The impact was like two leviathans colliding, and it shook the earth. They went down, swallowed by the vapor, and Mena scrambled away. The cold rasp of stone abraded her fingertips as she pulled herself up by the altar rock and clung to it. The terrible sounds of flesh connecting with flesh in violence echoed through the clearing, and a little part of her died every second she couldn’t see Liam. She wanted to do anything but stand and watch the events unfold before her, but knew the smartest thing to do was to stay out of Liam’s way. She would help no one by putting herself in danger. There were two daggers down there in the mist, and Lord only knew what damage was being done.
Thorne rushed forward, and it was then she realized that he was not alone. Russell barreled in behind him, followed by a stern-looking Thomas Campbell.
“We heard ye scream, lass,” Russell called. “Are ye hurt?”
“No, but the laird—”
Before the clansmen had a chance to reach her, Liam surged out of the mist, his own dirk poised where Hamish’s neck met his mangled shoulder. The laird’s powerful arm bulged with the strain of keeping his wounded brother in check.
“I should kill ye for laying yer hands on her,” he snarled.
“Doona do it, brother.” Thorne approached the two furious Highlanders cautiously. “He has many crimes to answer for.”
“And his justice should be swift,” Liam insisted through clenched teeth. His dark eyes were wide and wild with furious frenzy as the muscles in his arm clenched with the restraint it took not to slide the blade home.
“Hamish. It canna be,” Russell marveled, wearing an identically stricken look to Campbell’s as he took in Hamish’s distorted form. They were seeing a ghost. A hideous, disfigured specter of a man they all once knew. If he wasn’t so evil, he’d have been pitiable.
“Finish what he started if ye have the stones,” Hamish hissed, though he was out of breath. “Ye could just work through slaughtering yer entire family. First yer father, then me.” He turned to Gavin, his lips pulled away from a few sharp teeth. “Ye’ll be next,” he predicted ominously. His face was bleeding from a cut on his head, but in all the chaos of his scars, Mena couldn’t find the source of the wound.
Thorne’s expression faltered, at the revelation of what Liam had done.
He hadn’t known, Mena realized. He hadn’t known that his brother had killed their father.
The earl took his belt off, and gestured for Russell to do the same, his movements methodical. “Let us take him to the dungeon, Liam. We’ll deliver him to the regiment tomorrow by train. I’m certain Trenwyth will have more than a few charges to bring.”
“They’ll only hang him,” Liam gritted out.
“Liam.” Mena stepped forward, reaching for him.
“Stay back,” he ordered. “Doona get close.”
Mena hesitated, letting her hand drop to her side. She wondered who he truly warned her away from. Hamish? Or himself.
“Do ye think I’m finished with ye?” Hamish taunted. “That I’m the only one who would see ye dead?”
“I know you’re angry now.” Mena tried to ballast the poison spewed by Hamish. “But you don’t want your own brother to be just another sin that haunts you.”
She couldn’t tell if she was getting through to him, didn’t know if her words penetrated the haze of pure, white-hot fury radiating from the Demon Highlander’s massive frame.
“I’m sure yer tormentors are legion,” Hamish drawled. “I’ve killed many, but none so much as ye. I admit that I see them at night, the faces of my victims. I find them in my dreams, and sometimes when I’m awake. Do ye see their faces, Liam? Do ye find them in the darkness?”
Ignoring his order, Mena stepped behind Liam and pressed a hand to his back, the soft skin of her palm settling over the interruptions of long-ago wounds that never truly healed. She said nothing as the muscles twitched and shuddered beneath her chilled fingers.
“Nay, brother,” Liam finally said, maneuvering himself so Gavin could bind Hamish’s hands behind him. “I doona find them.… They find me.”
* * *
Liam watched his brothers disappear into the forest, aided by Thomas and Russell. He tried to feel the things he understood that he should be feeling. But he’d grieved for Hamish already. He’d alternately hated and loved his elder brother with the same complicated feelings he’d possessed for his father. They battled the same monstrous rage, only Liam put up more of a fight against it, instead of letting it dissolve his soul completely.
The moment Hamish had touched Mena in violence, his life had become forfeit, just like that fucking bastard who’d harmed her in London, whoever he was.
He could feel Mena’s gaze from behind him as tangible as her kind hand had been on his back. She’d done it again. Bedeviled him with her gentle magic and smothered the flames of his fury with one simple caress.
Anger and aggression still pounded through his veins and thrummed through his muscle, but it was joined by relief and fear.
What must she think of him now? Now that she knew his darkest sins. Now that she completely understood just exactly how damned his soul was. What would he find in her eyes? Revulsion? Terror?
Condemnation?
Awareness prickled along his spine and stung beneath his scars. He knew he was mostly bare, but never had he felt so naked. So exposed. Only one scar in a hundred had remained on his skin, but every single one had lashed at his soul.
