The Highlander (35 page)

The impact was like two leviathans colliding, and it shook the earth. They went down, swallowed by the vapor, and Mena scrambled away. The cold rasp of stone abraded her fingertips as she pulled herself up by the altar rock and clung to it. The terrible sounds of flesh connecting with flesh in violence echoed through the clearing, and a little part of her died every second she couldn't see Liam. She wanted to do anything but stand and watch the events unfold before her, but knew the smartest thing to do was to stay out of Liam's way. She would help no one by putting herself in danger. There were two daggers down there in the mist, and Lord only knew what damage was being done.

Thorne rushed forward, and it was then she realized that he was not alone. Russell barreled in behind him, followed by a stern-looking Thomas Campbell.

“We heard ye scream, lass,” Russell called. “Are ye hurt?”

“No, but the laird—”

Before the clansmen had a chance to reach her, Liam surged out of the mist, his own dirk poised where Hamish's neck met his mangled shoulder. The laird's powerful arm bulged with the strain of keeping his wounded brother in check.

“I should kill ye for laying yer hands on her,” he snarled.

“Doona do it, brother.” Thorne approached the two furious Highlanders cautiously. “He has many crimes to answer for.”

“And his justice should be swift,” Liam insisted through clenched teeth. His dark eyes were wide and wild with furious frenzy as the muscles in his arm clenched with the restraint it took not to slide the blade home.

“Hamish. It canna be,” Russell marveled, wearing an identically stricken look to Campbell's as he took in Hamish's distorted form. They were seeing a ghost. A hideous, disfigured specter of a man they all once knew. If he wasn't so evil, he'd have been pitiable.

“Finish what he started if ye have the stones,” Hamish hissed, though he was out of breath. “Ye could just work through slaughtering yer entire family. First yer father, then me.” He turned to Gavin, his lips pulled away from a few sharp teeth. “Ye'll be next,” he predicted ominously. His face was bleeding from a cut on his head, but in all the chaos of his scars, Mena couldn't find the source of the wound.

Thorne's expression faltered, at the revelation of what Liam had done.

He hadn't known,
Mena realized. He hadn't known that his brother had killed their father.

The earl took his belt off, and gestured for Russell to do the same, his movements methodical. “Let us take him to the dungeon, Liam. We'll deliver him to the regiment tomorrow by train. I'm certain Trenwyth will have more than a few charges to bring.”

“They'll only hang him,” Liam gritted out.

“Liam.” Mena stepped forward, reaching for him.

“Stay
back,
” he ordered. “Doona get close.”

Mena hesitated, letting her hand drop to her side. She wondered who he truly warned her away from. Hamish? Or himself.

“Do ye think I'm finished with ye?” Hamish taunted. “That I'm the only one who would see ye dead?”

“I know you're angry now.” Mena tried to ballast the poison spewed by Hamish. “But you don't want your own brother to be just another sin that haunts you.”

She couldn't tell if she was getting through to him, didn't know if her words penetrated the haze of pure, white-hot fury radiating from the Demon Highlander's massive frame.

“I'm sure yer tormentors are legion,” Hamish drawled. “I've killed many, but none so much as ye. I admit that I see them at night, the faces of my victims. I find them in my dreams, and sometimes when I'm awake. Do ye see their faces, Liam? Do ye find them in the darkness?”

Ignoring his order, Mena stepped behind Liam and pressed a hand to his back, the soft skin of her palm settling over the interruptions of long-ago wounds that never truly healed. She said nothing as the muscles twitched and shuddered beneath her chilled fingers.

“Nay, brother,” Liam finally said, maneuvering himself so Gavin could bind Hamish's hands behind him. “I doona find them.… They find me.”

*   *   *

Liam watched his brothers disappear into the forest, aided by Thomas and Russell. He tried to feel the things he understood that he should be feeling. But he'd grieved for Hamish already. He'd alternately hated and loved his elder brother with the same complicated feelings he'd possessed for his father. They battled the same monstrous rage, only Liam put up more of a fight against it, instead of letting it dissolve his soul completely.

