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“I told ye t’ leave her be.”
Though he was still dripping wet and completely naked, Liam didn’t start when the voice came out of the shrouded darkness of the forest. He’d known someone was there. He’d expected him to be.
Alan Mac stepped out as Liam put on his pants. “She knows.”
“Of course she knows.” Liam zipped the zipper, the sound a perfect punctuation to the sharpness of his words. “She saw.”
“But—” Alan Mac frowned. “She looked me right in the eye and swore she saw nothing but the woman.”
Interesting. Liam had to wonder why Kris would lie about this, considering her aversion to lies.
“She saw,” Liam repeated. “I shifted right in front of her.”
“Are ye daft?” Alan Mac threw up his big hands. “Now I’ll have t’—”
Liam was across the distance between them in an instant, one hand around the much larger man’s throat. “Ye willnae.”
“My vows,” Alan Mac began.
“Bugger your vows.” Liam leaned closer and squeezed. Alan Mac’s face began to redden. “Ye willnae touch her. She is mine.”
He shoved the man away. Alan Mac stumbled and nearly fell. His fingers rubbed at the mark on his neck as Liam calmly picked up his shirt and put it on.
“Those vows were composed in times long past,” Liam continued. “They arenae…” He searched for a word. “Right anymore. Ye cannae kill someone because they see me change. I forbid it.”
“Yes, Uilebheist.”
Liam sighed. Until recently no one had known his name. They’d all called him Uilebheist. Gaelic for “monster.”
He hated it.
Certainly he’d been a monster once upon a time. He had killed. He had enjoyed it.
But since he’d become the beastie known as Nessie, a monster in form by day, a man by night, he was a true monster no longer.
Which made it both ironic and annoying to be called that. But he’d allowed it because … what difference did it make what they called him? And really, he’d deserved nothing less.
He still didn’t deserve to have a name, a life, to love. But it had been nice, for a little while, to pretend.
“Ye told me she came to do a show on this place, on you.”
Alan Mac seemed to have conquered his momentary fear. One of the reasons Liam liked the man. He was honest, at least with Liam. He’d lie like a lazy dog to everyone else on the planet
. But Liam trusted Alan Mac both to protect him and to tell him the truth.
He’d like to think the constable was his friend, but that wasn’t the case. Alan Mac had little choice in the relationship. Which made it not friendship but bondage. Liam wished he could release the man, but only death would do that.
“What can she do?” Liam asked. “Her camera is at the bottom of the loch.”
He never had determined just who had shoved her off. It could very well have been one of his guardians. There was a reason no good footage of Nessie existed, and they were it.
“She came here to expose ye as a hoax.”
“People do that by the dozen,” Liam said. “Since I am not a hoax, they dinnae succeed.”
“What if she—”
“What?” Liam threw up his hands. “Tells the world that she slept with the Loch Ness Monster? What d’ ye think will happen to her career then?”
