Chapter 15
“God, look at ye!” Cohen exclaimed.
Jenson stood in front of the open door, blocking the light. “What happened?” he asked after he returned from the corridor, protecting a lit candle.
“Be careful.” Cohen slowly stepped into the room, sniffing the air. His nose wrinkled at the pungent smell. His eyes scanned the bottles scattered on the floor in the little light the candle offered. “We daenae yet ken how combustible it is in here.”
Jenson looked away from the sconce that just lit up. Cohen threw open the drapes at the right moment, and the room alighted with the silvery glow of the risen moon. At the center of the mess was Darragh, slouched in his chair, cradling a glass of brown liquid.
Jenson hissed and drew his hand away when the wick burned his fingers. He blew out the candle and discarded it, then took the glass from Darragh’s hand.
“I thought we were past this.”
Darragh did not protest. He hung his head forward.
“How long have ye been in here?”
“Since the morning,” Darragh replied in an all too familiar voice.
His throat burned, sore and dry. But the pain wasn’t enough to distract him.
“Tell me what happened,” Jenson demanded calmly.
He stood opposite him, while Cohen stood beside him. He turned the chair, then cupped Darragh’s face in his palm and studied him. His cheeks were red and burned hot, his pupils were dilated, and he could barely hold his head up. If he were to bleed, brown would seep out before red.
“I daenae think he can answer ye in this state.”
But Darragh could.
He could tell him a vivid tale about that morning, how the air had gone from cool to hot, then stuffy.
How the light had danced across her face from arousal, to anger, to hurt.
He remembered the curve and fullness of her lips as she uttered every syllable, the weight of the tear that dangled beneath her lashes.
He could describe the feel of her skin to perfection, its redness, its dullness.
Her smell, her taste—he could make a catalogue of it, give new meaning to anything old and everything new.
He could do all of that.
But that was what he was running from. The alcohol did nothing but slow him down, rooting him to the bottomless pit of memories he did not want to relive.
“Let’s try to get him to bed.” Jenson crouched beside him, and together, they heaved his weight onto their backs.
His head fell limply, and the pain splintered from his neck to his chin. Cohen adjusted him, forcing his dark eyes to watch the carpet turn into hardwood and then tiles. The rapid change caused an ache that rolled his eyes back, till veins popped in his face and his lips parted in a groan.
“Hang in there,” Cohen urged.
Darragh’s body was a bundle of physical and emotional pain.
They tilted to the side as they passed through the door. Jenson’s voice was muffled, like an incoherent vibration through his ears. Darragh cringed, but could not move away.
“Lift with yer legs, and ye willnae feel a thing.”
“What excellent advice. If only I had thought of it. Darragh, help us a little and pick up yer goddamn feet.”
“Ye’re so cruel,” Cohen laughed.
“Ye would be too after experiencing this countless times.”
“Ye forget I have.”
Mutual understanding in the form of silence passed between them. Then, Jenson broke it. “What do ye think caused it this time?”
“Talia,” Cohen said quietly. “Me wife has told me about them.”
Darragh, who had fallen asleep at some point, felt the sharp jab of Jenson’s shoulder.
“Darragh, ye cunt, is this about her?”
He mumbled incoherent words, which would have been a plea if he were sober.
“If ye were havin’ trouble with the lady, ye should have come to us. Cohen is married, and I am quite popular with the ladies. So what’s the problem?”
The problem was that…
“I love her.”
Saying it out loud was like driving a pike into his chest. He could not love her. It was not the right time. They would never be right for each other. Yet his heart pounded so hard that he could almost ignore the common sense urging him to forget about her.
“Then tell her that.”
“I cannae distract her. I need to put the clan first.”
They turned into his bedroom. After they lowered him onto the bed, Cohen went to shut the curtains, and Jenson lit the hearth. Together, they tucked him beneath the tartan blanket.
“Ye’re an idiot,” Jenson had muttered at some point, but he didn’t believe Darragh heard him.
He stared at the ceiling, at the dark drapes framing the bed, and wondered how he could have let himself drift into ruination again. He felt shame as their disappointment bored holes into his skull.
The last thing he remembered before drifting off was Jenson cupping his face in his hands. “Ye have to learn to put yerself first sometimes.”
