The Highlander (23 page)

“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.