The Highlander (40 page)

“I'm well within my rights to subdue my property in any manner I see fit,” Gordon St. Vincent, her husband, taunted Ravencroft from behind her, though he released her hair and subdued her wrists, instead. Every movement he made was calculated, and she knew he did this to mitigate any pathos her pain might cause. “Permit me to introduce us both,” Gordon said genially. “As I have it on good authority, you've never truly met the fugitive you've been harboring. I am Lord Gordon St. Vincent, the Viscount Benchley, and this”—Gordon gave Mena a firm shake—“is Lady Philomena St. Vincent, my reluctant viscountess and wife of five years.”

The marquess stared at her with unblinking dark chasms for eyes. “Ye're …
married
?”

Mena strained and twisted against the cruel grip of the man whom she'd vowed to love, honor, and obey in all things. Her master in the eyes of the law. She knew what Liam saw behind her. An elegant man with impeccable manners and a deceptively mild and trustworthy demeanor.

“Yes.” The word ripped from her on a hiss of pain. “You don't understand what I was running from. You can't know what it was like. What he did to me.” Even the Demon Highlander couldn't imagine the depths of Gordon's cruelty. Liam was nothing like him, though he was a soldier, a destroyer of life. Gordon had destroyed her
will
to live, and Mena knew that to be the greater sin.

Liam took a step toward them, tightening his grip on the club as if he'd decided to free her.

“What it was like for
you
?” Gordon scoffed, his breath stinking of opium smoke and his father's expensive cigars. “What about me, Philomena? Can you comprehend what it is like to be married to a madwoman? Do you realize how selfish it was to run from the asylum and leave no one with any clue as to your whereabouts? You almost killed poor mother, Philomena. We have been sick with worry.”

Liam's step faltered at the word
madwoman
.

“Like hell!” Mena accused, sending a pleading look toward the man she loved as suspicion brewed beneath the tempest in his eyes. “They committed me to the asylum because they'd spent my money and I was no longer useful to them. Because I turned his sister in to the authorities when she had a young actress murdered. I am married to a monster, Liam. And he left me in that place to rot indefinitely. I had no choice but to escape. I am
not
mad. Ask your—ask Dorian Blackwell, he's the one who facilitated my flight.”

A dark look crossed Ravencroft's features, one that told her that Liam planned to do just that.

“You witnessed my wounds,” she continued, hating how her voice began to climb to a hysterical pitch. “The bruises, the torture. I refuse to go back there. I'll die first!”

“My poor unfortunate wife. She's a delusional woman, Lord Ravencroft, and you're not the first to be taken in by her.” Gordon tightened his hold on her and Mena heard the boot falls of someone else bringing chains. “When she escaped Belle Glen Asylum, I hadn't seen her in months. Her wounds were self-inflicted; it was part of why I had to lock her away in the first place.”

Twisting and jerking in his hold with all her strength, she watched in horror as suspicion began to drown the anger on Liam's features. The odds were against her. Liam's first wife had been insane, and she could read the doubt that created within him. The reticence to go through something like that again, to put his children through it. Any reasonable man would pause to wonder if he'd been had.

“Your every action has been one of insanity.” Mena didn't miss the mocking note beneath Gordon's tone as one iron clamped over her wrist with cold and gritty finality. “A viscountess employed as a governess? Changing your very identity? Seducing a marquess whilst still married? You're seriously ill, my darling, I'm taking you back where they can take care of you.”

“This is my secret,” she cried to Liam, as desperation cracked in her raw throat. Her shoulders wrenched painfully as she struggled toward him. “This is what I was afraid to reveal. What I was
going
to confess. I'll tell you everything, Liam, just
please
don't let them take me.”

Mena never thought she'd see something as human and pedestrian as indecision in Liam's eyes. Mena's desperation became desolation. He didn't trust her, and who could blame him? Guilt and pain crushed any hope she had left. With a cry, she was able to wrench her arm away from Gordon and whirl on him, landing a blow to the aristocratic features she couldn't believe she'd once found handsome.

