The Highlander (Victorian Rebels Book 3)

Liam ran his hands through the soft green of the fresh peat moss and tried not to compare it to the vibrant shade of Miss Lockhart’s eyes. Was this the newest torment to his endless search for peace? Was there no escaping the lass? He couldn’t even examine something as innocuous as fucking moss without conjuring some part of her to his mind. She’d been at Ravencroft two weeks, and he could barely get through dinner every night without hiding arousal beneath the table.

Crushing the soft little buds in his hand, he growled at Russell. “Just how many barrels of peat did Grindall order?”

“Enough to roast the entire harvest,” his steward said carefully. “He said he discussed it with ye.”

“I’ve no memory of that.”

Russell swiped his hat off, revealing tufts of wild orange hair, and scratched his scalp nervously. “Well, if ye doona mind me saying so, my laird, ye’ve been a bit … distracted lately.”

Distracted by a ripe mouth and a round arse.

“I do mind ye saying so.” Because it was true. He’d always been a focused, driven, and determined man, and no tempting wee English lass was going to change that.

The Ravencroft distillery had almost collapsed under the drunken tyranny of his father, and Liam would be goddamned if he added the failure of the livelihood of so many to his already tainted legacy.

Employing a breathing technique he’d learned from an Indian guru, he took a breath in through his nose, and counted slowly as he controlled the exhale with his throat.

Russell likewise employed another tactic. “This shipment was expensive, and we could barely afford it due to the new copper mash tuns for the barley we acquired last year without dipping into the tenant rents. Grindall said that the peat would hasten the kiln fire of the barley and add smoke to the taste. So many of the Highland distilleries are implementing the practice.”

Goddammit. He’d wanted the distillery to be self-sustaining. He’d do anything to avoid dipping into his other sources of income.

Liam looked to his right, counting a few bricks of the warehouse which held rows upon rows of aging Scotch in their blond oak casks, then back to the kiln fires over which he was aiding Thomas Campbell, the cooper, in assembling and charring the insides of the imported casks for this year’s offering of spirits. The work was backbreaking for most men, but Liam found that he appreciated the mental monotony of it. Once Andrew fit the wet slats of oak into the bottom ring, he passed them to Thomas Campbell to char the inside over the flame.

Liam would then take one of the already charred barrels and bend the slats of wood to fit into the iron rings, and employ the blacksmith’s hammer to pound them into place. He enjoyed the need to sweat and strain, found a sort of physical release in the force it required of him.

A physical release that he was sorely in need of.

This peat business was an unwelcome interruption.

Taking another breath, he tossed the peat back into the crate. “There are three—and no more than three—ingredients in Ravencroft Single Malt Scotch. What are they, Andrew?”

He turned to his son, who stood behind him. The boy’s mood was as black as the soot smudged across his fine shirt and stubborn, miserable features. He’d brought Andrew down to experience the jolly frenzy of work that came after the barley harvest. The milling and mashing of the barley into grist, the import and assembly of the casks, the careful fermentation in the mash tuns, the distillation processes, and finally the stacking of the finished barrels where they would sit for no less than three years and one day, and sometimes more than two decades.

“I doona ken what they are,” Andrew mumbled.

“Aye, ye do, lad. They’ve been the same for centuries.” Liam tried to keep his rising temper from his voice.

Glowering at the crates of moss, his son lifted a shoulder. “I canna remember.”

Setting his teeth against his frustration with his son, his steward, and his fucking buyer, he ticked the answer off on his own fingers. “Malted barley, water from the river Glan, and yeast. That’s it,” he informed them both. “I’m not adding the taste of the slag ye collect from the bogs to my whisky.”

“This peat is special grown for Scotch,” Russell said. “It’s hardly from the bogs.”

Unused to repeating himself, Liam enunciated his words very slowly. “Barley. Water. Yeast.”

Russell took one look at Liam and hopped to cover the crates. “What do ye like we should do with all this?”

“Burn it. Throw it in the sea. Wipe yer arse with it! I care not,” Liam snarled. “But I’ll flay the skin from any man’s hide that puts it near my whisky.”

“You know, Mr. Mackenzie.” A soft, husky feminine voice from behind him vibrated through every hair on Liam’s body until lust dripped like warm oil straight to his loins. “I’ve heard that peat makes an excellent addition to compost. Perhaps you can add it to the fertilizer you’re mixing in with the top layer of soil before the frost.”

“Miss Lockhart, Lady Rhianna.” Russell beamed at her, wiping a self-conscious hand over his hair and replacing the cap. “What an unexpected pleasure.”

