“Now that we know the problem,” Liam said very evenly, “I would ask ye to again consider riding with me the scant five miles to Ravencroft Keep.” His reasons for wanting her on his horse had become much more opaque, but mostly he wanted her away from that fucking window and the wide, lusty gazes of his men.
Her expression actually brightened. “There’s really no need.” She then addressed Russell, his round, freckled face, ruddy cheeks, and perpetually jolly expression obviously more favorable. “Mightn’t you borrow a linchpin from one of the other wheels, as they all have two? That should hold for a scant five miles without incident and then more extensive repairs can be made at the keep.” At least she pulled her arm back into the carriage with her, which angled her body away from the window.
Liam wasn’t quite sure if he should thank God or curse Him.
Russell considered her words. “We’d need something to secure it with.” He rubbed at his russet beard with a thoughtful hand, then winked at her. “Braw as we are, we canna work a linchpin with our bare fingers.”
“I’ve my tool bag.” Thomas Campbell’s son, Kevin, dismounted and reached into his saddlebags, extracting a leather case.
Liam held up a hand. “It would be easier to deliver ye to Ravencroft and then repair this without the extra weight,” he said through clenched teeth.
She gasped, and every married man made a noise of either warning or panic.
“I meant of the bloody trunks lashed to the top of the carriage!” His famously short temper was fraying rapidly. Liam gestured to his horse, Magnus, and held his hand out to her as though the carriage walls didn’t separate them. “Please, lass.”
She regarded his outstretched palm for an indecisive moment with such intensity that Liam glanced down at it to see what the bloody issue was. He found nothing but his hand. Callused, square, and unsightly scarred, but nothing extraordinary, except perhaps the size, but there was fuck-all he could do about that.
They weren’t like the hands of any marquess she’d have met before. They both knew it.
“I can’t … I’m afraid.”
Liam regarded her for another tense moment as no one moved whilst waiting for his say-so. He’d at first thought her words had been I can’t, I’m afraid. An expression of polite regret. But upon closer scrutiny, he didn’t wonder if the meaning was entirely different. An admission.
I can’t. I’m afraid.
Somehow, the ball of frustration in his chest released only slightly. Though something else took its place. Maybe a bit of disappointment? He’d seen that look before in a woman’s eyes, the innate suspicion mixed with placating caution. His mother had worn that look around his father.
He glanced back down at his hands. Could she somehow see the blood that stained them? Could she sense the cruelty bred into his black soul? Did she know the vile and unholy urges that, even now, coursed through the very fibers of his muscle?
She was right to fear him.
“All right, lads.” Liam inhaled a weary breath and took post by the axle to lift the heaviest part whilst someone affixed the wheel back in place. “Let’s get this over with.”
He felt her gaze on him as they lifted the carriage and patched it. He couldn’t figure out why he was so full of this awareness, but something about her watching him grunt and strain and sweat was damnably erotic.
He didn’t allow himself to look at her, though, even when the deed was done. Instead, he swung onto Magnus’s back and kicked him into a gallop, leaving one of the others to drive the coach back to Ravencroft.
He needed a bath and a change. If she wanted a proper marquess, she was about to meet one.
CHAPTER THREE
The rain painted the red sandstone of Ravencroft Keep a deep, melancholy shade. Mena loved it immediately, as the roof was, as her father would have said, rather crowded. She counted fourteen turrets and four towers as the carriage trundled over an ancient stone bridge arching above an emerald loch.
Renaissance architecture from the early seventeenth century overlaid defensive ramparts and the original tower that must have dated all the way back to Robert the Bruce. The windows were large and airy for such an imposing stone structure, she supposed, to optimize the view and the occasional sunlight over the sparkling sea beneath the cliffs below. She’d only begun to count the chimneys when they pulled past the fountain around the circular drive and thereby lost sight of the roof.
She’d known the keep would be large, as it was a castle, after all. But this estate had to boast at least a hundred rooms, perhaps more.
Mena took another moment to close her eyes and silently send a whisper of gratitude to the Blackwells for arranging this new life for her. Here might be that isolated place at the end of a lane where she could exist in quietude and seclusion. Just as she’d imagined at Belle Glen.
She hoped the carriage debacle would be her only unpleasant surprise for the rest of the day. If she avoided anyone like the frightening Highlander she’d met on the road, she’d likely succeed.
His men had been nice enough, one of them even going so far as to drive the carriage to Ravencroft. But his savage visage had unsettled her, so much so, her heart had yet to slow from its frantic pace.
What was it about a ferocious man that terrified her so? To date, it had been so-called civilized men that had caused her harm.
But the power in the Highlander’s body as he’d strained and lifted the carriage with his men had impressed her to a bewildering degree. It had to be his sheer, inconceivable size. And the magnitude wasn’t only pertaining to his towering height, but the breadth of his shoulders and the depth of his chest. Some of that had to be the cloak he wore, didn’t it?
Mena knew Dorian Blackwell as a well-built man, strong and broad. And likewise Christopher Argent filled a doorway with impossibly wide shoulders, his like not often seen in the boroughs of London. But … Mena didn’t think she’d ever witnessed a feat of strength to match what she’d seen today. Never cast her eyes upon a man so large and well hewn. His kilt had revealed more than it covered as he’d used his tree-trunk thighs to lift the carriage. His neck had corded and jaw clenched in a most … captivating manner. The disturbing notion that something even more intriguing was happening beneath the thick cloak still hadn’t abandoned her thoughts.
Lord help her, she hadn’t been able to look away.
Once he’d galloped off into the mist, she’d had a strange feeling, much like she’d done after stumbling upon an uncommon creature in the wild, and watching it leap into the shadows. The sense of disenchantment in the knowledge that such a glimpse was rare and extraordinary, and one was likely not to experience it again.
Which was for the best, she decided. Who knew what a man like that was capable of?
Mena sobered a bit when the carriage passed the entrance with the grand stairway and circumvented the keep toward a wide but decidedly less grand portal in the back.
The servants’ entrance.
Right. Now was the time to remember not who she had been, but who she was meant to become.
She filled her lungs with a bracing breath, though nothing could have prepared her for the streak of color in the form of what she supposed was a footman, who danced down the few stone steps. He opened the door with a flourish, covering the space with an overlarge umbrella.