He was only a specter against the tree line, but his form was unmistakable. Ravencroft ran with surprising speed and an astonishing amount of skin bared to the autumn elements. From her far vantage, Mena couldn’t tell where his burnished torso ended and his fawn trousers began.
He’d been an advancing leviathan of warm male flesh and hot Scottish blood. The closer he’d come, the more inevitable a conversation seemed to become. Considering how the last one had ended, with his mouth upon hers, Mena had known she should retreat. There was no shame in doing so, she told herself. Not when countless armies had done just that very thing upon the Demon Highlander’s approach.
He was not to be trusted. And, judging by the extra beats of her heart and the tremor suffusing her at the sight of him, even so very far away, neither was she.
She couldn’t help but watch for an unguarded moment as he jogged from the direction of the cove. His head wasn’t down, exactly, but tilted in a way that suggested he was intent on a place straight ahead of him, the next span of ground he was about to conquer.
He hadn’t seen her yet, but she could certainly see plenty of him.
The closer he came, the more detail Mena discovered. The visible ribbons of sinew and strength clinging to his heavy bones flexed and rippled with movement. The wide discs of muscle on his chest rebounded with each heavy footfall. Long legs ate up the distance between them with a flawless sense of rhythm. His hair was loose and clung to his shoulders with moisture, as though he’d been in the sea. She’d known that she should turn away, lest she be discovered gawking, but her shoes had seemed to be glued to the ground, and her eyes similarly glued to him. He’d saved her from a rather awkward altercation when he veered to the left at the hedges, and made his way down the west hill toward the distillery.
It was then that Mena had made a shocking discovery. The Marquess Ravencroft had, at some time in his life, been tortured. Long, horrific scars marred the otherwise smooth flesh of his back. They’d have to be rather large for her to see them from this distance. Her hand flew to her chest to contain an ache that had bloomed there.
Breathless, Mena had taken refuge in Ravencroft Keep, making certain Andrew had Rune spirited safely away, before starting her morning with the children. She’d attempted a regular day of instruction with them, but had proved utterly useless. Who had so egregiously wounded Ravencroft? Perhaps he’d been a prisoner of war at some point. Maybe he’d been tortured for information. Or whipped for insubordination. But surely, the army wasn’t in the practice of whipping peers of the realm, especially those as high-ranking as a marquess.
Mena couldn’t help it, a well of tenderness bloomed beneath the apprehension and suspicion she felt toward the Laird of the Mackenzie. Was the laird going to appear today, she’d wondered, full of lithe carnality and meaningful glances?
When he didn’t, she couldn’t tell if it was relief or disappointment that flooded her breast. But after a while, her nerves had threaded so taut that one more mispronounced French verb promised to make her snap. So she’d concocted a few vague excuses to the children, put a book in their hands, and wandered the halls of Ravencroft, grateful for a moment alone to collect the thoughts, fears, and fantasies threatening to gallop away with her.
Mena found herself at the top of the grand staircase that led to the front entry, as she closely perused the luxurious tapestries that warmed the cold stone of the castle walls. The sky outside had become an endless sheet of drab steel curtaining the sun as a storm pelted the earth with rhythmic hostility. She’d dressed in a heavy wool gray frock with tiny pearl buttons down the front. Piling her hair on top of her head in a loose chignon, she thought she’d made a perfectly macabre reflection. Half to match the weather, and half to match her mood.
Her gaze snagged on an imposing oil canvas located above the middle of the grand stairway. It was as tall as her and maybe ten times as wide. This one depicted a great battle, with a large and ferocious Mackenzie war chieftain leading a cadre of kilt-clad Highlanders into battle against the English. Their claymores brandished high, and their hair flying wildly about them, they looked awe-inspiring and inescapable. The battle of Culloden, perhaps? However had such fierce men been defeated?
She pictured the marquess rushing into ancient battles, a dark figure of retribution and prowess, incomparably fearsome because of his unrivaled strength and magnificent form. His fathomless black eyes would flash with rage in the heat of battle, and his thick ebony hair would gather riotously about his face as he vanquished his enemies in bloody and mortal combat.
Spellbound by the beauty of the illustration in this particular painting, she reached out trembling fingers and brushed them against the vicious rendering of the ancient chieftain.
He’d been painted with a heavy hand, all square angles and dark, rough strokes. Almost the exact image of the current Laird Mackenzie. The same fire. The same ferocity.
The same untamed beauty.
Mena realized, as she allowed her fingertips to absorb the insignificant striations in the paint, that a wicked part of her regretted not allowing the marquess a deeper kiss.
No other man had beckoned to her fingertips like the physical marvel that was Liam Mackenzie. She wondered, if she’d wrapped her arms around him, would she have felt the scars on his back through his shirt? Would he have shared with her another intimacy of his past, adding a thread to the cord of complex emotion he’d begun to weave?
Lord, he held all of the fascinating curiosity and thrilling peril of a lightning storm. Of course he’d garnered a mythical sort of reputation because myths were how the common man struggled to explicate someone so extraordinary.