A simple white linen handkerchief appeared in his hand, and Liam lifted it to wipe the grime from his face without thinking.
It came away black and ruined, and he found he couldn’t tear his gaze away from what he’d done to her clean, dainty cloth. “I always did make a better soldier than a father,” he admitted grimly.
“I’m certain you’re excellent at both.” She placed an encouraging hand on his arm, and Liam stared at it, wondering if anyone had ever done that before. “Perhaps being a father and being a lieutenant colonel are not so different, just require separate tactics.”
Liam’s entire existence became the weight of her lily-white hand covering his flesh. He watched her long, elegant fingers as they rested over the muscle they found there, and pictured them curling over something else.
Gripping him. Stroking him. And suddenly, the inferno that threatened to consume him, the fire he fought every godforsaken day, was redirected.
To his cock.
As though she sensed the shift in him, she snatched her hand away, smoothing the movement over by turning to the ceiling-high rows of whisky barrels and running her fingers over the Ravencroft crest branded into the lid where the tap would go.
“Miss Lockhart,” he started, reaching for her shawl with the intention of revealing her hair. “Mena, I—”
“You said there was something you wanted to discuss with me?” she said with false brilliance, retreating a step.
Liam let his hand drop and whatever he was about to say became like Scotch vapor. Intangible until ignited by a single spark. “Jani mentioned today that ye received some bad news from London a few days past. I’ve figured it was the reason ye’ve kept to yerself, and I wanted to inquire after ye.”
“It was nothing, I assure you. Just … the gossip of mutual acquaintances. Trifles, really.”
She was lying again. Liam had taken part in, and been the victim of, enough interrogations to easily identify deception.
Jani had also mentioned the letter had been from Liam’s own sister-in-law, Farah Blackwell. Normally, he would have assumed the contents had something to do with trifles. Farah had procured his governess the position so correspondence wasn’t, in itself, troubling.
But something restless and suspicious stirred inside Liam. Some instinct of danger and unrest that he had relied upon in his military days, which had saved his life on more than one occasion, pulsed red with warning.
Danger lurked nearby; he could feel it in his bones. A malevolent menace stalked his keep, but identifying it was like searching for shadows in the darkness.
It was more than a purposely sheared linchpin on a carriage he was supposed to take to meet her the day she arrived. More than the fire that could have destroyed his entire east crop of barley. And more than the violence against his governess and the frightened pain he glimpsed in her eyes.
On top of everything, there was the way Jani looked at his daughter, or Andrew looked at Liam, or Gavin and Russell looked at Mena.
The banked fire in everyone’s eyes simmered with the risk of eventual combustion.
Except for her eyes … They held nothing but shadows.
“Everyone, it seems, is hiding something from me,” he said darkly, stepping toward her. Of all the secrets he felt haunting Ravencroft like erstwhile ghosts, he found he wanted to discover hers the very most.
At first he’d thought her features contorted in terror because he’d advanced toward her, but then the sounds of splintering wood preceded the deafening, unmistakable crash of a whisky barrel.
Liam lunged forward, grasping Mena around the waist and lifting her from the ground. He drove them both into the alcove between the shelves and the door, plastering her body against his as the four-hundred-and-fifty-pound barrel rolled past them with the cacophony of a herd of wild horses.
They stood like that for a moment, his arms on either side of her head. Their chests heaving together with frantic breath. God, but she was as soft as she’d been in his fantasies. Her lush breasts were yielding pillows against the hardness of his own chest. Every hair on his body rose, not just from the danger they’d survived, but the unexplainable electric sensation of her body against him. Beneath him, for all intents and purposes.
“Did ye see what happened?” he panted.
She stared at him with wide, moist eyes for a beat longer than she should have before they darted away and she shook her head. “It was all so fast.”
A panicked ruckus from the square told him that the barrel had rolled right out of the open doors and into the yard. It would pick up momentum down the yard, heading straight for …
Andrew.
Liam leaped away from Mena and bolted after it, dashing into the square and chasing it toward the open barrel fires. Nay, if it reached the flames with as much alcohol as was inside the barrel, the consequences would be as explosive as a barrel full of gunpowder.
Bellowing his son’s name, Liam lunged for the runaway barrel, ready to throw himself beneath it if need be to ensure his son’s survival. Others reached it at the same time, and between them they were able to grapple it into stillness inches away from the open-framed building where the fires burned.
Frantically searching the distillery yard, Liam called for Andrew, the need to cast eyes on his son first and foremost in his mind.