There was no amount of controlled breath that could have prepared Liam for the sight of Miss Lockhart swathed in a simple dark gold day dress the exact color of the barley roasting in the kiln. A woolen shawl of the blue, green, and gold Mackenzie plaid rested casually over her head and shoulders. Only a little of her hair peeked from beneath it, but Liam thought that she might have worn some of it down.

How long is it? he wondered. And was it truly as silky as it appeared?

Beneath the slate-gray autumn sky, she was as vibrant as a sunset. Judging by the instantaneous change in productivity around the crop of buildings that comprised the distillery, he wasn’t the only man to notice.

The lass had addressed Russell, but her gaze traveled the length of Liam from the top of his loosely bound hair, to his open shirt, soiled kilt, and filthy boots. When she’d finished her inspection, her eyes returned to meet his, and he couldn’t exactly name what he saw there before she flicked her lashes down, but his body responded to it.

Violently.

Miss Lockhart elbowed Rhianna who stood next to her, dark curls tumbling over a lavender dress. His daughter stepped forward and performed a perfect curtsy. “Mr. Russell, Mr. Campbell, Father,” she addressed them all kindly. “Good afternoon.”

Liam reached for his daughter, then noted the soot on his hands and staining the cuffs of his shirt and kilt, and thought better of it. “Ye look like a fine grown lass today, nighean.”

Philomena Lockhart had begun to turn his wild wee daughter into a lady. She never ceased to impress him.

Goddammit.

Russell sidled closer to the governess, a solicitous smile affixed beneath his beard. “So, Miss Lockhart, what were ye saying about the peat making compost?”

“Well, Mr. Mackenzie—”

“We’re most of us ‘Mr. Mackenzie’ around here. Call me Russell.” He offered her his arm and the charismatic smile that had gotten him many prettier lasses than he deserved.

“Then you must call me Mena.” She took Russell’s offered arm and drifted with him toward the crates of moss in the yard.

Mena.

Liam had to clench his teeth to stop himself from testing the name out loud. The word was soft and round, lovely and feminine. Just like everything else about her.

The sight of her clean, soft hands resting on the sleeve of Russell’s grubby work clothes set a shimmer of antipathy through him.

Abandoning his post at the open fire to Campbell, Liam followed them over to the crates. “A governess, a carriage mechanic, and now an agriculturalist? Is there aught ye doona do, Miss Lockhart?” he challenged.

She met his antagonism with a modest smile that deepened the distracting dimple next to her lush lips. “I’m no agriculturalist, but my father did have me practice my reading from an American publication entitled The Farmer’s Almanac. While I don’t remember everything I read, I do recall that often American barley farmers would import Scottish peat moss to fertilize their fields and help stave off the blight.”

“She’s ever so clever, isna she, Father?” Rhianna exclaimed solicitously.

“Ever so.” Liam nodded, though his features tightened. “But she forgets our Scottish soil is already full of peat, and thereby adding too much can create a buildup of ammonia.”

“There is that,” Russell ceded, sliding Mena an apologetic look and patting her hand with his. “But it was a good idea, especially for a lass.”

Liam noted, with no small amount of pleasure, that Mena gently but resolutely extricated herself from Russell’s arm. Apparently, she’d had enough of his masculine supremacy.

“I have it on good authority that the extra ammonia is easily balanced with an agent like sodium bicarbonate,” she observed. “Which is not at all expensive, and you can order such a substance from most any alchemical farming supply these days and it’s shipped by train. It might put you a few days behind, but the money you would save on wasting the moss would be worth it to the operation. Not to mention the benefits you’d reap next year with abundant crops.”

A stunned silence followed her declaration in which she seemed to take great pleasure. However, instead of saying something smug, which he’d fully expected her to do, she turned to Andrew, and dismissed them altogether.

“This all looks so exciting.” She addressed Andrew with a cheeky smile. “I’ll bet you’re enjoying working with your father rather than conjugating your French verbs.”

Andrew shrugged, turning to address his sister. “What are ye doing down here?”

“I wanted to see what this is all about,” Rhianna insisted. “It isna fair that only ye get to work at the distillery.”

Russell chuffed Rhianna under the chin. “The lad is going to inherit Ravencroft someday. He needs to learn the business. Ye’ll move into yer husband’s house, so there’s no need to worry yer pretty head about the dirty work done here.”

Russell’s words chafed Liam, even before he saw the governess surreptitiously reach for his daughter before Rhianna gave words to her mutinous look.