“Unhand me,” she demanded.

Gordon returned her strike with the back of his hand, and Mena's knees buckled as, for a precious moment, the lights of Euston Station dimmed as shadows danced, threatening her consciousness.

In her periphery, she saw Liam lunge forward, retribution etched onto his features.

Her husband had just signed his own death warrant, and thank God for that. Even if he didn't believe her, Liam's honor wouldn't allow her to be struck.

She turned toward him, anticipating the moment he'd come between her and the man she'd grown to fear and hate.

The unmistakable blast of a pistol shot echoed through the portico with such deafening reverberation, even time seemed to hold its breath.

Mena whirled to see that Gordon was as stunned as she, the two men at his side looking past her in openmouthed astonishment. There was not a pistol among them.

Her heart stalled, then dropped into her stomach as she slowly turned back to see her worst fear confirmed. A pool of red bloomed over the left chest of Liam's gray waistcoat.

Mena cried out and reached for him with her one free hand, burning to go to him, unable to claw herself from her husband's punishing grip.

Liam's expression turned from astonished to enraged in an instant, and he leaped around, his bludgeon lifted to swing at his attacker, heedless of his injury.

Mena saw him hesitate, and she couldn't fathom why. Had they missed one of Gordon's thugs? What did he see that seemed to deflate his lungs and extinguish the inferno of his fury?

The hesitation cost him dearly as a heavy piece of luggage connected with his temple.

Mena screamed and lunged forward as he fell, but someone seized her free wrist and clamped the shackle around it, leaving her to watch in horror as Liam's magnificent body folded to the platform, landing hard enough to shake the ground.

A ragged sound escaped her as it uncovered just
who
held a pistol in one hand, and sharp-edged baggage in the other.

“No,” she sobbed, as the resolute anger in Jani's dark eyes was blurred by the storm of her hysterical tears.

 

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
THREE

My only means of escape is to be other than I was. You know I have a secret. A terrible secret. You can't imagine the depth of it. The scope of it. You don't know who I am … what I've become. To tell you would be the end of me.

Mena's words haunted Liam as he stomped around his private room at St. Margaret's Royal Hospital.

He did things to my body, to my soul. I let him. I had to.

She'd had to let him because she'd been fucking
married
to him.

His head pounded every time he stood upright. His shoulder burned like someone persisted in needling him with a branding iron, even though his left arm had been secured to his chest with a sling. He had enough thread in his hairline and his chest to stitch a quilt.

But none of that mattered. It barely registered. His wounds were more annoyance than pain. They slowed him down when there was so much to be done.

Everything had been ripped open and was falling apart, and he needed to be out there triaging the bleeding damage, not holed up here like a goddamned invalid.

Just when Liam had been certain Jani had become family rather than foe, the boy had chosen the worst possible moment to exact his revenge. His children were probably worried out of their minds, stuck with a grandmother they'd only visited a handful of times. Had Gavin been able to deliver Hamish to the proper authorities?

And Mena …

Mena was in the clutches of that smarmy fuck-wit who'd struck her, shackled her, and dragged her away.

Her.
Husband.

Christ.

Liam pressed his palm to his throbbing temple with his right hand and kicked the edge of his hospital bed. She'd lied to him in the most fundamental of ways. Not just about whom she was, but
what
she was. A viscountess. A fugitive.

A madwoman? Liam couldn't quite believe it. He'd lived with a madwoman before. Had seen the toll, physically and mentally, that insanity took on a person. Mena had seemed desperate, secretive in the extreme, but never mad.

But did he truly believe that? Or was it his own fervent wish that made it seem thus?

He
had
to know the truth. All of it. Not only to question her, but to see her, and touch her. To know that she was all right. His anger at her, at the whole fucking mess, was knitted tightly with the love that still burned in his heart, and concern, not to mention an intense frustration at his own ignorance. If Lord Benchley had struck her in front of everyone, what had he done to her once they were alone?

