A sound like the muffled beating of her accelerating heart pounded at the earth, and Mena leaned against the window in time to see several mounted Highlanders melt out of the mists like the specters of Jacobite warriors who had roamed these very moors a hundred years past.
Her breath caught at the sight of them. Heavy cloaks protected brawny shoulders, though their knees remained bared to the elements by matching blue, green, and gold kilts. They reined their horses to a walk and lurked closer to the carriage, letting the mist unveil them to her wide gaze.
Mena was suddenly aware of how very alone and vulnerable she was. Chances were, she told herself, this was the help Kenneth Mackenzie had sent for, but she didn’t see the driver among the mounted Highlanders.
She counted seven, each one burlier—and filthier—than the last. On the other hand, they could be brigands. Highwaymen, rapists, murderers …
Oh, dear God.
They circled the carriage, all peering inside the rain-streaked windows with not a little curiosity, speaking the lyrical language of the Highlands. She understood it to be Scots Gaelic, though she comprehended not a word.
Then she saw him.
Her mouth became dry as the desert, and a tremor that had nothing to do with the cold rippled through her.
Though he wore a soiled kilt and loose linen shirt beneath his drenched cloak, he sat astride a black Shire steed with the bearing of a king. Dark waves of hair hung long and heavy with moisture down his back, and menace rolled off the mountains of his shoulders in palpable waves.
Whoever he was, he was their undeniable leader. She saw it in the way they looked to him, in the deference they used when speaking. If not by birth, then by physical laws of nature, surely. As the largest, the strongest, and the most fearsome of them all, he towered above the brawny men as he scowled through the window at her.
Even through the mesh of her hat’s veil, and the black soot streaked across his features, Mena could see the tension in his strong jaw. The aggression etched into the grooves of his fierce, deep-set eyes. Viewed through the chaotic tracks of rain upon the window, he could have been a savage Pict warrior, bred not only to survive in this beautiful and brutal part of the world, but to conquer it.
Mena gasped at the shocking flash of muscled thigh bared to her as he dismounted, and despaired that even afoot, his astounding height and breadth diminished not at all.
Dear Lord, he was coming closer. He meant to reach for the door.
Lunging forward, she threw the lock and extracted the skeleton key just as his big hand turned the latch.
Their eyes met.
And the rain disappeared. As did everything and everyone else.
Mena knew that there were moments in one’s life as significant as an epoch. Existence, as a result, was split into a before, and an after, and whatever was left as a consequence of that moment illuminated who someone really was. It laid one open, exposing the most vulnerable part of one’s self for honest and brutal inspection, and the acceptance that inexorable change has been wrought. She’d lived long enough to experience a few of these. Her mother’s death when Mena was only nine, her first real taste of tragedy. The first time she galloped on a horse on her father’s farm, and experienced true freedom. Her first kiss. The horror of her wedding night. The moment she was told she’d never be a mother.
So she recognized this as one such moment.
The leviathan on the other side of the now seemingly inadequate barrier of the window was not the only one conducting the inspection.
What Mena saw in the striations of amber and ebony in the Highlander’s eyes alternately terrified and fascinated her. Here was a man capable of inconceivable violence. And yet … a weary sorrow lurked behind the incredulity and subsequent exasperation in his glare. He might even be attractive beneath all that soot and filth, but in the feral and weathered way the Highlands, themselves, were appealing.
Mena blinked, berating herself for noticing such a thing of her probably robber-highwayman-rapist-assassin, and the spell was broken.
“Open the door,” he commanded in a deep and booming brogue.
“No,” Mena answered, before remembering her manners. “No, thank you.”
* * *
They called him the Demon Highlander.
Over the course of the previous two decades, Liam Mackenzie had led a number of Her Majesty’s infantry, cavalry, and artillery units. He’d stormed countless mobs during the Indian Mutiny and made his fame when the so-called Indian Rebellion had been crushed. He’d facilitated the disbandment of the East India Company with espionage, assassination, and outright warfare, painting the jungles with blood until the crown seized the regime. He led the charge against Chinese cannon in the second Opium War, leaping from his horse over cannonfire and slicing through Asian artillery. He’d secretly conducted rescue missions to Abyssinia and Ashanti, leaving no trace of himself but for a mountain of bodies in his wake. He’d trained killers and killed traitors. He’d toppled dynasties and executed tyrants. He was William Grant Ruaridh Mackenzie, lieutenant colonel of Her Majesty’s Royal Secret Highland Watch, Marquess Ravencroft, and ninth laird and thane of clan Mackenzie of Wester Ross. A high agent of the crown and a leader of men was he.
When he gave an order, it was obeyed by patrician and plebian alike. Most often without question.
He had no time for this. A fire had somehow ignited in the east fields this morning and his men were exhausted from frantically fighting it. The rain had been a blessing, one that had saved their winter crops. When Kenneth had ridden up and explained their predicament with the carriage, they’d raced five miles through the sac-shriveling autumn rain to save her pretty hide.
Had she really just locked him out of his own carriage and then disobeyed his command with a polite no, thank you?
If he’d have been himself, he’d have ripped the door off its hinges and yanked her to attention, taking her to task for her insolence.
He should do it now, lest his men think him weak.
Then again, perhaps not, lest his men think him brutal.
He never knew anymore. These Mackenzie were farmers, not soldiers, and the regulations that had regimented his life didn’t apply here at Ravencroft.
More’s the pity.
When their eyes had met, he’d felt the earth shift beneath him in a way he’d never experienced before. Not with the unstable feeling of a peat bog or slick silt beneath his boots, but exactly the opposite. As if the land might alter and align to please the cosmos, clicking into place with prophetic finality.
Something about the bruised look glowing from the softness of her vibrant green irises, the only thing about her he could see with any clarity, seemed to have stolen his wits from him.
It was bloody unsettling. Infuriating, even.
He jiggled the handle of the carriage door. “Open up, lass,” he hissed through his teeth.
The infernal woman shook her head demurely, her lips quivering behind the heavy veil she wore. Leaning up, she unlatched the small half-window used for ventilation above the larger window and spoke through it in a perfect, cultured British accent.
“I’d rather not, thank you.”
Liam’s knuckles cracked as he tightened his fist.
“I think we’ve frightened the wee lassie,” Liam’s steward, Russell Mackenzie, said in their native Gaelic. “We look a sight after the day we’ve had.”