Liam could see that Mena’s conciliatory smile was of the practiced variety, and didn’t reach her eyes. “That might be so, sir, but I am of the opinion that it does all individuals credit to understand the operation that is responsible for their livelihood, be they lads or lasses.”

Liam’s eyes crinkled with amusement at his people’s colloquialisms spoken in her unmistakably crisp British tongue. He also had to admit that this particular lass had a point.

All eyes looked to him for his blessing or refusal, but Liam could only feel one gaze, in particular, and all the hope contained within its verdant luminosity.

“Russell,” he said, finally coming to a decision. “Gavin is in with the stills. Take Rhianna to him. She can start there.”

Rhianna’s pleased and victorious smile warmed him. “Oh, thank you, Father!” She moved to embrace him, then seemed to remember how dirty he was. “Come, Miss Lockhart.”

“Miss Lockhart will remain here.” Liam enjoyed the drain of color from her face. “I need a word.”

“Yes, Father.” Rhianna bounced away, scrambling after Russell.

“Can I go now?” Andrew asked.

Liam glanced at him sharply. “Nay, ye canna go, there is work yet to be done, and ye doona quit until it’s finished.”

“Ye’re quitting.” Andrew threw his arm out toward Campbell. “And this is the cooper’s work, not ours.”

Liam set his jaw against his son’s impertinence, his hands curling at his sides as the rage that had been his one constant companion simmered through him. “I’ll have no son of mine be a useless laze-about. If ye’re to run this business, ye’ll have to learn every detail, and have done every job.”

“But—”

“It’s past time, Andrew, that ye learn to be responsible for something other than yer own selfish desires,” Liam snarled. “Mark me, lad, ye’ll not leave here until these barrels are assembled, do ye ken?”

The visible ripples of heat in the air between them could have been caused by their clashing wills as much as the open barrel flames.

“Aye,” his son said through bared teeth, then turned his back.

Liam nodded to Thomas Campbell, who smirked with both knowledge and approval, being the father of his own three sons.

“Follow me, Miss Lockhart,” he barked, and stalked through the square toward the warehouse.

Her shoes made quicker sounds than his on the earth beneath them, but she kept pace with his punishing march until he stalked under the wide arched entry to the brick warehouse. Liam let the perpetual chill generated by the brick cool his work- and fire-heated body, as well as his ire. Halting mid-march, he whirled about and nearly knocked over his startled governess, who caught herself just in time.

“That lad is going to be the death of me,” he raged, running his hands through his hair. “He stomps around the castle like a dark cloud, glowering at everyone in his path. Stubborn, angry, obstinate, willful…” He trailed off as that dimple appeared in her cheek once again. “Ye find this amusing, do ye?” He scowled down at her, crossing his arms over his chest.

She wrapped the shawl tighter around her shoulders, and lifted a meaningful brow. “I’m sorry, my laird, I’m just confused as to which of the Ravencroft men you are referring.” A soft smile teased at the corner of her full mouth, and lessened the effect the veracity of her words had on him.

And just like that, his anger dispelled into a vapor, much like the angel’s cut of Scotch would once any one of these barrels were open. How did she manage to do that? It was like some queer sort of feminine magic, a spell she worked with a flash of that dimple and a merry twinkle in her eye. Suddenly the flames of his wrath were doused, and he could breathe again.

A caustic sound escaped his throat, half amusement, half bewilderment. “Am I truly such an ogre?”

“Not an ogre, per se.” Her smile deepened. “But I recall a story I read as a child about a rather distempered troll—who lived under a bridge and frightened all who crossed it—to whom I could possibly perceive a resemblance.”

A laugh warmed his throat but didn’t quite escape, as a hopeless sound of frustration smothered it. He rubbed at a blooming tightness in his forehead, then noted the soot still on his hand. Covered in the filth of the day, he must, indeed, appear like a troll.

A simple white linen handkerchief appeared in his hand, and Liam lifted it to wipe the grime from his face without thinking.

It came away black and ruined, and he found he couldn’t tear his gaze away from what he’d done to her clean, dainty cloth. “I always did make a better soldier than a father,” he admitted grimly.

“I’m certain you’re excellent at both.” She placed an encouraging hand on his arm, and Liam stared at it, wondering if anyone had ever done that before. “Perhaps being a father and being a lieutenant colonel are not so different, just require separate tactics.”

Liam’s entire existence became the weight of her lily-white hand covering his flesh. He watched her long, elegant fingers as they rested over the muscle they found there, and pictured them curling over something else.