Nothing Liam had ever done—no danger he’d ever faced—had taken as much courage as did turning around to meet her unflinching gaze.
Mena used the altar rock to support herself. The indigo mists climbed and caressed her body as though trying to seduce her with embracing wisps of moisture.
She was the most beautiful creature ever crafted of the mystifying and enchanted elements that made up a woman. If he was stone and steel, she was serenity and softness. The long tendrils of her luxurious hair tumbled down her arms and grazed the dramatic flare of her round hips. The flimsy material of her bodice—God love whatever it was called—enhanced more than concealed her breasts as they heaved with her own panting, unsteady breaths.
Christ, he could have lost her tonight. Liam’s knees weakened as he truly realized how close that blade had been held to her delicate throat.
He saw his severe relief mirrored in her lovely, pale eyes.
An ache throbbed deep in his body, as a shudder coursed down the length of his spine, starting at the shoulders and landing at the base, sending heat and desire into his loins. A raw, unbidden sound rose from deep in his chest, and escaped on a breath of undiluted need.
She tilted unsteadily forward, like a siren beckoning him to his destruction. He had about as much power against her.
In that moment, they both knew it.
Nothing else need be said between them. No words or platitudes uttered. No fears or sins confessed. He saw absolution in her eyes. Understanding. Acceptance.
And still he gave her a moment. A warning. A chance to escape.
Because once he got his hands on her, there would be no stopping him.
His body screamed for her, driven with a need to touch and taste that teetered on the brink of madness. Every lurid, wet, aching, shocking, demanding thing he could do to her body raced through his mind and incapacitated him with lust. The drive to fuck overcame every other rational thought or biological need. There wasn’t enough time left in his life to try everything he wanted to do to her, but damned if he wasn’t about to attempt it.
Her lashes swept down for a breathless moment, and then she raised her gaze back to meet his, eyes hooded and lips parted.
Desire.
There was no mistaking it. Not this time.
He surged forward, planted his hands against the rock on either side of her head, and took her offered lips with the desperate hunger of a man denied sustenance for too long.
She surged against him, pressing every curve of her voluptuous body to his. Her full breasts were a delicious crush against his rib cage, and his entire being focused on the weight of them against his bare skin. Her warm mouth opened to him in silken welcome, accepting the possession of his tongue with a soft sigh of capitulation.
This time she was no passive recipient of his kiss. She met his tongue with her own, pressing her mouth against his with the same fervent sense of frenzy.
She clung to him as if he were her only stability in an uncertain world. As though she somehow knew that if she let go of him, everything would fall apart. The gesture was his undoing. The sheer, heartrending honesty in the action. She was unguarded in her passions, uninhibited by the usual wall that surrounded her. It drew him to her, made him want to uncover all her secrets, to lay her bare for him to soothe and soften the rough edges of her life. To offer himself as a guardian, as a vigilant sentinel against all that would cause her pain.
Their mouths fused with reckless passion, he lost himself to his reverent worship of her. He found salvation in her surrender, and he knew that in offering it to him, she’d gained an ardent devotee.
His hands explored her lush body with all the eagerness of an untried boy and all the patient skill of an adept. Only a fragile layer of silk and lace separated his hands and her skin. Pausing at the swell of her cleavage, he stroked the cleft, and drew his finger along the lacy line of her bodice. He knew the nipples beneath her corset pebbled, and the need to take them in his mouth drove him mad with anticipation.
She moaned her pleasure, dissolving into liquid shivers beneath his fingertips.
Needing no further provocation, he slipped the tiny capped sleeves of her emerald dress off her shoulders and peeled her bodice down to her waist. A black corset hoisted her generous breasts into half orbs of alabaster flesh, and Liam reluctantly broke the kiss to enjoy the vision.
He stared at her, momentarily paralyzed by a hushed and splendid wonder. The world seemed to recede, to cease spinning on its axis, as if her beauty could command the cosmos to hold its breath in deference to her magnificence.
“Save me, lass.” His groan rumbled from somewhere deeper than he could physically imagine as he finally found the voice to plead for what his soul could not. “I’m drowning in my need and I— Say the words that willna make me a monster in the morning.”
One refusal from her lips would shatter him into a thousand pieces.
She rested her head back against the stone with an ardent sigh, and splayed her fingers right above the warm skin over his heart.
“I want you, Liam,” she said in a clear voice turned husky by desire. “Take me.”
His dark soul exalted and every last bit of restraint caught fire and became ash. He was going to claim her so thoroughly she’d never be the same. He wanted no other name on her lips. No other lips on her skin. He wanted no other man to touch her the way he was about to touch her.
And come the morning, they’d all leave for London, where he would rid himself of the last of his ghosts, and claim her not just as his lover, but as his wife.
