“I knew Gavin wasna in yer room,” Liam assured her. “He wouldna dare. I forbade him from bothering ye further, and he left.”
“Forbade?” Liam could tell she didn’t like the word by the perplexed lethargy with which she said it. “If the earl went home, then who did you think…?” It took her mind two very quick seconds to put it all together and snatch her hand out of his. “You came to my bedroom looking for … Andrew? You kicked the door in because you thought your son was in here with me in the middle of the night?” She’d moved past perplexed to mystified, and Liam had to sort through his Scotch-muddled thoughts for something to say.
“Oh, my God.” She stood and turned away from him, retreating a few paces and wrapping her arms back around her middle in that protective gesture.
The loss of her comforting touch drove Liam to his feet. “Rhianna said ye’d both gone upstairs to bed at the same time. The two of ye had been avoiding me for days. When ye werena sneaking away together ye were whispering secrets. I didna ken at the time that it was regarding a wee beastie.”
She slowly twisted to face him, and Liam was glad he couldn’t see whatever awful emotion her gaze contained. “So you thought I … Lord, I can’t even say it.” Her hand flew to her forehead and dragged across it as though to wipe away the offending thought.
Liam groped for something, anything that might make her understand. “Andrew’s sullen moods have driven away every governess he’s ever had, and suddenly he started treating ye like ye’d hung the moon.”
“It’s called fondness,” she hissed. “Affection. We can feel that, you know, without it being some kind of perversion.”
“I ken that.” He took a step toward her, and again she retreated. “But he’s a handsome lad on the cusp of manhood who thinks of little else but women, and ye’re young and damned desirable. Ye canna blame me for suspecting—”
“You had to feel a little more than suspicion to kick my bloody door in!”
Liam said nothing. At first because no one ever dared to interrupt him, and then because he couldn’t ever remember hearing her curse. The lass was right, of course, he’d been quite a bit more than suspicious.
He’d been jealous.
“I should leave,” she whispered, her hand still resting on her forehead as though she were now afraid her mind would escape her if she let it.
Liam pinched the bridge of his own nose. He was turning a misunderstanding into a catastrophe. “Nay, I’ll go, we’ll discuss this in the morning.” They’d sort out the mess when he was thinking more clearly. Every emotion he had simmered right below the surface of his skin, some that he battled constantly such as lust, anger, need, and regret. Others he’d buried with his father, and he should wait until the light of day to sort through them.
And then there were these new foreign ones which needed to be inspected. Softer, tender, almost …
“No,” she lamented, bringing his attention snapping back to her. “There’s no discussing this. I have to depart first thing. I cannot stay here any longer. Not now.”
Alarm seized him. “Ye mean, leave Ravencroft?”
“Yes, I mean leave Ravencroft.” She hurried to her wardrobe with stilting, uncertain steps, blindly reached in, and yanked down an armful of clothing. It was too dark for either of them to truly ascertain what color they were, but she didn’t seem to care as she flung open the trunk at the foot of her bed and began to shove them in.
When she looked as though she’d return for more, Liam placed his body in her path. “Ye’re staying,” he ordered.
She stepped around him. “If your opinion of me is so low that you think I could take advantage of a child, this will never work. I’ll find a different situation.”
“I was…” He didn’t want to say wrong, though he knew it to be the appropriate word. He trailed her to the wardrobe wondering how he’d managed to halt armies in their tracks, but this one wee governess refused to cooperate. “Ye’re not leaving.” He tried a command, which in his book was a bit higher than an order. That ought to work.
“But I must.” She hurried away from him, thrusting her second armful into the trunk.
He shut the wardrobe and advanced on her. “I willna allow it,” he threatened. “Ye’ll remain here in my employ, and that is my final word on the matter.”
She whirled around and stomped in his direction until they met in the center of the room beneath the silver gaze of the moonlight streaming through her window. She could have been the goddess Danu, her red hair billowing around her, her robe flowing with the force of her truncated movements.
“Don’t you think for one minute that you can order me about like one of your subordinates.” She spoke slowly, enunciating her indignant words with abject clarity. “You may be a Highland laird, and you may be a marquess, but that doesn’t give you one ounce of dominion over me, Liam Mackenzie.” Her breasts heaved with her increasingly forceful breaths. Her voice shook with anger and her pale jade eyes flashed silver with wrath and moonlight.
Something about her temper gave Liam the most excruciating erection he’d ever had. He stepped forward, wanting to reach for her, but for every move he made to close in, she took a step back.
“I might be afraid of you,” she confessed, her voice losing some of its fervency as he stalked her in the dark. “But mark me, I’ll never cower to another man. I am my own self. I am a woman with free and independent will. I deserve to live for no one’s whims and pleasures but my own, and I don’t have to follow your commands.” Her back found the wall, and suddenly there was nowhere to go. Liam knew it. And so did the lass.
“Do what you will, you high-handed, imperious, overbearing brute, but if I want to leave, you’ll not sto—”
Liam cut off her words with his mouth.
It was a movement born of panic and instinct. He hadn’t been thinking. He just … couldn’t bear to hear her say that she was leaving one more fucking time.
He’d kissed her before, and still he hadn’t been prepared for the complexity of sweetness that he found on her lips. It inflamed him. It humbled him. It held him in a thrall he knew full well he’d never escape. So here he stood, a willing slave to his own desire. A helpless victim of the debilitating lust that flared in his loins and boiled through his blood. He was hard as a diamond, the cords and sinew at his hips rolling forward to press against the softness of her belly.
Liam would never have enough of her, not if he fused their mouths for an eternity. Each drugging sweep of their lips only intensified his hunger. Nibbling at her lower lip, he sampled the flavor of her skin, then licked at the seam of her full mouth, silently requesting admittance into the honeyed heat he was certain to find inside.
He swallowed her shocked gasp and plundered her with his tongue as though she were a lifelong conquest. Digging his fingers into her ribs to keep from taking what she did not offer him, he deepened the kiss, using his tongue to convey what he could not find the words to say.
She wasn’t the only one who was afraid. Liam was terrified.
Of losing her.
Of loving her.
And at this moment, he was in mortal danger of both.