The moment Hamish had touched Mena in violence, his life had become forfeit, just like that fucking bastard who'd harmed her in London, whoever he was.

He could feel Mena's gaze from behind him as tangible as her kind hand had been on his back. She'd done it again. Bedeviled him with her gentle magic and smothered the flames of his fury with one simple caress.

Anger and aggression still pounded through his veins and thrummed through his muscle, but it was joined by relief and fear.

What must she think of him now? Now that she knew his darkest sins. Now that she completely understood just exactly how damned his soul was. What would he find in her eyes? Revulsion? Terror?

Condemnation?

Awareness prickled along his spine and stung beneath his scars. He knew he was mostly bare, but never had he felt so naked. So exposed. Only one scar in a hundred had remained on his skin, but every single one had lashed at his soul.

Nothing Liam had ever done—no danger he'd ever faced—had taken as much courage as did turning around to meet her unflinching gaze.

Mena used the altar rock to support herself. The indigo mists climbed and caressed her body as though trying to seduce her with embracing wisps of moisture.

She was the most beautiful creature ever crafted of the mystifying and enchanted elements that made up a woman. If he was stone and steel, she was serenity and softness. The long tendrils of her luxurious hair tumbled down her arms and grazed the dramatic flare of her round hips. The flimsy material of her bodice—God love whatever it was called—enhanced more than concealed her breasts as they heaved with her own panting, unsteady breaths.

Christ,
he could have lost her tonight. Liam's knees weakened as he truly realized how close that blade had been held to her delicate throat.

He saw his severe relief mirrored in her lovely, pale eyes.

An ache throbbed deep in his body, as a shudder coursed down the length of his spine, starting at the shoulders and landing at the base, sending heat and desire into his loins. A raw, unbidden sound rose from deep in his chest, and escaped on a breath of undiluted need.

She tilted unsteadily forward, like a siren beckoning him to his destruction. He had about as much power against her.

In that moment, they both knew it.

Nothing else need be said between them. No words or platitudes uttered. No fears or sins confessed. He saw absolution in her eyes. Understanding. Acceptance.

And still he gave her a moment. A warning. A chance to escape.

Because once he got his hands on her, there would be no stopping him.

His body screamed for her, driven with a need to touch and taste that teetered on the brink of madness. Every lurid, wet, aching, shocking, demanding thing he could do to her body raced through his mind and incapacitated him with lust. The drive to fuck overcame every other rational thought or biological need. There wasn't enough time left in his life to try everything he wanted to do to her, but damned if he wasn't about to attempt it.

Her lashes swept down for a breathless moment, and then she raised her gaze back to meet his, eyes hooded and lips parted.

Desire.

There was no mistaking it. Not this time.

He surged forward, planted his hands against the rock on either side of her head, and took her offered lips with the desperate hunger of a man denied sustenance for too long.

She surged against him, pressing every curve of her voluptuous body to his. Her full breasts were a delicious crush against his rib cage, and his entire being focused on the weight of them against his bare skin. Her warm mouth opened to him in silken welcome, accepting the possession of his tongue with a soft sigh of capitulation.

This time she was no passive recipient of his kiss. She met his tongue with her own, pressing her mouth against his with the same fervent sense of frenzy.

She clung to him as if he were her only stability in an uncertain world. As though she somehow knew that if she let go of him, everything would fall apart. The gesture was his undoing. The sheer, heartrending honesty in the action. She was unguarded in her passions, uninhibited by the usual wall that surrounded her. It drew him to her, made him want to uncover all her secrets, to lay her bare for him to soothe and soften the rough edges of her life. To offer himself as a guardian, as a vigilant sentinel against all that would cause her pain.

Their mouths fused with reckless passion, he lost himself to his reverent worship of her. He found salvation in her surrender, and he knew that in offering it to him, she'd gained an ardent devotee.

