She’d been brave.
Clutching the flowers with white knuckles, she’d not even winced as the thorns had pierced her delicate flesh.
Because the entire time she’d stood against him, she’d been too terrified to notice.
All suspicion and—he finally admitted to himself—jealousy drained from him as he watched her courage likewise desert her. As the haze of red receded from his vision, he noted the details that supported her story. She smelled like the sea and the forest and late-summer herbs. Beneath that, the unmistakable smell of a wet dog clung to her damp bodice.
Her skirts were soiled and damp, but her blouse remained clean and her hair was undisturbed in its intricate coiffure. If she’d had a proper go with Gavin St. James, she’d be a disheveled mess. An image of her danced into his mind, lips swollen from rough kisses and her luxurious hair wild and spilling down her back. Naked flesh flushed with passion and begging to be touched, tasted, nay, worshipped.
“Christ,” he whispered.
Never in his long, regret-filled life had he felt like such an unmitigated arse.
Liam tried to stop. Told himself to turn, to march away and leave this conversation for another time. But somehow he was reaching for her again, his fingers circling her wrists with all the infinite gentleness he could muster.
She gave little resistance as he pulled her hands away from her face, revealing her pale, pinched features.
And the haunted eyes of a refugee.
He’d seen the same look on the faces of victims from the Orient to India and Africa. The question in their forlorn gazes lurking behind the exhaustion and despair.
Are you going to be the next one to hurt me?
Hurting people was something he’d always excelled at, something his superiors in the military had noticed right away. They’d honed him from a violent youth into an efficient weapon and had unleashed him upon their enemies. Pain became his arsenal and his ally. In his long life, he’d hurt so very many.
But causing her pain seemed as unfathomable as did erasing the sins of the past.
Liam hated himself almost as much as he loathed whoever had put those shadows in her eyes. He’d relish using his considerable skills to bring the word pain a new and horrific perception to that man.
Grappling his temper, he schooled the wrath from his features as he searched his person for a handkerchief.
“Mo àilleachd,” he whispered gently.
Her eyes sharpened with a question, but she remained still and watchfully silent as he pressed his handkerchief to the few small wells of blood.
“Tha mi duillch … Maith mi.”
Forgive me.
Liam had never apologized before, and could only bring himself to do so now in his native tongue. Perhaps because he asked too much? That he was beyond forgiveness.
Had been for years.
Miss Lockhart searched his face with those huge, haunted eyes, her entire body still, yet coiled to spring away, like a rabbit beneath a stroking hand.
Working his jaw as though grinding his pride down enough so he could swallow it, he flicked her a penitent look. “I vow on my honor as Laird of the Mackenzie clan never to strike ye.”
She watched him with care, testing each movement of his muscle, assessing every change in his expression. “I do not question your honor, Laird, but it seems that I, also, may trust no one’s word.”
She’d heard such a promise before. And it had likely been broken.
So where did that leave them?
A small tendril of her lovely hair escaped its pin, caught the breeze, and snagged over her soft features. Liam released her uninjured wrist to reach up and brush the curl away from the nearly healed bruise on her cheek.
She winced, but did not flinch away.
“I’ve been the cause of enough such wounds in my life to recognize one made by a fist,” he murmured. He wanted to say that he’d never raised his hand to a woman … but a terrible night in his youth would have made him a liar, and a familiar shame choked him into silence.
Her throat worked over a swallow, and the tension loosened, if only the slightest measure.
“I’ll believe that yer walk through the forest with Gavin St. James was innocent, lass … if ye admit ye’ve been keeping a secret from me.”
Her lashes swept down over her pale cheeks, and it warmed Liam that she was a terrible liar. An endearing trait in a woman.
“This was no carriage accident,” he prodded. “Some bastard struck ye, did he not?”
The backs of his fingers caressed her cheek, the satin skin cool and unutterably soft beneath his work-roughened hands.
She stared at the space between them for several uncertain moments, and gave a barely perceptible nod.
“Tell me,” he urged.
Her features became indescribably bleak. “I—I can’t. Please don’t ask that of me.”
The sun gave one last explosion of light as it finished its dip below the trees, setting fire to her hair. Her jade eyes became luminous with unshed tears.
Never in his life had Liam seen anything so heartrendingly beautiful.
It unsettled him. It was as though when she looked at him, she saw not the man he struggled to be, but the man he truly was.
The demon he tried to keep locked away, but that he’d very nearly unleashed upon her.
A protective instinct welled from deep in his gut and seized his chest. It was wrong, and it was dangerous, but it was as undeniable and inevitable as the coming night. This woman, this stranger Farah Blackwell had sent him, she was intelligent, capable, indescribably lovely …
And she was running from something. From someone?
Perhaps that was why her perceptive gaze disturbed him, caused him to wonder what those observant eyes saw when she looked at him. Why did he care? He’d not done so before. Why did he look down at her now and yearn to be the savior she so obviously needed?
Because he’d never been that to anyone before. Indeed, it had always been the opposite. He’d been the one to run from. The Demon Highlander. The man from whom there was no salvation.
Only pain.
God, but he was tired. Tired of the fear he read in the eyes of others. The deference. The expectation.
The English loved him for the atrocities he committed for their empire. His clan hated him for the atrocities committed by his father, but they needed his land, his business, to survive. So they tolerated him, and feared him, and obeyed him. Avoided his temper because his wrath had become legend.
But what if, just once, he inspired a different emotion? What if he used what made him hard and dangerous to protect something soft and vulnerable?
Someone rare and brilliant and beautiful.
What if, in return, he found the thing he sought most in this world?
Peace.
Testing the strand of silken hair between his thumb and forefinger, he tucked it behind the shell of her ear.
“Do ye know what this land was called before it was Wester Ross, before it was Scotland even? A name that is still whispered to this day?”
Her brows drew together, creating a little wrinkle of confusion between them. “I confess I do not,” she said carefully, her mistrust of this subject change apparent.
“Comraich.” He murmured the word with all the reverence it deserved. “It means sanctuary. Protection. People have been climbing the Bealach na Bà Pass to Wester Ross to hide for thousands of years.”
She caught her lip in her teeth, and Liam’s gaze snagged there. “Is that what ye’ve done, Miss Lockhart? Have ye come here in search of refuge?”