She truly didn’t understand what it was Ravencroft wanted from her. What he saw in her. Why he would be … be what? Jealous? Surely he could see that she didn’t return the Earl of Thorne’s flirtations.
“I can’t imagine,” she murmured.
Andrew flicked her a perceptive look from beneath his lashes and his slash of a mouth quirked up just a little. “I can.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
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.”