But not him. He preferred midnight curls to straight, fair locks, and porcelain skin, not freckles and honey. Slim, shy wraiths enticed him. Not the hearty type that romped out of doors practically in the altogether.
If she was beautiful, it was like a viper was beautiful. Best to be appreciated from afar, and given a very wide berth.
“Perhaps ye shouldna be so hard on the old man’s memory,” Ravencroft admonished lightly. “I’ve noted this sort of thing too many times in my life as an officer to discount it. Nurses and soldiers, ye ken? There’s something about the gentle healing touch of a pretty, kindhearted woman that a man who’s been kissed by death canna seem to resist. It evokes a powerful emotion … obsessive even.” Flicking Cole a meaningful glance, he dared, “Besides, nursing is a great deal more respectable profession than whoring, wouldna ye agree?”
Cole’s returning glare was full of warning, though he had no retort when presented with his own hypocrisy.
“Doona mistake my point for censure or judgment.” Ravencroft put up his hands as though to ward against attack. Even so, his features remained as good-natured as the savage-looking Scot could attain. “I’ve fallen prey to the curse, myself. I’ve married a woman who’d been in an asylum, after all. Disgraced, besmirched, and dishonored, she still makes an excellent marchioness.”
“Yes, well. She’d have to possess a certifiable measure of insanity to consider marrying the Demon Highlander,” Cole retorted, with no real heat in his scorn.
Trenwyth actively hated the contented warmth in Ravencroft’s wry laugh. “Then I am to assume your recent marriage is a happy one?” he asked.
“Happy doesna seem an apt enough word,” the marquess answered rather enigmatically. “Last year was … eventful. I lost a brother and gained a wife.”
Cole crossed his arms, tucking his metal hand against his opposite bicep. They’d never spoken of it. Of the dreadful time that Laird Mackenzie had brought Major Hamish Mackenzie to the Home Office and thrown him upon the mercy of the crown. Hamish had been a monster by that time. A monster. A murderer.
A traitor.
To his crown and to Cole.
They’d charged him for innumerable war crimes, treason, and hanged him shortly before Christmas. Cole and Liam had been allowed to attend, even though the crown had outlawed public executions in 1866.
Ravencroft and Trenwyth had always respected each other. The lieutenant colonel, almost a decade Cole’s senior, had been his commanding officer for a time, until Cole had taken a commission with the Special Operations Corps. Ravencroft earned his moniker, the Demon Highlander, on the open battlefield, where he dominated with the savage brutality of his Jacobite ancestors.
Cole never earned a moniker, for his brutal deeds rarely left witnesses.
On paper at the Home Office, his work was filed under diplomacy. In the field, it was no less than espionage, intelligence, and, in most cases, assassination.
It was the elder Mackenzie bastard, Hamish, who’d followed Cole into the Special Operations Corps. And then he’d betrayed him to the Turks in order to save his own skin.
Ravencroft hadn’t known he’d been rescuing his own brother’s victim when he’d been sent in to retrieve Cole from the Ottomans. The marquess had accompanied the American consul, the British ambassador, and the Irish-American reporter Januarius MacGahan to Bulgaria under the guise of intelligence gathering, as the Ottomans denied the Bulgarian uprising ever occurred. They’d scoured towns of once seven thousand souls with only two of their thousand left remaining. They’d searched heaps of bodies rotting in the streets with no one left to clear them. Rummaged through the decaying skulls of maidens and the babies skewered by bayonets. Fifty-eight massacred villages. Five desecrated monasteries. Thirty thousand corpses were combed through while the dogs feasted.
The aftermath of the horrors Cole had witnessed. Had battled against. And somehow survived.
Then they’d heard that more than a few important prisoners had been marched east toward Constantinople, and it had still taken several months for Ravencroft to find him. Their relationship had been forged anew when he’d dragged a beaten and emaciated Duke of Trenwyth back home.
The American journalist wrote an exposé on it, and the English press and the people began to call for answers. Oscar Wilde, Charles Darwin, Victor Hugo, they used their influence to force an investigation, for Britain, or rather, the whole of Europe to take action.
Ravencroft and Trenwyth had joined the ranks, hoping that Britain would do more than sanction the Ottomans for their villainy. As time passed, it seemed, their cause was lost in the cogs of capitalist bureaucracy.
Regardless, they’d forged a deeper acquaintance during that tumultuous time. But it wasn’t until the day they both watched the man they’d once called brother kicking at the end of a rope that their bond had been solidified. Cole confided in the Scottish laird like no other. Though Ravencroft resided mostly in his Highland castle with his two children and relatively new bride, he’d still been instrumental in Cole’s tireless search for Ginny.
“Are you in London for the duration?” he queried flippantly, hoping to change the course of his dark thoughts.
“Aye, my daughter Rhianna is presented to the queen and having her season. My life is naught but bloody ball gowns, ceremonies, waltzes, tedium, and yer terrible English food. I’ve considered impaling a few of my daughter’s favorite young lads on my dirk, just to enliven the evenings if nothing else.”
“Sounds bloody awful.”
“’Tis.” Ravencroft scratched at his ebony hair, which he kept past shoulder length. Cole surmised that it was to hide the few locks of silver that shone at the temples. “I’ll be a pauper and a murderer before the season is out, mark ye me.”
They both knew this to be a lie. At least the part about becoming a pauper. Ravencroft was responsible for more deaths than almost anyone in the history of the empire, surely, but he owned some of the best land in all the Highlands. His estates and distillery were more than profitable, they were enviable.
“Havena even had a proper honeymoon,” the burly Scot groused.
“A pity,” Cole replied, distracted for a moment as Lady Anstruther lifted her long hair and coiled it into some sort of knot on top of her head, stabbing it through with an extra paintbrush. Lord, had her neck always been that elegant? “It’s not as though you need to get an heir on her or anything,” he muttered, shifting a little to relieve an uncomfortable tightness in his trousers.
“If ye’d met my wife, ye’d understand my need to drag her away from all distraction and keep her naked for days in some warm, exotic place. But I canna do that until my stubborn daughter has bewitched and broken every limp-wristed, useless aristocrat in this godforsaken city.”
“Another ball tonight, I take it?” Cole smirked, grateful he’d escaped the peculiar responsibilities of fatherhood.
“Actually, she’s chaperoned tonight by my late wife’s mother, her grandmother.” The marquess didn’t exactly sound relieved, more resigned. “Lady Ravencroft has enticed me to attend a benefit this evening. A new charity project she’s rather passionate about.”
“By enticed, you mean coerced.”