“My Laird Ravencroft, I’m so very sorry,” she began earnestly. “I didn’t at all mean to cause you distress, you must believe me … I would never … that is … I wasn’t thinking…”
He stopped an arm’s length from where she sat, twisting to face him. Shadows played off his flexing jaw as his gaze touched her from the top of her hair all the way down to the hem of her skirts as they rippled beneath her swinging feet from where she perched.
“Please forgive me,” she begged, searching his savage features for a sense of how angry she’d made him.
To her utter astonishment, his expression relaxed and his shoulders sagged, though the intensity never left his dark eyes.
“Lass, I’d forgive ye just about anything in that dress.”
Flushing, Mena pulled the edges of her cloak around her, sinking her neck into the fur collar and covering the deep cleft of her décolletage.
The laird frowned, but said nothing.
Unable to look at him and still maintain her breath, Mena turned back to the tableau beneath them, a pang of happiness tugging at her heart when she spied Andrew romping about the grounds with little Rune yapping at his heels.
“May I join ye?” Ravencroft murmured from beside her, his breath a warm puff of white against the growing chill of the evening.
“It’s your castle,” she replied. She wished he wouldn’t, and yet she didn’t want him to leave. The last time she’d been alone with him she’d allowed him the most illicit liberties. Liam Mackenzie turned her into someone who was not herself. Every moment in his presence was fraught with intensity and heart-stopping emotion.
Mena didn’t watch as he kicked his leg over the wall, and then the other, settling in next to her close enough that her shoulder pressed against his arm. She’d have to scoot away from him in order to maintain a respectable distance, and though the rules of conduct dictated that she should, it would still be unaccountably rude.
Either way she couldn’t win, and Mena had the distinct impression that he’d put her in that position on purpose.
Glancing at him sharply from under her lashes, she found she could not look away. What must it be like, she wondered, to sit atop such a grand castle and lord over all that was below him? Every soul in the village, every grain in the field, every beast in the pasture all relied upon his land, his will, his honor, and his word. No wonder Ravencroft surveyed the scene with a look of fierce possession, as stolid and stony as a gargoyle, and every bit as formidable.
“This must be how the world looked in the beginning,” he observed in a voice as smooth as silk and hard as iron.
She knew exactly what he meant. What had life been like when the pleasures of night and the seduction of fire could culminate in orgiastic revelry that wasn’t impeded by the structures of society?
“Perhaps this is what it will look like at the end,” she hypothesized, feeling strangely reckless as though the spirit of the holiday was somehow contagious.
“What are ye doing up here, Miss Lockhart?” he asked, without looking down at her. “Why are ye not with the others at the feast?”
Just as quickly as heat had abandoned her face, it crept back from beneath her cloak. “You’ll think me ridiculous.”
“Never.” The sound escaped on an exhale of his, too soft to be a word, too deep to be a sigh.
“I find myself here often,” she confessed. “One of my favorite things in the world is to watch day turn into night. First the brilliance of the sunset, then the quiet blues of twilight, and then this final moment.” She tilted her head back to look above her, feeling the muscles in her throat slightly stretch in a pleasant way. “It’s as though the sky disappears and some sort of heavenly curtain is pulled back, unveiling the stars. Some people find the night sky melancholy, but I’ve always thought of the stars as familiar as old friends, always right where they’re supposed to be. It gives me a sense of the same, I think.” Mena lowered her chin, and glanced to the side where Ravencroft stared at her neck with the oddest of expressions before he lifted his unreadable eyes to hers.
“I told you.” She lowered her lashes, feeling self-conscious and very small next to him. “It’s silly. Tedious, even.”
“Nay, I ken just what ye mean, lass.” Ravencroft leaned forward, his own neck arched to turn his face to the sky. “I feel as though I’ve been everywhere in this world. There were days at war, or on a ship, where I would think that maybe home was nothing more than a memory, or a dream. I would wake at night afraid that I’d forgotten where I hied from or who I truly was. I thought I’d lose Liam Mackenzie to the Demon Highlander. It was then I began to study the constellations.”
“Did it help?” Mena wondered aloud.
He glanced down at her as though her question had pleased him. “Aye, it did. In a world where men paint the ground with blood, the stars gave me a reason to look up. They’re a map when ye’re lost, and points of light when all is dark. I ken why you think it makes them seem friendly.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I suppose that they remind me that the world always turns. That things are constantly changing. This moment, every moment, whether good or terrible, will pass into oblivion and so I must live it. I must see it through. And, eventually, a new day will come again. Another chance for something better.”
Mena thought his face, turned down as it was, half to the light, and the other half to shadow, should remind her that she conversed with the Demon Highlander, the dangerous man she’d promised to avoid as much as possible.
But something about the arrangement of his features belied any of her reservations. His lips seemed fuller, drawn out of their hard line into something resembling a lazy half-smile. The tilt of his deep-set eyes and angle of the brow above wasn’t stern or scowling, as usual, but relaxed and at ease and, if her gaze didn’t deceive her, perhaps a bit unsure or—dare she think it?—shy.
He seemed younger like this, with his hair loose and his shoulders free of their customary tension. Mena thought that when he smiled, he must be the most handsome man God had ever molded of this earth.
She swallowed, doing her best to ignore the warmth beginning to glow deep in her belly, and lower.
“I think I’d be more comfortable in perpetual darkness,” he murmured.
“Why?”
His shoulders heaved with a weighty breath, pressing deeper against hers. “Do ye believe that the things we’ve done in the dark will be answered for in the light of day?”
“I certainly hope so.” She nodded.
He searched her face then, lifting a hand to draw away a tendril of hair the breeze had blown across her cheek. “Perhaps because ye have a clear conscience.”
“I don’t, I assure you.” She turned away from his fingers, unable to bear the sweet memory of his skin against hers. Unwilling to give words to the message in his eyes.
He dropped his hand to his lap. “Perhaps, then, because ye hope that someone answer for their crimes against ye.”
Tears burned behind her eyes, and Mena dipped her chin against her chest. It was the darkest desire in her heart. That her husband answer for all the times he’d caused her terror and pain.
How had he guessed?