The Highlander (19 page)

The thought lodged in the cavity of his chest, driven like a wedge with a mallet, until the pressure was more than Liam could possibly bear. His chest refused to expand. Guilt and regret were heavy mantles, smothering him until he fought for breath.

Lost in his struggle, Liam barely noted the whisper of soft slippers against the long violet carpet leading up the aisle until the ruffle of a golden skirt teased at his peripheral vision.

He didn't want to look at
her
. She was a temptation that didn't belong in this sacred place. To gaze upon her was to commit a dozen sins at least. How was it that God could grant someone so angelic a body crafted for little else but wickedness?

“Forgive me if I'm disturbing you.” His governess's voice permeated the stillness and warmed the cold stones of the walls with a sacrosanct melody. Like the song of a seraphim in spoken form. “I confess I didn't expect to find you here.”

Why would the Demon Highlander be in a church? There was nothing for him here … No forgiveness, nor redemption.

He'd been beyond that for longer than he could remember.

“I doona often find
myself
in this place.” Liam neither moved nor dared to glance at her. He wanted her to go, but not as badly as he wanted her to remain.

“I can leave—”

“Nay.” He spoke with more haste than he'd meant to. “Nay … say yer prayers, lass. I'll go.” When Liam would have stood, she sat. The soft, gilded fabric of her skirt pressed against the rough material of his kilt. Liam stared at the tiny loose fibers of his wool plaid as they rose to touch her silken skirts, drawn by some unseen current toward her.

Just as he was.

“Are you here to give confession?” she queried uncertainly.

Liam's scoff grated roughly against the smooth stones. “I keep no priest at Ravencroft.” He had no desire to confess his sins to a man who would take it upon himself to deem him worthy or damned. In his life, men had only been judged by battle where there was no good or evil, only strong or weak. He had no use for priests. He knew what he was, and where he was headed once this life was through with him.

“Then … do you come here to be closer to God?”

“Nay, lass, only farther from my demons.”

“Oh.” They sat in silence a moment while she smoothed an imaginary wrinkle from her skirts before primly returning her hands to fold in her lap.

It occurred to Liam that
she
may have been seeking a priest. “Have ye sins to confess, Miss Lockhart?” He doubted she was Catholic, but he knew curious little about the mysterious woman next to him.

“I come here sometimes to pray for forgiveness.”

“Forgiveness?” he echoed. “What possible atrocities could ye have committed that need forgiving?”

“Perhaps I don't ask to be forgiven, but to be granted the ability to forgive.”

She was looking at him with level eyes when Liam finally lifted his head. In the dim room, cast only in the illumination of the sun filtered through stained glass, she was a kaleidoscopic study in blasphemy. No artist could have given her face a more cherubic shape, but the rendering of her plump lips brought to mind only the most profane acts a man could devise.

The moment his gaze lowered to those lips, she turned away and bowed her head.

“That isn't to say I'm not without sin,” she continued. “We all have things we've done in the past that haunt us. Of which we feel ashamed.”

Some more than most,
he thought darkly. “Do ye believe, Miss Lockhart, that we may be forgiven our sins? That the past can ever be left behind us?”

She shook her head. “We may try to leave the past, but I don't think the past ever truly leaves us. It is a part of us; it shapes us into who we are. I don't think any of us escape that fate, my laird.”

Then I am damned.
He finally looked up to the window, and met a stained-glass gaze that no longer seemed compassionate.

“Why do you believe you are damned?”

It startled Liam that he'd spoken his thoughts aloud. If she only knew. She'd run from this place. From him. “Ye've heard what they call me, have ye not?”

“Yes. The Demon Highlander.” Spoken with her honeyed inflection, it didn't sound so derogatory.

“Even here, in my own land, they think I've been possessed by the
Brollachan
. Do ye believe that of me?”

He expected a practical woman like her to deny it. So when she lifted a hand to her forehead and let it trail to her cheek in an anxious motion, he was actually taken aback.

