Thorne’s verdant eyes widened, not just with fear, but with disbelief. “Ye want her,” he marveled.
“Haud yer wheesht.” Releasing him roughly enough to make his brother stumble, Liam turned to his desk, trying his best to slow the frantic hammering of his heart.
“My God, Liam. After all this time of self-imposed isolation, ye’re hard for the governess?”
“I said. Haud. Yer. Wheesht!” Unable to stand it, Liam lashed at the closest thing he could get his hands on. A sheaf of papers, their brass paperweight, and a box of writing implements flew into the bookcase behind the desk and clattered to the ground in chaotic disarray. Struggling to fill his lungs beneath the pressure tightening about his ribs like a vise, Liam stalked to the sideboard and grappled with the stopper in the decanter while looking for a glass big enough for his desperate thirst.
“Are ye starting to have a problem with the drink, brother?” Thorne asked coolly.
“My only problem is that I doona have any.”
Fuck the glass. Liam tipped his head back, taking a large gulp of the Scotch that bore his own title. He allowed the liquid fire to slide down his chest and ease the way for the subsequent inhales. At this point, his breath was likely flammable, but he didn’t care. It was drinking or fratricide, and he didn’t want Jani to have to clean blood off the study floor.
“A man like ye canna have a woman like her, Liam.” Not many people denied him and lived to tell about it. It surprised Liam his brother had the stones. “Any man can see that someone’s handled her roughly. In hands like yers, she’d be broken, just like every woman who dared love a Laird of Ravencroft.”
His brother’s words landed on his turned back like daggers. The truth shredded through his flesh, his bones, and into the heart they protected. A masterfully wielded blade, was his brother’s tongue. As it had ever been.
“Do ye not think I know that?” Liam asked darkly as he now took the time to find a whisky glass. “Do ye think she’d fare any better in yer hands? A gambler. A libertine. A fickle reprobate who collects women like trinkets. Who has no compunction about taking his own brother’s wife?”
The tightening in Thorne’s features told Liam his own blade had struck true. “Doona bring Colleen into this.” He pushed off the arm of the chair he’d been pretending to lounge against. “If ye remember, brother, ye took her from me first.”
“Ye know full well I didna ken she was yers. Father hid it from me, ye never said a thing, and that—” Liam had thought many terrible things about his late wife over the course of the years. But he never dared utter them, lest he escalate the dangerous hostility that had formed between them. Now, it would just be speaking ill of the dead. “That woman married me over ye because I was a marquess and ye merely an earl. She only wanted the brother who would inherit. How could ye still love her after that?”
Gavin looked away, a soul-deep pain cutting through his permanently sardonic expression. “There is no stopping yer soul once it finds its mate. We both know she wasna right. That she wasna … well. But there were days she was lucid. When she was … luminous.” Thorne’s eyes softened as they gazed into the past. “Those days were worth the pain I bore on her behalf.” He looked up at Liam. His hair gleaming the color of the malted barley they shoveled from the kilns, his eyes darkened with rare sobriety. “I like to think that if she’d been.… of sound mind, she’d have married me.”
“Think what ye want.” Liam turned and regarded his brother over another numbing sip. They’d already had this out a decade ago. Colleen had been mad, and that madness had turned her into something hateful. Spiteful. Someone … not altogether human. Or perhaps the constant duality of humanity had been too much for her. Maybe she’d just not learned to lock away the wretchedness of it like most tend to do. “Ye’d have been welcome to her,” he snarled. “Hell, ye helped yerself to her anyway.”
Thorne’s eyes flashed like a blanket of lightning over the emerald moors. “One night, Liam. Ye’d been gone so long. She was lonely and I was in love. It was only ever that night.”
“So ye say.”
“So. It. Is. We’ve been over this before, brother. I told her that we’d made a mistake. That I had to confess the sin we’d committed against ye.” Thorne’s teeth were clenched now, his handsome features contorting into something cruel and malicious.
“I bled for ye,” Liam said, so low it was almost a whisper. There it was. The bleak truth left to fester between them. Liam’s back bore the scars that should have been his brother’s. He had taken on so much cruelty, so much pain for the boy he tried to protect from their evil father. “I bled for ye and ye still betrayed me.”
“We all bled plenty.” Thorne’s register also dropped dangerously low.
“Ye doona ken the half of what I’ve done…” He couldn’t bring himself to say the words. “Ye were too young to remember—”
“Oh, I remember many of yer deeds, brother. I remember ye whipping that whore. I remember that no one has seen her since.”
“Are ye accusing me of—”
“I remember what happened to Colleen when I told her we had to confess. She was so afraid of ye, of the Demon Highlander, that she threw herself off the roof. What does that tell ye about what kind of husband you were to her? What does that say about what kind of man ye are?”
To Liam’s surprise, a bitter sense of amusement permeated the rage fueled by pain and alcohol. “I ken exactly what kind of man I am. I am a monster. A monster who has earned the title of demon. I’ve killed more men with my bare hands than most soldiers have the opportunity to shoot at. I have done every evil deed required of me without question. Without hesitation. I’ve wiped out bloodlines, Gavin, and ridden through entire cities like the angel of death. I’ve spilled enough blood to turn the sea red. I’ve heard enough screams to fill eternity with their echoes.” His grip tightened on his glass. “I am tired of being reminded of just who and what I am, not because I doona want to remember, but because I’ve never forgotten. And doona intend to.”
Liam took perverse enjoyment out of the darkness gathering across Thorne’s usually light features. “But I ken what ye are as well, and I will see ye hanged before I’d see ye with Miss Lockhart. So mark me when I order ye to leave her alone.”
“You mean leave her to ye?” Thorne spat, his own fire igniting behind the mask of geniality. “I’m not one of yer sycophantic soldiers, Liam. Ye canna sanction me. Ye canna fire me from the distillery. And ye sure as fuck canna order me away from whomever I wish to keep company with.”
He could kill the lad. This wasn’t the first time he’d considered it. “She is in my employ. Not only that, she’s under my protection.”
“How noble of ye,” Thorne mocked. “But I doubt ye’ve learned the difference between protection and command. If she seeks my company, ye canna very well physically stop her from doing so.”
“Ye’ll not take her,” Liam growled. “Not this time.”
Thorne’s smile showed entirely too many teeth. “What is that charming expression? Oh, yes. All’s fair in love and war.”