Gripping him. Stroking him. And suddenly, the inferno that threatened to consume him, the fire he fought every godforsaken day, was redirected.

To his cock.

As though she sensed the shift in him, she snatched her hand away, smoothing the movement over by turning to the ceiling-high rows of whisky barrels and running her fingers over the Ravencroft crest branded into the lid where the tap would go.

“Miss Lockhart,” he started, reaching for her shawl with the intention of revealing her hair. “Mena, I—”

“You said there was something you wanted to discuss with me?” she said with false brilliance, retreating a step.

Liam let his hand drop and whatever he was about to say became like Scotch vapor. Intangible until ignited by a single spark. “Jani mentioned today that ye received some bad news from London a few days past. I’ve figured it was the reason ye’ve kept to yerself, and I wanted to inquire after ye.”

“It was nothing, I assure you. Just … the gossip of mutual acquaintances. Trifles, really.”

She was lying again. Liam had taken part in, and been the victim of, enough interrogations to easily identify deception.

Jani had also mentioned the letter had been from Liam’s own sister-in-law, Farah Blackwell. Normally, he would have assumed the contents had something to do with trifles. Farah had procured his governess the position so correspondence wasn’t, in itself, troubling.

But something restless and suspicious stirred inside Liam. Some instinct of danger and unrest that he had relied upon in his military days, which had saved his life on more than one occasion, pulsed red with warning.

Danger lurked nearby; he could feel it in his bones. A malevolent menace stalked his keep, but identifying it was like searching for shadows in the darkness.

It was more than a purposely sheared linchpin on a carriage he was supposed to take to meet her the day she arrived. More than the fire that could have destroyed his entire east crop of barley. And more than the violence against his governess and the frightened pain he glimpsed in her eyes.

On top of everything, there was the way Jani looked at his daughter, or Andrew looked at Liam, or Gavin and Russell looked at Mena.

The banked fire in everyone’s eyes simmered with the risk of eventual combustion.

Except for her eyes … They held nothing but shadows.

“Everyone, it seems, is hiding something from me,” he said darkly, stepping toward her. Of all the secrets he felt haunting Ravencroft like erstwhile ghosts, he found he wanted to discover hers the very most.

At first he’d thought her features contorted in terror because he’d advanced toward her, but then the sounds of splintering wood preceded the deafening, unmistakable crash of a whisky barrel.

Liam lunged forward, grasping Mena around the waist and lifting her from the ground. He drove them both into the alcove between the shelves and the door, plastering her body against his as the four-hundred-and-fifty-pound barrel rolled past them with the cacophony of a herd of wild horses.

They stood like that for a moment, his arms on either side of her head. Their chests heaving together with frantic breath. God, but she was as soft as she’d been in his fantasies. Her lush breasts were yielding pillows against the hardness of his own chest. Every hair on his body rose, not just from the danger they’d survived, but the unexplainable electric sensation of her body against him. Beneath him, for all intents and purposes.

“Did ye see what happened?” he panted.

She stared at him with wide, moist eyes for a beat longer than she should have before they darted away and she shook her head. “It was all so fast.”

A panicked ruckus from the square told him that the barrel had rolled right out of the open doors and into the yard. It would pick up momentum down the yard, heading straight for …

Andrew.

Liam leaped away from Mena and bolted after it, dashing into the square and chasing it toward the open barrel fires. Nay, if it reached the flames with as much alcohol as was inside the barrel, the consequences would be as explosive as a barrel full of gunpowder.

Bellowing his son’s name, Liam lunged for the runaway barrel, ready to throw himself beneath it if need be to ensure his son’s survival. Others reached it at the same time, and between them they were able to grapple it into stillness inches away from the open-framed building where the fires burned.

Frantically searching the distillery yard, Liam called for Andrew, the need to cast eyes on his son first and foremost in his mind.

“Where is he?” he demanded of Thomas Campbell.

“I doona ken where he went, Laird.” Thomas stumbled out of the forge on unsteady legs, obviously shaken by how close he’d come to death. “He disappeared right after ye did.”

A sick fear lodged in his gut as Liam turned and rushed back toward the warehouse. Mena flattened herself against the door to get out of his way as he stalked past her to check the shadows and corners below the place where the barrel had landed.

No Andrew. He was safe. But as Liam inspected the shelf from where the whisky had fallen, one thing became staggeringly clear. The barrel had been pushed by someone. And if Liam hadn’t stepped toward Mena when he did …

It would have crushed him.