Maybe she’d won a personal victory tonight, standing up to the marquess’s unreasonable temper; but the cost of such a victory might well be regrettably high.
“Ye were wrong.” The pain and shame in the deep voice ripped through the stillness of the night with enough force to leave a wound.
Both hands flew to her mouth to contain a scream as Mena whirled around.
Moonlight rimmed the dark silhouette of the marquess in silver. His visage remained masked by the night, though his body dwarfed the chair in which he reclined, obscured by the shadows that seemed to embrace him as one of their own.
The Demon Highlander was not one to wait until the light of day when cooler heads prevailed. He’d never leave a challenge unanswered.
Mena swallowed around a throat closing with fear. No, he’d deal her fate to her here in the dark.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Ye were wrong,” Liam repeated, though he hadn’t wanted to say anything at all. Nay, he’d wished to be a ghost, an invisible specter who could play voyeur to her mysterious feminine nighttime rituals. But she’d have turned and found him eventually, and every moment that passed without a word between them became more dangerous to them both.
To her body. To his soul.
She was a goddess shrouded in silver beams. Naked beneath her wrapper, her lush form was perfectly outlined by the moonlight piercing the thin fabric.
Liam had known she was a voluptuous woman, had often speculated in his quiet moments about the body she might be hiding beneath her corset and many skirts. But nothing in his life could have prepared him for what he’d witnessed mere minutes ago before the debacle in the hallway. Her nude form would forever be the image branded on the inside of his eyelids. Her creamy shoulders glowing in the candlelight as her luxurious hair fell in loose waves down her back, vibrant as a sunset reflecting off a waterfall. He’d known her breasts were generous, but his palms itched at the memory of their ripe, rosy-tipped perfection, quivering with the force of her astonishment.
They’d even fill hands as large as his, maybe to overflowing. The thought caused his mouth to water and his eyes to close against the unadulterated lust that rocked him to his core.
It wasn’t fair. To see her thus was to be a damned soul given a glimpse of heaven. Forever denied. The cruelty of it was enough to break him.
“I know.” Her humble admission confused him for a moment, and he opened his eyes to see her lower her hands from her mouth to wrap them around her middle.
“I was wrong, unutterably wrong to keep Andrew’s secret from you. There is no excusing my decision, and—”
“Nay.” He lifted a hand to stop her and didn’t miss the way she flinched, even though the length of an entire room lay between them. The reflexive action set his teeth on edge. “I meant, ye were mistaken about … I did have a dog when I was a lad.”
Backlit by the moon as she was, Liam couldn’t make out her expression, though her bewilderment seemed as tangible as the floor beneath him.
“You did?” she asked.
“Aye.”
“And … you returned to my room to inform me of that?”
Liam hated the careful evenness in her voice. The uncertainty and apprehension his actions had stirred within her. He wanted that to cease, but it seemed everything he did exacerbated her fear of him.
“Aye,” he answered again.
“That I was wrong?”
“Aye. Nay. That is … not only that … I…” He sifted through thoughts as dark and muddled as the evening air. It seemed all the alcohol had gone to his head and all the blood had settled in his groin and nothing was working as it should.
“Then why else did you come, my laird?” she queried softly. “What are you doing here in the dark?”
“I…” He knew he owed both of them the answer to that question. After she’d stunned him by dressing him down in the middle of his own keep, he’d planted his boots firmly in the direction of his rooms at the opposite end of the long west wing. But, the farther his feet had carried him away from her, the colder he’d become. The heavier his burdens had weighed upon him, until his shoulders and neck felt as though they’d snap from the strain. So he’d turned around, not at all understanding his own actions, and stumbled back into her room.
The scent of lavender and roses had lingered in the air, and his knees had given out when he’d spied the drying bouquet of the flowers he’d sent her tied to a metal accent of her vanity. Dried but fragrant, displayed like a treasure.
He’d sat where he’d landed in the chair, knowing the husky register of her voice would soothe the restless beast inside of him. That her feminine presence would remind him that he was human. That he was capable of not just temper and fire and fury, but of amusement and tenderness and … whatever it was that expanded in his chest when she was nearby.
She seemed to be the soft place his thoughts landed whenever they would wander. Hers was the sweet voice he clung to when the demons of his past screamed in his head. When he thought of beauty, he saw her face. When he felt hard and cold as iron, it was the fantasy of her supple pliability that warmed his blood. She seemed to be the only being that could temper the flames of his rage.
What was he doing here in the dark? He knew not, only that he’d followed some kind of instinct to find her, like a wounded animal searching for a safe haven.
“His name was Brutus, and my father killed him.” The confession ripped from Liam’s lips before he could call it back, and hung in between them with a weighty vibration.
Her arms dropped to her sides, and Liam wondered if she realized that she’d taken a tentative step toward him.
“Your … dog?”
He nodded, abruptly feeling too raw and exposed to realize that she might not see the movement in the dark. He wanted to retreat from what he’d just told her, to draw back inside of himself. But the memories lived in there, and he didn’t want their company tonight.
Only hers.
“Why would your father do something so awful?” The curiosity in her voice was devoid of pity or censure, and so he was able to answer.
“Because Brutus was something I loved, and my father reveled in destroying anything I treasured, in denying me anything I wanted, and punishing me if I showed any weakness or attachment.”
She made a sympathetic noise in the back of her throat, and it washed over Liam like a balm over a smarting burn.
“My father wanted to break me down so that he could craft and fabricate me into his likeness. He wanted a cohort to his evil. A maniacal copy of his cruelty. I never stopped fighting him, but in some ways, I fear, he succeeded in making me like him. A very large, very strong, very violent man. Of all the lashes he dealt me, and all the bones he broke, it was the loss of Brutus that caused me the most pain.” Christ, why was he saying this? He was a man not only grown but aged, and he buried such things in the darkness of decades past and swept them beneath greater atrocities. Maybe it was the drink that loosened his tongue, the night, or the moon, or some sort of feminine magic that pulled the narrative from his throat. A panicked part of him wanted to stop, and something else pressed him forward, the part that sensed the burden begin to lift from his shoulders with a spoken revelation.
Mena ventured even closer, gliding over the carpets with a tentative sensuality that Liam wasn’t certain he knew how to process. He almost wanted her to stay where she was, safe out of arm’s reach. But to be approached by her was as miraculous as the proverbial lamb with the lion.