His stomach gave a mutinous surge at the thought.

Every moment counted in this situation, and every second apart from her was pure torture. She had much to answer for, but dammit, she'd give him those answers in person.

“Someone bring me a bloody shirt!” he bellowed into the stark and curiously empty hallway. His trousers had been replaced by some flimsy gray cotton pants tied by a string, and his upper half was bared to the chilly hospital air. “
Where
are my goddammed boots?”

The little mouse of a nurse had disappeared when he'd woken violently, and nearly struck her with his flailing limb mere minutes ago. She'd whimpered something about lying still while she fled to find a doctor. Now there was no one to be seen.

Lie still? Didn't they ken who the fuck he was? He hadn't become the Demon Highlander by holding still.

Whirling around, he searched the sparse, clean room for a trace of his belongings and found nothing but a bed, a chair, a table on the far wall with various medical implements on it, and an ugly stand next to the bed upon which a lone glass of water sat.

He reached the table in two long strides and opened its only drawer, finding it empty. Bits of red began to creep into his vision as his heart thudded against his chest, marking the rise of his temper. An image of Mena's pleading, tear-filled eyes swam across his murky vision.

She'd begged him to save her, and he'd let her down.

I'll die first.

Dear Christ, what he if was too late?

His hand connected with the glass, and it went flying across the room, shattering on the far wall.

He wasn't staying here a moment longer, he'd walk the gray autumn streets of London in these flimsy trousers if he had to. He needed to find Mena.

Now
.

He turned on his bare heel and had to reach for the bedpost. Not only to counteract the dizziness, but to offset the astonishment of finding his doorway filled by the last person he ever expected to encounter here in London.

Let alone his hospital room.

“You look as though you've been to war, Ravencroft.” Dorian Blackwell, the Blackheart of Ben More, stepped into his room with the unconcerned bearing and lithe prowl of a cat, assessing Liam with his one good eye. One that was as obsidian as Liam's own. An eye patch covered the other, hiding an egregious wound. “I've only been shot the once,” he continued conversationally. “But I remember that it smarted like the very devil.”

“What are ye doing here?” Liam growled by way of greeting.

“I have … friends at every train station and on the hospital staff.” Dorian shrugged. “They keep me informed of any interesting goings-on in the city, and I'd say the attempted murder of a marquess and the arrest of a fugitive viscountess certainly fit the bill.”

“Spies, ye mean?”

With a dismissive gesture, Dorian moved closer. “Technically, I'm your next of kin hereabouts, though very few know it. It'd be ungentlemanly of me not to check on my injured brother.”

Christopher Argent's wide shoulders silently filled the door frame Dorian had only just vacated, and the large, pale-eyed assassin stood like a cold sentinel, never making a move to invade Liam's room.

Dorian was
right
to have brought muscle. Liam might only have use of his one arm, but he was still tempted to choke the life from the reigning king of the London Underworld.

“
Ye
sent her to me,” Liam snarled, letting go of the bedpost to advance on his criminal half brother. “Ye
knew
who she was, what she'd done, and ye sent her to look after my
children.
Do ye have any idea—” Liam's teeth clenched together with the force of his tumultuous emotion.

Dorian Blackwell had lied to him. But in doing so, he'd sent Mena, the only woman who could have possibly defeated the Demon Highlander. For a man who was used to charging entire battalions, he'd not been prepared for her to come at him sideways. “I'll make ye answer for that,” he vowed, stepping up to Dorian.

Though Liam did have a slight height and width advantage, Dorian stood his ground, unperturbed. He was leaner in that feral, hungry way predators were lean, and it lent him a cruel grace.

“I had my reasons, brother, and you'll want to hear them.”

Brother.

There was no denying Dorian Blackwell was a Mackenzie. He bore the same broad angles to his forehead and jaw, the same sharp lines etched below his cheekbones. His ebony hair and onyx eyes were an exact replica of Liam's own.