“Truly, my laird, I don't know what I believe these days. I hardly trust my own eyes…” She blinked as if she might say something, and then obviously changed her mind. “Did you do what they say? Did you go to the crossroads and make a deal with a demon?”

He made a bitter sound. “Nay, lass, 'tis only a myth about me. Though that doesna mean I'm not possessed of a demon. I think it's been with me since birth. That it's in my tainted blood and turns everything I do into a transgression. There has never been salvation for me.”

“You don't really think that, do you?” She gasped.

“Aye, I do.”

“But why?”

A bleak and arctic chill pressed in on him as a few of his darkest deeds rose unbidden to his mind's eye. “Because, lass, there are such sins heaped onto my shoulders, it would kill me to turn and face them.”

“It is a good thing, then, my laird, that you have the strength in your shoulders to carry them.”

The lack of gravity in her voice astounded him into looking down at her again. She was staring at him again, half of that tempting mouth quirked into a careful smile. Liam basked in it like a winter bloom would soak up the first rays of spring. Blue light from the windows fell across her hair and turned it the most fantastical shade of violet. Greens and golds softened her features and illuminated her pale eyes until they seemed to smolder.

She'd never looked lovelier than she did at this moment.

“How can there be salvation,
redemption,
unless there is first sin?” she asked, her face soft with concern for him. “The devil is in all of us, I think. That's what makes us human rather than divine. I believe there is a tenuous balance between redemption and damnation. You cannot have one without testing the limits of the other. No light, without first conquering darkness. No courage, without battling your fear. No mercy, unless you experience suffering.” She turned to gaze at the golden cross gleaming on the altar, her mouth pressing into a line. “No forgiveness without someone having wronged you.”

“Who wronged ye?” Liam asked, briefly forgetting his own troubles. “Who do ye come here to pray for?” And why did he want to send that person to meet his final judgment?

“You wouldn't believe me if I told you,” she murmured, staring down into her lap.

“Try me,” he prompted, surprised by how much he wanted her to trust him, to confide in him.

To confess to him.

“All I can say, my laird, is that I have demons of my own.” She met his eyes again, hers shining with suspicious moisture. “And because of your protection, your …
comraich,
I like to think that they cannot find me here at Ravencroft.”

Something within him melted. Perhaps it was his native language so adorably mispronounced by her British tongue. Or the self-effacing smile that produced that dimple he wanted to explore with his lips. Or her words. Words that provoked a tiny well of light in a subject he'd thought had become hopeless. A part of Liam hated the effect she had on him, that she made his heart soft and his body hard. Though it was life affirming, in a way, this sense of anticipation between them. Of … inevitability.

She turned back to the altar and leaned closer to the side of the pew. Away from him, killing the effect. “I just left Andrew,” she said brightly. “He is doing much better.”

His frown became so grave, so hard, he feared his own features would crack with strain. “With him, I feel there is no forgiveness for me.” He scored his scalp with heavy fingers as he ran a frustrated hand through his unbound hair. “All I've ever been is a man without mercy. An agent of cruelty and darkness and fear. My entire life, I've wrought nothing but destruction. I suppose that's why I came back to Ravencroft. The idea of growing things, of building a life, and leaving a thriving legacy for my children, the two beings I helped to create, suddenly held great appeal. As if in doing so I might find some deliverance, if not redemption. Perhaps chase away the terrible memories haunting the halls of this place. But I fear it's too late.”

“It's
never
too late to make things right.”

She had no idea of what she spoke.

“Miss Lockhart—Mena—I must ask ye. Did ye see what happened today? Could it have been Andrew that pushed that barrel?”

As though realizing what must have been troubling him, his greatest fear, Mena's eyes widened and she shook her head vehemently. “I'm still not certain what I saw, but I'm positive it wasn't him, my laird. I know your son has been a dark and angry cloud. But I found Andrew in his bedroom directly after the incident. He'd already made it back to the keep.” She perked, rushing to cover his skepticism. “In fact, we had a rather splendid moment, and made unprecedented progress. I think that you will be pleased with him in the days to come. He'll approach you, I know it, and you'll find a reason to mend things between you.”