Then his weight lifted off the mattress.
Darragh’s head throbbed.
It was the sort of pain that had him believe he could find himself in the study after a full night of drinking and get on with his day as if nothing had occurred. But once he sank into the soft leather upholstery, hot pain splintered through him.
“Yer soup, me Laird.” A footman pushed a bowl across the desk.
The steam tickled his nostrils, and he forced himself up.
With a groan, he lifted his head, which felt heavier than he could handle, from his hands.
Green and orange vegetables swirled in an unattractive yellow liquid—a cure for his hangover, presumably.
The liquid burped up a brown ball of potato and coughed out a small drop of liquid that landed on his desk.
The seasoning was a nauseating blend of pepper and garlic, which was not what was needed to cure his headache.
Bile rose in his throat, and the bowl’s contents swirled as if to taunt him.
He would make sure to remember this before he went on another spiel.
He peeked out from slitted lids. The footman lingered, looking a tad amused, like someone who had just collected a nugget of gossip.
“Ye are excused.”
Darragh did not see the man bow or leave as he covered his eyes with his palm, but he heard the creak of hinges and the snap of a bolt.
When he opened his eyes, the steam from the soup had permeated the air, painting the room in a hazy mosaic. It drifted to him, and he rose and backed away as if it were some contagious disease. It might as well have been, seeing the way his stomach reacted to it.
The sudden motion turned the throbbing in his skull to cymbals, a ringing in his ears that pressing his hands to either side of his face could not quell.
This was what happened when one abandoned a life of debauchery and decided on a whim to pick up the habit without easing into it.
He had drunk the usual lot to get drunk.
But the usual lot would also have him gingered in a boxing ring or the backyard of Minister Harrison’s parish, puking away his virility the next day.
Minister Harrison… His daughter would have been serving him a chilled glass of sweetened lemonade at the moment.
Darragh looked out forlornly. That was what he needed: something sweet, something cold.
He pushed off the seat, careful not to be caught up in the steam, headed to the window, and threw it open.
The parish stood out from the rest. Its grandeur was nowhere close to McGhee Castle, but standing at three stories high with terracotta slate roofing, it dwarfed the neighboring buildings.
It had fresh white paint, courtesy of the magnanimity of the people, reminding him of his own failure as Laird.
He rested against the windowsill, gulping in the fresh air. The cold chilled the heat in his veins and calmed the turmoil in his stomach.
It was particularly drafty that morning. The air was thick with the smell of petrichor. Fog rolled in, shadowing the walls of the keep as it usually did before a storm.
If he did not send a letter, Mrs. Goodwill’s chickens would run amok as they always did before storms—they spooked easily, and she had yet to find a pen for the jittery things—and he would be forced to spend a sunny afternoon bird calling in the hope of finding the creatures before some tenant took a bird in their backyard as a blessing and cooked it. It had happened one too many times.
He would also have to remind his mother to stock up on milk for the next two to three days. The farmer’s incompetence was also one thing he could anticipate.
Dread coiled in his gut as an image of the aftermath of a storm flashed through his mind: flooded canals, drainage blocked by debris and fallen tree branches, dislodged roofs. The roads churned with mud because of years of neglect, and he could only imagine their state after the storm hit.
Potholes eroded day by day, and it irked him how he did not yet have the funds to mend them. A tenant had once come upon a pile of boulders within the keep. If Darragh had the money back then, he would have employed stonemasons to break them down and then built proper drainage systems.
There was a hole in the outer wall that currently required fixing, and the roads…
He could have covered up so much of the clan’s shame with proper roads.
Without the funds, he had been forced to sell some of the rocks to the man to finish building his workshop.
He had made less than he would have had he used the rocks himself.
The money was not much, but he had someone who could foresee a future in the keep for so long that he set it in stone.
His tenants were growing tired of the constant thieving because of the gap in the fence and the frequent visits to fix their carts. He had had to employ Jenson’s help to convince the minister not to abandon them just yet.
The soup had cooled by the time he returned to it. There was an expensive looking victoria sitting in the courtyard. He knew he had only moments before a caller would disturb him. The carriage must have been sitting there for a while, as a knock sounded at the door just then.