His hands explored her lush body with all the eagerness of an untried boy and all the patient skill of an adept. Only a fragile layer of silk and lace separated his hands and her skin. Pausing at the swell of her cleavage, he stroked the cleft, and drew his finger along the lacy line of her bodice. He knew the nipples beneath her corset pebbled, and the need to take them in his mouth drove him mad with anticipation.

She moaned her pleasure, dissolving into liquid shivers beneath his fingertips.

Needing no further provocation, he slipped the tiny capped sleeves of her emerald dress off her shoulders and peeled her bodice down to her waist. A black corset hoisted her generous breasts into half orbs of alabaster flesh, and Liam reluctantly broke the kiss to enjoy the vision.

He stared at her, momentarily paralyzed by a hushed and splendid wonder. The world seemed to recede, to cease spinning on its axis, as if her beauty could command the cosmos to hold its breath in deference to her magnificence.

“Save me, lass.” His groan rumbled from somewhere deeper than he could physically imagine as he finally found the voice to plead for what his soul could not. “I'm drowning in my need and I— Say the words that willna make me a monster in the morning.”

One refusal from her lips would shatter him into a thousand pieces.

She rested her head back against the stone with an ardent sigh, and splayed her fingers right above the warm skin over his heart.

“I want you, Liam,” she said in a clear voice turned husky by desire. “Take me.”

His dark soul exalted and every last bit of restraint caught fire and became ash. He was going to claim her so thoroughly she'd never be the same. He wanted no other name on her lips. No other lips on her skin. He wanted no other man to touch her the way he was about to touch her.

And come the morning, they'd all leave for London, where he would rid himself of the last of his ghosts, and claim her not just as his lover, but as his wife.

*   *   *

Mena felt every bit of his low, strangled growl in her loins as he surged against her once more and took her lips with a primitive possession. Something about the way he looked at her, as if she were a morsel about to be devoured, was alternately exalting and petrifying.

But his kiss set her body aflame with electrifying, life-affirming need.

She was acutely aware of the power in his arms as they roamed her body, and only made a small sound of shock when he broke her corset, freeing her breasts to the kiss of the autumn night. His mouth branded a trail down her jaw to lave at the hollow between her shoulder and her throat before moving lower.

His hand lifted her breast to his mouth, and Mena's surprise turned into pure, sensual astonishment as he closed his hot lips over the cool skin of her taut nipple. His mouth was both hungry and unhurried as he sucked and nipped. Teasing and tantalizing until she no longer felt the chill of the night, he paid each of her breasts equal attention. She felt dazed and feverish, threading her fingers in his glossy black hair as she watched him feast on her abundant flesh.

A steady, insistent throbbing clenched her feminine muscles around pervasive emptiness. An acute ache speared her until she arched her back against the novel and unbearable intensity of it, and struggled to draw breath.

He straightened, his skin glowing with a sheen of mist and his hair tousled by her kneading fingers, and his dark, questioning gaze searched hers.

The cuffs at his arms and neck gleamed metallic in the moonlight. The runes he'd painted on his skin little more than darker knots on the muscled planes of his body.

She couldn't believe a man this magnificent could wear a look of such worship when making love to
her
. She, who'd always been taunted for her height, her weight, her lack of feminine fragility, felt as substantial as a scrap of lace, unstitched by the unparalleled force of his masculinity.

The mystic night lent her a boldness she'd never before possessed as she reached out to again splay her hand over steely muscle that covered his racing heart, caress up to his iron-sculpted shoulders, and down the swells of his liberally veined arms.

Never again would she have the opportunity to appreciate such a rare and primal specimen of lethal virility, and she wanted to take a moment to savor the feel of all that smooth skin stretched taut over unyielding strength.

Suddenly her hands were pinned above her head, and he was filling her mouth with his tongue. She tasted the salt of her skin on his lips and the pervasive ache between her legs became a flooding, insistent sort of pain. He kissed her with such scorching thoroughness, he quite erased the last vestiges of rational thought.

“Now,” she sobbed against his mouth, too distressed to feel shame at the pleading note in her voice.