* * *
Mena felt every bit of his low, strangled growl in her loins as he surged against her once more and took her lips with a primitive possession. Something about the way he looked at her, as if she were a morsel about to be devoured, was alternately exalting and petrifying.
But his kiss set her body aflame with electrifying, life-affirming need.
She was acutely aware of the power in his arms as they roamed her body, and only made a small sound of shock when he broke her corset, freeing her breasts to the kiss of the autumn night. His mouth branded a trail down her jaw to lave at the hollow between her shoulder and her throat before moving lower.
His hand lifted her breast to his mouth, and Mena’s surprise turned into pure, sensual astonishment as he closed his hot lips over the cool skin of her taut nipple. His mouth was both hungry and unhurried as he sucked and nipped. Teasing and tantalizing until she no longer felt the chill of the night, he paid each of her breasts equal attention. She felt dazed and feverish, threading her fingers in his glossy black hair as she watched him feast on her abundant flesh.
A steady, insistent throbbing clenched her feminine muscles around pervasive emptiness. An acute ache speared her until she arched her back against the novel and unbearable intensity of it, and struggled to draw breath.
He straightened, his skin glowing with a sheen of mist and his hair tousled by her kneading fingers, and his dark, questioning gaze searched hers.
The cuffs at his arms and neck gleamed metallic in the moonlight. The runes he’d painted on his skin little more than darker knots on the muscled planes of his body.
She couldn’t believe a man this magnificent could wear a look of such worship when making love to her. She, who’d always been taunted for her height, her weight, her lack of feminine fragility, felt as substantial as a scrap of lace, unstitched by the unparalleled force of his masculinity.
The mystic night lent her a boldness she’d never before possessed as she reached out to again splay her hand over steely muscle that covered his racing heart, caress up to his iron-sculpted shoulders, and down the swells of his liberally veined arms.
Never again would she have the opportunity to appreciate such a rare and primal specimen of lethal virility, and she wanted to take a moment to savor the feel of all that smooth skin stretched taut over unyielding strength.
Suddenly her hands were pinned above her head, and he was filling her mouth with his tongue. She tasted the salt of her skin on his lips and the pervasive ache between her legs became a flooding, insistent sort of pain. He kissed her with such scorching thoroughness, he quite erased the last vestiges of rational thought.
“Now,” she sobbed against his mouth, too distressed to feel shame at the pleading note in her voice.
His dark noise was full of masculine victory as he continued his seductive assault on her lips, caressing down the soft curve of her hip, then slid lower, gathering the folds of her skirts in his hand, tugging them up her leg.
Mena’s fingers blindly gripped the stone behind her as frantically as she grasped for her sanity.
Then he dropped to his knees.
“What are you doing?” she gasped, reaching for him, meaning to pull him back against her.
“Doona touch me, lass,” he commanded, sliding his hands up beneath her dress, his calluses rasping against the silk of her stockings with a delightfully wicked sensation. “I’ll not be able to stop myself from taking ye.”
Her brows drew together in bemused consternation. “But I told you that you could take me.” She was almost panting now, as though she’d run a great length.
“Aye.” He chuckled, his clever fingers stopping to toy with a garter, effectively rendering her witless. “I give before I take, lass. It’ll always be thus.”
“But I don’t unders—” The rest of her breath left her on a rush as his hand found its way inside of her drawers and sifted through her damp curls. Pleasure spiraled through her as his hand found the flesh that had been causing her such aching distress. Her breath became nothing but broken gasps as he rent her intimate garments and delved within the swollen folds, his fingers becoming instantly slippery with the abundant wetness he found there. Any thoughts of embarrassment disintegrated into the stunning pleasure he expertly coaxed from her with the slightest of movements.
His head dipped below the mists and disappeared. Her skirts lifted. His hair grazed the tender skin of her thighs for a shocking moment before he made a fluid, magical movement that buckled her knees and eased her thighs apart.
Then he was there between them, settling her thighs against his shoulders.
In all her life as a married woman, she’d never experienced the brutish, straining satisfaction she’d glimpsed on her husband’s face as he attained his climax on her. And though she’d been forced to submit to any indignity he could devise, he’d never even considered her pleasure.
Touched, scandalized, apprehensive, and unbearably aroused, Mena opened her mouth to protest when his wicked, sinuous lips nudged against her closed body, and then licked it open, delving into her sex.
His moan vibrated against her, driving little tendrils of bliss through her core before letting them escape to her limbs. His tongue was at once lewd and unutterably sweet as it glided against the swollen nub that throbbed with torturous need.
Incredible agony slammed into her as he parted her folds with his fingers and suckled the aperture. He breathed only in moans as he tasted her, and the hedonistic pleasure conveyed in the sounds brought her to the edge of madness.
“I can’t,” she cried, feeling her knees melt.
His lips left her with a wet, wicked sound. “Ye will,” he breathed against her most intimate flesh.
