He rolled off the bed, magnificently naked and not in the least self-conscious about it. He strolled toward her. “And I thought taking you to bed would tame you.”
“Like a good little Victorian woman?” she asked sweetly. “Like Caroline?”
He stopped. “Caroline is different. I swore an oath to watch over her. Gresham trusted me.” He laughed. “Trust is a very rare commodity, Mac. I trusted Perry once.”
“But you don’t trust Caroline.”
“She can’t be trusted. She has a dangerous wildness in her makes her an easy victim of men like Perry.”
There was a shift in his tone, the faintest crack in his implacability. Mac got up and walked toward him, step by hesitant step.
“You sound as if… you’ve seen this happen before.”
At first she thought he wouldn’t answer. But he turned his head toward the window, and she saw his profile: it made her think of stone that appeared impregnable but could be shattered with a single well-placed blow.
“I know,” he said, as if he were speaking to someone only he could see. “She’d put herself into their hands, and they’d use her, destroy her, until she ended her life on some street corner selling her body…”
He was no longer talking about Caroline. He no longer seemed to be in the room at all, but somewhere far away in time and space.
“It was someone… close to you, wasn’t it?” she asked.
No reaction. No questioning of her meaning, no anger, no mockery. Only a flat, frigid harshness that covered something unbearable.
“Siobhan,” he said at last.
“That’s a beautiful name.”
“She was beautiful once. It was beaten out of her.”
“By… a man?”
“By life.”
“Who was she?”
He looked over his shoulder, the familiar cynicism back in his eyes. “You want my life story, Mac? It’s a sad, sad tale. Before the English landlords took our farm in Ireland we were prosperous people. They left us with nothing.”
“Liam—”
“Da said ‘Go to America.’ He had great plans to make us comfortable again. But he wasn’t a man. He broke his promises. He left Ma and me and Siobhan in a New York tenement. He took what money he’d earned and went his own way.”
Abandoned, Mac thought. “Then Siobhan was your sister,” she said softly. “How old were you?”
“Old enough. I was eleven. Siobhan was fourteen.”
Mac took another step, commanding her hands to stay at her sides. “What happened?”
His gaze had grown unfocused. “We had no money. No food. I worked where I could, but it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t Da. Ma was sickly. She could never accept what had happened. She wouldn’t accept my—” He fell mute, and it was several moments before he spoke again. “She went mad, I think. She never left the tenement. But Siobhan wanted more. She wanted what we’d had in Ireland, and she was beautiful. There was always a wildness in her. She met a man who told her he’d give her all that and more in exchange for her virginity.”
Even with so little said Mac knew where the story was going. She was already beginning to understand the source of Liam’s fixation. A young woman barely out of childhood, a girl with a reckless streak who didn’t know what she wanted, perched on the edge of freedom—or ruination…
“I tried to watch her,” Liam continued, flat and distant. “I tried to stop her, but she always had her own way. And I wasn’t Da. So she went with this man and he kept her until he tired of her, and then she went to another. And when one of them made her sick enough that no one wanted her, she took to the streets.” His hand flexed against the wall, grabbing at nothing. “I couldn’t stop her.”
Her heart clenched. “You were a boy.”
“I tried to bring her home,” he said, “but when Ma saw her it was too much. Siobhan ran and when I came back from work the next morning Ma had used my knife on her wrists.”
Good God. He’d been a kid, watching his sister destroy herself and his mother…
“She killed herself,” Mac whispered.