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.”