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.”
Liam glanced at his soot-laden steward, then down at his soiled and drenched clothing. “Och, aye,” he agreed. Then turned back to the woman. “If ye’ll come with us, we’ll take ye to Ravencroft Keep and get ye out of the storm. We can send for yer things once ye’re safe.”
She glanced nervously at the men surrounding the carriage, and Liam thought he caught sight of a wound or a split in her lip when she turned her head. He couldn’t be certain. He couldn’t see inside as well as he wanted to. And Lord, it irritated him how badly he desired to uncover the rest of her features and perceive if they were as striking as her lovely eyes.