from him.
And what he could take from them.
Something dark and brutal twisted in his gut. A stab of murderous rage that caused a red jealousy to bleed into the wound. Would a woman like Mena Lockhart dare trifle with the son of the Demon Highlander? He wasn’t certain. Hadn’t Rhianna said Andrew and Mena had disappeared together today? Liam, himself, had noticed that they’d seemed to avoid him more than once.
Head swimming with the Scotch he’d had with dinner—had it been three or four snifters?—and whatever had been in the decanter thereafter, Liam stalked out of his son’s empty room and pointed his boots at the light beneath Mena Lockhart’s door. He let the dread that weighed down his organs bloom into the familiar anger that he usually fought, but now embraced.
Ravencroft Keep was full of secrets, and one by one, he was determined to ferret them out.
And deliver swift and retributive justice.
