She truly didn’t understand what it was Ravencroft wanted from her. What he saw in her. Why he would be … be what? Jealous? Surely he could see that she didn’t return the Earl of Thorne’s flirtations.
“I can’t imagine,” she murmured.
Andrew flicked her a perceptive look from beneath his lashes and his slash of a mouth quirked up just a little. “I can.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Liam stopped short of shoving his brother into his study, and he slammed the door behind him. His hands shook with dark needs and murderous impulses. Fury sizzled through his blood, riding the waves of the whisky he’d downed at dinner to keep from hurling his knife across the table at Thorne.
Pacing the room, he wrestled with the seething beast clawing its way through him. The study was too small. Why had he chosen to do this here? Oh aye, because this was the only room that didn’t carry the essence of that woman. She’d never been in here. Never left her sweet floral scent to invoke the enticing memory of her skin.
God, he felt as though he’d truly been possessed. A great number of the deadly sins surged within him and fought for supremacy when it came to Mena. Pride, envy, greed, lust. And at the moment … wrath.
He couldn’t even bring himself to look at his vainglorious brother for fear of what he would do. Gavin St. James was handsome in that disarming way the lasses melted for. He’d always been thus. Every time Liam looked at his brother, he imagined Mena Lockhart pressed against him.
Was that why she’d run from Liam after he’d kissed her? Why she had avoided him after that day in the chapel? Why she seemed so guilty and secretive tonight, as if she were frightened of discovery?
Was there something between his brother and his governess? Was he being lied to?
Again?
“Did ye fuck her in the woods, Thorne?” He posited the question in such a low register, he wasn’t even certain he’d heard himself correctly.
“What?”
“My governess, ye daft bastard, did ye put yer sullied hands on her?” he thundered. Had he tasted of her sweetness? Did her lips part for his plunder as they had for Liam’s? He had to know, even if the knowledge might just push him past the edge of his own sanity.
“Technically I’m legitimate, so not a bastard in the truest sense of the word.” The laconic flippancy in Thorne’s tone lit fire to the alcohol already in Liam’s veins.
“Stop saying nonsense to sound clever,” he barked.
“I doona know, brother, ye should try it sometime.”
Liam spun around. Thorne still hadn’t wiped that sly smirk away from his mouth. Though when Liam took a step forward, the smile quickly died.
“Mark me, Gavin, I will rip yer spine out through yer throat and not feel a thing—”
“All right.” The earl put his hands up in a gesture of surrender, knowing that when Liam used his real name, he’d hit his mark. “Nay, I left the woman as untouched as I found her, I promise ye.”
Liam leaned in; his generally uncanny ability to identify a lie with abject clarity had somehow become maddeningly obscure. “Then why talk to her like ye made her yer mistress in my house, at my table?” he demanded through clenched teeth.
Thorne’s shrug was meant to be conciliatory. “I was flirting is all, Liam. I’m a wee sweet on the lass. She’s a bonny lady with a pair of tits I’m not like to get a chance to—”
Liam seized two handfuls of his brother’s suit and nigh yanked the man off his feet. “Open yer filthy gob about her again and I’ll see yer guts spilled on the flagstones.”
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.