Page 157 of Twisting Beauty

I grabbed the empty teapot out of his hands and threw it across the room. It hit the far wall and shattered into white china pieces that skittered across the floorboards.

“Answer the fucking question.”

He looked at the broken pieces of his teapot, then at me. “I’m trying to protect you.”

“What part of my naked body needed protecting from behind a hidden lens?”

His shoulders shifted under the shirt, his calm cracking. “Well, you certainly weren’t going to tell me you were fucking the enemy. I had to know what you were keeping from me so I could protect you from yourself.”

“The camera.” My voice climbed. “Then showing up at Ravenwood. Now telling me it was protection? Do you think I’m a gullible eejit?”

“That boy has corrupted you.” He took half a step toward me. “I’m here to save you.”

“Save me?” The word came out of my throat full of teeth. “The way you saved Maggie?”

The room went very still.

His face emptied. The color went out from under his cheekbones. “What are you⁠—”

“I know,” I said. “I fucking know you went to jail for murder.”

He held very still. “That was justice.”

The words landed flat between us.

For a second I couldn’t speak. He’d said that line like a lie he’d practiced. Like this had been his line for twenty years.

“You think,” I hissed, “killing an unborn baby is justice?”

The stillness broke for half a second. His eyes widened. Shock cut through the mask before he could lock it down. He glared at me with something dangerously close to anger. “Is that what he told you?”

I crossed my arms. “It doesn’t matter how I found out.”

“That’s the story Alistair told the court,” he said, his cold mask smoothing itself back into place. “He’s a liar and a monster. You know that as well as I do.”

He wasn’t telling me everything.

The recognition slotted into me cold and clean. This was him. This had always been him. A man who never quite lied, but who withheld. He only chose which parts of the truth I was allowed to see.

“Tell me everything.” My voice came out lower than I meant it to. “All of it. Or I walk out of the Lasair Manor tonight and find another way to get Dervla out. Without you.”

My threat hung heavy in the silence between us. I now knew why he had created this elaborate plan, why he needed me. He couldn’t get anywhere near Alistair without being thrown back into prison.

He blinked first. “You need me, Liath.”

I shook my head. “Not anymore.”

A flicker of something raw went across his face, almost gone before I’d clocked it.

He took a glass off the shelf, poured himself cognac from a half-empty bottle, then threw back half of it before he started speaking.

“I loved Maggie since we were kids. But her family was never going to let me marry her. I went away to make something of myself, leaving her alone at the mercy of those bastards. I’ve regretted it ever since.”

The newspaper clipping from the wardrobe came back to me. Son of the Blackwoods’ gardener. The Blackwoods were the founding family of this town. Their class differences would have been too great.

“By the time I came back, the Lasairs had forced her to marry Alistair. He’d forced himself on her and she was pregnant.”

The breath went out of me. Oh fuck. Lorcan was the product of her rape. God, did he know?