The air between them vibrated with needful frenzy, and the frightened tears in her eyes only dampened the fire of a lust that would never truly be extinguished. “Mena.” Her name became a prayer.
A plea.
“Forgive me,” she whispered, surging to her feet and turning away from him. “You can’t know how wrong this is.”
She took the warmth with her as she gathered her skirts and fled.
CHAPTER TEN
Every day at sunrise, Laird Liam Mackenzie courted death.
He’d strap on his low-heeled deerhide boots and run the few miles across the moors until he had to scale Ben Crossan, the mountain which the river Crossan had to divert around to reach the sea. Though the way was rocky and treacherous at times, the true danger didn’t begin until he reached the abrupt pinnacle called Craeg Cunnartach, the Dangerous Cliff.
Many a tragic, lovelorn Highland lass had tossed herself to her death from this very place. It was said among the Mackenzie that these women became Fuathan, water wraiths, and should a man venture into their waters, the vengeful lasses would drag him to the depths of the sea, and devour him as he drowned, trying to fill the eternal void of their broken hearts. Even fishermen, divers, and merchants avoided the mouth of the Crossan River and the water beneath Craeg Cunnartach.
Liam, of course, didn’t believe in the superstition, but knew that a strong current lurked beneath the deep waters, as did sharks, rocks, and numerous other hazards.
The way he figured it, he owed the devil a chance to take him. He also understood that he was not an easy man to kill, and therefore sought the one place he could think of where he was not the alpha predator, the dominant warrior, or the Laird of the Land.
And so it was to the sea that he commended his life.
Almost.
Winded as he was once he climbed to the cliff’s edge, he never hesitated to leap, using his momentum to clear whatever juts and crags of the rock face that reached for him on his way down. For in his extensive experience with death, it was in the hesitation that a man often made his most fatal mistakes.
To say that he gave the Prince of Darkness a chance to take him didn’t suggest he meant to make it easy on the devil to collect his due. Warrior that he was, Liam fought the current with all his hard-won strength. Once he surfaced, he waited with patience for his breath to return to him—as the cold always stole it—before swimming with lithe, powerful strokes toward the Ravencroft Cove.
He’d never clocked the distance, precisely, but it took him a little over a half hour of hard swimming on most days. He’d performed this ritual since he was a lad.
Since the morning after he’d taken a whip to innocent flesh. His first true sin against another.
The first of many.
When abroad with his regiment, he’d plunged into any waters he could, when possible. He’d forged crocodile-infested jungle rivers, icy Prussian lakes, and just about every ocean on the map.
But this stretch of Highland coast was his favorite. Submerged in the sea that surrounded his home, the water which Druids had blessed and his Viking and Pict ancestors had profaned with the blood of the ancients, he turned his existential struggle into a physical one, as he battled against all that would claim him. That would pull him into the black depths and suffocate him. The guilt. The pain. The hatred. Burdens he carried every day.
He felt as though he invited the gods to strike him, or the devil to take him, and when they didn’t, he emerged from the briny water with a semblance of peace or, dare he say, permission. Not so much like a baptism, wherein his soul would be cleansed, but more like a figurative bath. He would live and toil another day, and the refuse, soil, and filth would paint his soul black again, and so he would repeat the ritual the next morning.
This particular morning, he made the journey in perhaps the shortest time since he could remember. A peculiar disquiet chased him up the mountain, and he fled from it with such speed, his legs burned as they propelled him to go ever faster.
You can’t know how wrong this is …
The autumn wind screamed her words through the canyon until they whipped against his scarred flesh, and stung lashes already healed. He ran and swam shirtless, even though the cold turned his skin white and pink as it drove the blood inward to protect his heart and vital organs.
There was a lesson to be learned here. He would do well to protect his heart. And hers.
She was safe here from everyone that would do her harm.
Everyone but him.
She’d been mistaken, his governess, he did ken how wrong it was to have kissed her, to have awakened these desires, almost violent in their ardency. This obsessive, wicked curiosity he had about her bordered on the profane. She made him want things. Dark things. Had him considering sins that would not just condemn his soul, but hers as well.
Mena Lockhart.
A name? A state of being? A woman with a locked heart.
Was it her innocence or mystery that drew him? Her keen intellect? Her troubling secrets? The depth of the understanding in her eyes, or the depth of her warm, lush body?
He wanted all of it. All of her. He wanted to uncover her, body and soul. To lay her bare and wide and make a conquest of her.
He wanted to own her. To claim her. To brand her skin with his mark and to see the same, violent desire mirrored in her eyes.
Aye, he knew how wrong it was. He knew that he must master these wicked thoughts and temper these sinful urges before they burned out of control and consumed him.
She made him hard, so fucking hard that he couldn’t think.
But she made him soft, too. In those spaces he’d built walls and fortresses, around those places where memories, sins, and pain lay scattered about like shards of glass in a dark room, waiting for an unsuspecting victim to venture forth. And therein lay the danger.