Liam slumped back against the pew, more relieved than even he'd expected.

“You can't be inclined to believe that your own son would take actions to cause you harm,” she said in disbelief.

He wouldn't be the first Mackenzie son to do so.

Liam dipped his head. “I'm inclined to believe that ye're an angel sent to look after them, Mena. The ballast to the devil that sired them.”

He couldn't be certain, but he thought a blush tinged her cheeks.

“Hardly an angel,” she whispered, and seemed to lean toward him in a way that told him she wasn't aware of her action. “Your children, they have been so lonely for you. Would it be unforgivable of me to ask you what kept you from them all these years?”

His heart thumped so hard, he wondered if she couldn't hear it. He'd never had someone dare to ask him such a question. His gaze darted about the chapel, until it landed on the long unused dark wood box with its royal-blue curtains. Perhaps, Liam thought, now
was
the time for confession. Maybe he could, just this once, unburden his soul.

His voice felt like gravel in his throat as he gave words to his darkest thoughts. “As I said before, there
is
a demon, of a more figurative kind, that has tainted the blood of the men in this family for generations. It burns through us until there's nothing left but ash and char. I've fought innumerable battles in my life, but none as difficult as the one I wage with myself. Ye canna know what it is to live with this much fire. With so much anger and hatred that it chews through ye until ye're nothing but a black void. I would save my children from knowing that kind of cruelty. I would protect them from the abject violence of it. For decades I thought that dark abyss would swallow me whole, and until I stepped away from its edge, I couldna risk taking them into it with me. And so I did whatever I had to do to keep it away from them, even if it meant … keeping myself away.”

“I don't think you ever would have hurt them,” she reassured him after a thoughtful moment.

He shook his head. “But I couldna return until I was certain.”

“What changed?” she asked softly. “When were you convinced?”

Liam knew the exact moment; it was branded onto his soul. It haunted his nightmares. “When I lost my brother.”

“Hamish?”

A bitter sound escaped him. Of course she'd have heard about Hamish. He'd been a part of this clan. A part of their lives. Their father's not-so-secret shame, and the man that their father would have preferred over Liam to be his heir.

“Our company was sent on a mission to put down a secret sect of Irish insurgents that had been hiding in Canada since the Fenian Rebellion. They'd taken a ship full of people and packed it with explosives. Their plan was to drive it into an English port and detonate it, killing masses of innocent people. We couldna stop the ship, but we boarded it, executed the mutineers, and Hamish was able to steer it back out to sea whilst the rest of us evacuated the civilians. It took longer than we thought to get them a safe distance from the blast radius. I was returning for Hamish, when I realized we'd run out of time. There was a fire on board, the fuse had been lit, and in that moment I knew if I boarded that ship, I'd not make it off again. That my luck as the Demon Highlander had run out.”

“Poor Hamish,” Mena murmured.

“Aye.”

“Was he a good man?”

“Nay, not really. But neither am I. We were forged by the same brutal father, though, and so I suppose ye could say we were bound in that way.” Liam let his shoulders lift and fall with a weighty breath. “I wanted to go back for him. I considered it, even though it would have been the end of me. But the only thing I could think of as the explosion ripped the ship apart was that I had to see my children. That I had so much to make up for.” His hand curled into a fist at the memory of his brother, begging for rescue. Pleading to be saved. “Something shifted the day Hamish … I just knew I needed to come home.”

When Mena laid her pale, elegant hand over his rough knuckles, it felt like a miracle.

“I'm truly sorry for all you suffered, and for all you lost. But regardless of the struggles you have with your children, they're better for you having returned. It was the greatest choice you ever made. You must know that.”

The fervency in her voice tightened his throat, and for the second time that night he had to look away from her. “I made certain they never knew my father. I shielded them from their mother's madness. All they've known of family is me, and Thorne, I suppose. But I
never
want them to meet my demon. My greatest fear is of them bearing witness to the evil of which I am capable. Of which I've
proven
myself capable.”