“I’m going to fall,” she warned weakly, her hips undulating toward his mouth with mortifying wantonness.
“Fall apart in my arms, lass,” he soothed, his hands caressing around to fill his palms with the flesh of her backside, making a cradle of her hips. “I’ll not let ye go.”
Then he burrowed his mouth inside her slick folds once again.
Mena shivered with carnal bliss, then tensed with the building, aching pulses as each glide of his swirling tongue elicited sensations she’d not known herself capable of. A cataclysm of pleasure seized her with such force, she truly did feel as though it unmade her.
Distantly, she heard the low, lurid sounds that ripped their way out of her as she shuddered and pulsed with unparalleled, unfathomable bliss. Tension rushed from her, released with slick pulses of rolling, cresting delight. She whimpered and arched, strained and bucked, and still he pressed against her with that gentle, hot tongue, ever the conqueror, until she pleaded with him for mercy.
He finally relented, his wicked mouth reluctantly leaving her. But as he again rose from the mist, his sinister features were anything but merciful. Dark eyes glittered at her from a face etched with animalistic hunger.
Mena was too boneless to be afraid. Too drugged with pleasure to either anticipate or hesitate until the moonlight briefly reflected off the storm that had gathered in his onyx eyes.
This was the Demon Highlander, and he was about to take not only her body, but her soul. The force of his passion seemed to reach her a moment before his lips did. He backed her fully against the stone, devouring her with lips that tasted of sweet musk and intimacy.
Her gown was suddenly above her waist, and he pushed his kilt aside before seizing her thighs and splitting them around his lean hips, supporting her with his shocking strength. The smooth head of his cock caressed the still-pulsating flesh of her sex, becoming instantly wet with the evidence of her release.
He was large. So devastatingly thick that a flash of fear speared her just as he slid into her with a swift, desperate stroke. There was pressure, there was even pain, but as soon as she would have cringed away, he withdrew. As though understanding her dilemma, he feathered kisses over her clenched eyelids, crooning low words to her in that indescribably beautiful language of his before plunging forward again. Even though he moved even deeper, she felt her body open to accept him, enclosing him in warm, slippery flesh.
Pressure morphed into pleasure, radiating from where their bodies joined in such a way that she felt awash in a pool of wet desire, held together only by the warm, hard masculine flesh around her.
And inside her.
“Can ye take more of me?” he panted.
Mena’s eyes flew open. How could there possibly be more? He withdrew yet again, gazing down at her with dilated eyes as he surged forward. He touched a place inside her she’d not known existed, and Mena tossed her head from one side to the other, letting out a high cry of ecstasy.
“Yes,” he whispered fervently. “I knew ye would take all of me, Mena.” He drove forward again. And again. Thrusting with controlled urgency, the storm gathering into gale, and then a hurricane. Lifting her incredibly higher, he angled his cock so that it slid along that place deep inside her, the one that made her scream and clamp around him, bearing down on his hard length as it penetrated her again and again.
Using the rock to press back against him, Mena found herself straining to meet his thrusts, setting a rhythm. She anticipated each slippery invasion with eager delight and mourned his every withdrawal. It was as though a bond weaved between them within the Samhain mist, pledging themselves to this night, to this act, to the pleasure they found in each other’s bodies and the ease they gave to the other’s wounded soul.
When another climax blinded her with pure bliss, she locked her legs around his pistoning hips, pulling him impossibly deeper. Shivering pleasure assaulted her in wave after unrelenting wave.
He roared her name to the sky as her pulsing body gripped and stroked at the swelling length of him. Hot spurts of his release spilled inside her. His great body locked with spasms as he crushed her to him and joined her in that place where right and wrong no longer mattered. Where consequences didn’t exist. Where tomorrow was an opportunity instead of a liability.
They stayed in that place for a long time after the storm of pleasure had passed. She locked in the strength of his arms, and he cradled within the softness of her body.
“I find, lass, that I doona want to let ye go,” he confessed.
Mena’s fingers tenderly searched the stark angles and planes of his beloved features. What a man this was. A rare, brilliant, incredible man, and, as of this moment, he belonged to her.
The wondrousness of it was unfathomable.
At her touch, he rolled his hips forward once again, and Mena’s eyes peeled wide as she realized that he was still hard, still reaching that quivering swath of pure, burning sensation deep within her.
He’d … finished. She’d been certain of it.
His teeth flashed a brilliant white in his swarthy face as he shrugged. “It’s a Mackenzie trait,” he said blithely by way of explanation, before he began to move in slow, but insistent thrusts. “Once I’m done here, we’ll probably only make it back to the keep before I’m ready to take ye again.”
“Oh, my,” was all she could say as teasing heat and pleasure stole all her capacity for speech as he began his tireless climb toward bliss once again.
