“Forgive me, as I’m not the expert, but is it considered good manners to call a conversation across a room?” His expression revealed nothing. Not an eyebrow lift, a half-smile, or even a scowl. Just an unsettling stoic watchfulness that set every hair of her body on its end with absolute awareness.
He’d not-so-subtly requested for her to approach him, but it sounded like a dare.
Like a temptation.
“No, my lord, it is not.” Remembering Millie LeCour’s advice, Mena lifted her chin and forced her eyes to remain on his, summoning every iota of British superiority that had been beaten into her since she’d come to London as the Viscountess Benchley.
The flames that reflected in his unblinking eyes licked his gaze with heat and, for a moment, Mena could truly believe that a demon stared out at her from those abysmal depths. He regarded her approach with the same sulfurous glare she imagined the devil used to survey his unholy realm.
To compensate for her apprehension, Mena rolled her shoulders back, as though stowing angel wings, and traversed the length of the table with the deportment of a benevolent royal. Though she kept the corner of the table and one of the high-backed chairs in between them.
She was being brave, not idiotic.
Mena regretted eating quite so much at dinner, as the meal now rolled and tossed inside her stomach, and threatened acid that she had to desperately swallow. Despite that, she didn’t allow her gaze to waver, though it cost her more strength than she’d ever credited herself with.
His eyes touched her everywhere, and Mena had to fight the impulse to cover herself, lest he know how exposed she felt in his presence.
“We’ve not had the opportunity to formally meet,” the marquess remarked. “I must say, Miss Lockhart, ye’re not what I expected.”
Mena attempted a polite smile and fished in her blank mind for something witty and charming to say. “It seems, my lord, that the circumstance is mutual.” Indeed, she hadn’t expected him to be so young. So devastatingly virile. So wickedly dark and—dare she think it?—attractive.
She’d meant to be witty, to diffuse some of the intensity between them, but she could tell that her answer hadn’t pleased him.
“Aye.” He didn’t return her smile, and Mena fought the urge to fidget like a child set in the corner.
She’d met precious few people in her lifetime who’d made her feel small. She looked most men straight in the eye, if she didn’t tower over them. But Ravencroft dwarfed her so entirely, she had to tilt her head back to meet his stern regard. He stood before her every inch the regimented soldier, posture erect and unyielding with his arms clasped behind him, neither a hair nor stitch out of place. At this close vantage, Mena could identify the familial resemblance between Liam Mackenzie and Dorian Blackwell. The same thick ebony hair, similar dark, haunted eyes, and a raw, almost barbaric bone structure. All hard angles and broad planes and no quarter given to weakness. But where a cruel, sardonic twist adorned Blackwell’s lips, Ravencroft’s were instead drawn into a perpetual hard line. Unreadable and forbidding. Dorian had the look of a prowling lone beast, hungry and predatory. Ravencroft, however, had never seen a cage that would dare hold him. Nations fell before him. Kings had bowed and tyrants had groveled at his feet.
Mena found herself wondering if those hard lips ever softened. If those heated, merciless, assessing eyes ever became languid and tender.
“I asked Lady Northwalk to send me a capable, experienced, and educated governess and she sent ye, Miss Lockhart, what do ye make of that?” His words pierced her with panic, though his tone remained neutral.
“D-did you not receive my references? My letters of recommendation? I assure you, sir, I am beyond qualified to teach your children comportment. Lady Northwalk informed me that after reading the Whitehalls’—”
“Yer references were impeccable. However, the expectations of my children differ greatly from the Whitehalls’, ye ken? They were merchants, I’m a marquess, if ye’ll believe it now.”
“A marquess who dresses like a Jacobite rebel,” she reminded him. “Forgive me for not believing you earlier, but you were covered in mud and ash from the fields, and I’d never met a marquess who assisted in such—physical labor.”
Ravencroft stepped forward, and Mena retreated, her hands covering the flutters in her stomach as though holding back a swarm of butterflies. “I only meant—”
“There are some, Miss Lockhart, who would argue ’tis the responsibility of a noble to oversee every aspect of work on the land he owns. And there are others who would find it mighty strange that a proper London governess kens so much about linchpins and carriage wheels.”
Mena recalled Miss LeCour’s sage advice, that a lie was best told peppered with truth. “My father was a landed gentleman and avid agriculturist, as well as a scholar. I learned quite a few things at his feet as a child which included—”
“And are ye aware of how far behind schedule my men and I are because we spent all bloody afternoon saving yer stubborn hide? If ye’d allowed me to take ye on my horse, we’d not have lost the daylight.”
“I do regret my part in that,” Mena said, and meant it. “But as I was a woman traveling alone you can’t expect—”
“Ye’ll need to ken more than farm maintenance and how to distract a man with a pretty dress in order to teach my children what they’ll need to know to survive in society,” he clipped.
“Well, their first lesson will be on how rude and socially unacceptable it is to consistently interrupt people in the middle of their sentences,” Mena snapped.
Oh, sweet Lord. She could hardly believe her own behavior. Here she stood, alone and defenseless before perhaps the deadliest warrior in the history of the British Isles, and she’d just called him to answer for his bad manners.
Had she escaped the asylum only to go mad outside its walls?
“Go on then,” he commanded, his voice intensifying and a dark, frightening storm gathering in his countenance. “I believe ye were about to apologize for wasting my time.”
Mena actually felt her nostrils flare and a galling pit form in her belly. What was this? Temper? She’d quite thought she’d been born without one. Affection and tenderness had made up her idyllic childhood, and acrimony and terror had dominated her adult life. She’d never really had the chance to wrestle with a temper.
And wrestle it she must, or risk losing her means of escape into relative anonymity. Closing her eyes, she summoned her innate gentility along with the submissive humility she’d cultivated over half a decade with a cruel and violent husband. Opening her mouth, she prepared to deliver a finely crafted and masterful apology.
“Why aren’t ye married?” the marquess demanded, again effectively cutting her off.
“I—I beg your pardon?”
“Wouldna ye rather have a husband and bairns of yer own than school other people’s ill-behaved children?” His glittering eyes roamed her once again, leaving trails of quivering awareness in their wake. “Ye’re rather young to wield much authority over my daughter, as ye’ve not more than a decade on her.”
“I have exactly a decade on her.”
He ignored her reply, as the corners of his mouth whitened with some sort of strain that Mena couldn’t fathom. “Were ye a Highland lass, ye’d barely seen Rhianna’s age before some lad or other had dragged ye to church to claim ye. Whether ye’d consented or not. In fact, they’d likely just take ye to wife in the biblical sense and toss yer father his thirty coin.”