Page 136 of Pride: The Rogue
Latimer, even panting and growling like the savage animal he’d been turned into, couldn’t erase the echo of Livian’s earlier pleas and weeping. Those plaintive wails of misery grew louder and fiercer in his mind.
“Lachlan, please. Pleeeease.”
Wait. Latimer didn’t let up, but something through the mayhem reached across a black tunnel.
Lachlan, please.
Not Forfar.
Not Latimer.
Rather, his Christian name, and which had only ever been spoken by one person.
One woman, that was.
Latimer faltered.
“Livian,” he whispered.
Those anguished cries and pleas weren’t a hellish torture chamber echo.
“Lachlan?” she wept.
Livian’s touch, delicate as the fragile flutter of a butterfly’s wings, penetrated Latimer’s stark, raving madness.
“Lachlan.”
Hands trembling, he looked at his slick, crimson-stained, bruised, and swollen hands. Dazed, he stared unblinkingly at Fofar’s bloodied, pulverized face.
Scrabbling with his sweat-slicked, messy hair, Latimer hung by mere threads of sanity and tried to free himself of the fog.
“Mr. Latimer!”
The call of his name continued to shift; between his given one and surname. Back and forth. One sharp and angry. The other doleful and imploring.
What is happening?
His gaze ultimately went first to the plaintive creature whose wails threatened to drag Latimer down in the sea of tears it shed and drown him completely in depths of its sorrow.
He froze.
Livian’s tear-streaked face and bloodshot red eyes met him.
The implications sent Latimer recoiling.
My God. She’s crying.
Because of me.
His body tautened; his arms spasmed.
“Livian,” he whispered raggedly.
He reached out for her, needing to know she was safe.
Before he could, strong, powerful fingers gripped Latimer about the arm and hauled him away.
“Good God, man!” someone commanded in a crisp, clear King’s English that Latimer recognized but couldn’t place. “It is enough.”
