Her arms dropped to her sides, and Liam wondered if she realized that she’d taken a tentative step toward him.
“Your … dog?”
He nodded, abruptly feeling too raw and exposed to realize that she might not see the movement in the dark. He wanted to retreat from what he’d just told her, to draw back inside of himself. But the memories lived in there, and he didn’t want their company tonight.
Only hers.
“Why would your father do something so awful?” The curiosity in her voice was devoid of pity or censure, and so he was able to answer.
“Because Brutus was something I loved, and my father reveled in destroying anything I treasured, in denying me anything I wanted, and punishing me if I showed any weakness or attachment.”
She made a sympathetic noise in the back of her throat, and it washed over Liam like a balm over a smarting burn.
“My father wanted to break me down so that he could craft and fabricate me into his likeness. He wanted a cohort to his evil. A maniacal copy of his cruelty. I never stopped fighting him, but in some ways, I fear, he succeeded in making me like him. A very large, very strong, very violent man. Of all the lashes he dealt me, and all the bones he broke, it was the loss of Brutus that caused me the most pain.” Christ, why was he saying this? He was a man not only grown but aged, and he buried such things in the darkness of decades past and swept them beneath greater atrocities. Maybe it was the drink that loosened his tongue, the night, or the moon, or some sort of feminine magic that pulled the narrative from his throat. A panicked part of him wanted to stop, and something else pressed him forward, the part that sensed the burden begin to lift from his shoulders with a spoken revelation.
Mena ventured even closer, gliding over the carpets with a tentative sensuality that Liam wasn’t certain he knew how to process. He almost wanted her to stay where she was, safe out of arm’s reach. But to be approached by her was as miraculous as the proverbial lamb with the lion.
“The scars on your back … they were inflicted before the military. By your own father?”
“Most of them,” he answered honestly, simultaneously dreading and resigning himself to her pity.
She showed him neither, though she paused and gave an audible swallow. “Would you permit me to ask you something?” she inquired.
She could say whatever she wanted if she’d only keep using that voice, the one that reached for him through the shades and memories to caress the tension from his muscle, sinew, and bone.
When he didn’t answer she proceeded anyway. “If your father’s treachery caused you such a wound, would you then hurt Andrew in the same fashion?”
He stiffened. “Nay, lass, doona ye ken I’m trying to protect him from such a loss? I had Brutus less than year before he was … slaughtered in front of my eyes. What if my son had such an attachment for ten or fifteen years, and then the wee beastie died or ran away? Is it not kinder of me to circumvent the pain of that altogether?”
“Wasn’t it Lord Tennyson who first said that ‘it is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all’?” Slowly, his governess lowered her frame onto the dainty bench of her vanity. She was within an arm’s reach now, and Liam kept his hands fisted in his lap.
“I doona know, lass. I’ve never read much poetry.”
“Well, that must be remedied.” She sighed softly and leaned toward him in the darkness. “The point you make is frankly absolute nonsense, and yet I feel as though I am finally beginning to understand you, Laird Ravencroft.” The whisper of a smile warmed her voice and Liam thought that if he sat very still he could feel that warmth radiating from her skin, though she didn’t touch him.
Liam’s brows drew together as he tried to figure whether her words pleased or offended him.
“You know that I’m acquainted with Farah Blackwell, the Countess Northwalk,” she continued.
“Aye.”
“Well, I will confess that she has taken me into her confidence, and I know that she is not only an association, but your sister-in-law. You see, I understood your father to be a vicious man before I came here, because Farah told me that he paid to have your brother, his own son, beaten to death by the guards at Newgate Prison where he was wrongly incarcerated.”
She’d uncovered another guilt he carried locked beneath his ribs. Something he should have been able to stop, somehow, had he acted sooner. Had he become the Demon Highlander back when Dougan Mackenzie, the boy who had become Dorian Blackwell, had needed him, might he have saved his brother from becoming the Blackheart of Ben More?
“I felt so much sorrow for your brother all those years ago.” Mena’s voice caught for a moment before she cleared the emotion from it. “I mourn for all of the ill-treated and illegitimate children of Hamish Mackenzie and men like him. But what I realize now is if that was the awful fate of the unwanted boy, what must it have been like for the child who had to reside with such a man?”
No one, not even Liam, himself, had thought of it in those terms before. He’d always mourned for the countless victims of his father. Never had he thought to count himself among their ranks. He’d been the heir apparent. The legitimate issue who at least had inherited a castle, fertile land, a title, and a business, one he’d built from failing to thriving. He’d always thought that of all Hamish Mackenzie’s offspring, he’d received the most reparation, and therefore had little entitlement to his pain.