“Wooed?” The word tasted as foreign in his mouth as the idea was to his thoughts. “Ye mean, gifts and jewelry—”
“Nay, dammit.” She pressed a beleaguered and dramatic hand to her forehead. “The most precious thing you can give a woman, a worthy woman, is intimacy, time, truth, safety, and friendship.”
“Friendship?” He lifted his own hand to his temple, pressing at the place where his head was starting to pound.
“Talk to her. Know her and let her know ye, as well. Intimacy is not only in the bedroom, ye know. To love each other, ye must first like each other. Do ye like her?”
Liam considered that. He liked the way she treated and talked with his children. He liked the way that, for such a practical woman, she was rather idealistic. He liked the way she ate, with as much relish as manners. He liked how she did her hair and the way she wrinkled her nose, the books she read, even the ones he didn’t understand. He liked that he could spill his secrets to her in the dark, and she never shamed him. That she treated him with sympathy that never smacked of pity.
He liked what his heart did when he heard the clip of her shoes against the floors of his keep. In fact, he couldn’t think of one thing that he didn’t like about her.
Her secrets, he supposed. Whatever put the shadows behind her eyes and caused her to fear him.
“Aye,” he admitted. “I like her.”
“Then ye must go to her, claim her, right away.” She stood, as though ready to shoo him from her house.
“Ye make it sound so easy.” He stood as well, feeling large and encumbered in her dainty room.
“Nothing worthwhile is easy,” she quipped. “Ye helped to dismantle the East India Company. Ye’ve stormed castles and replaced entire regimes. Should she resist ye, lay siege to her defenses and scale her walls, Lieutenant Colonel, it’s not as if ye doona ken how to do that.”
That drew a dry sound of amusement from him. “I canna go now, I have a weeklong summit to reside over here in Dingwall. It’s an obligation to my kin and clan I canna ignore.”
“Then ye have a week to figure out how ye’re going to win her heart, Laird Mackenzie, I suggest ye use it wisely.”
* * *
Russell had been right about the rain, Mena thought as she stood on the roof of Ravencroft Keep’s northwest parapet and surveyed the festivities below her. The chilly October breeze whispered of moisture, but not a drop had fallen.
The Mackenzie laird had returned from Dingwall two days ago and, it seemed, had brought most of the Highlands home with him for the Samhain celebration. Mena hadn’t the opportunity to see or speak to Ravencroft alone as he was always surrounded by guests or on some errand or another. Today he’d taken the children and the visiting lairds Monroe and Fraser with their families to the village of Fearnloch, leaving Mena to her own devices.
She’d spent the day helping poor harried Jani and the housekeeper, Mrs. Grady, with menial tasks to ease the burden of the household staff. Soon, though, she found herself more in the way than accommodating, and she sought a moment of solitude before the commencement of the evening’s revelry.
Ravencroft had come alive with Highlanders, rustic and noble alike. Many of them slept indoors in any one of the lavish guest rooms, but more still pitched grand and colorful tents on the grounds, heating them with pungent peat fires and enough Scotch and ale to drown an entire ship of pirates.
Mena had Jani familiarize her with the plaids and flags proudly displayed on the tents and tartans of the people. Guests from the neighboring MacDonnell and MacBean clans feasted with the MacKinnon of Skye and the MacNeil of the Outer Hebrides. Campbells threaded among them, as did a few Ross and Frasier clansmen, as well.
Mena didn’t own a Halloween costume, but she did don her black cloak with the fox-fur collar for the occasion, and settled it over her finest green silk dress.
With its looming red stone grandeur, extensive grounds, and spires that pierced the gothic gray skies, Ravencroft Keep was the perfect setting for the macabre holiday. Though, from what Mena could see from her vantage, the costumed carousers were much too cheerful to be considered ghoulish in the least.
Mena had been afraid of heights, once upon a time, but locked away in her tiny white room in Belle Glen, she’d gained more than a passing appreciation for the open sky. She’d yearned for it in the cruel hours of darkness. During times she’d been confined alone for the entirety of the day, she’d watched the sun move a tiny circle across the floor from a little porthole window that was too high to see out of. Those days she’d yearned for the beauty of a sunset, or a glimpse of a moonlit night.
Now Mena breathed in the fragrant evening air as she watched the sun dip below the trees and the isles beyond, wishing she could be the raven she’d spied soaring over the fires that dotted the autumn terrain of Wester Ross. Starting in the east, the sky had become black, the closest stars appearing as pinpricks on the eternal canvas of the Highland firmament. As she followed the arc of the dusky sky to the west, Mena observed the ribbon of azure still illuminating the horizon above the shadow of the Hebrides. The stars had only become a suggestion of light and Mena planned on remaining until the night sky shimmered with constellations as she’d only seen it do here in the Highlands.
The trees and stones of the keep sheltered those below from the biting wind, but where she stood on the balustrade, it teased wisps of her hair and the hem of her dress. Feeling silly and fanciful, Mena held open the seams of her cloak and let the breezes billow it out from her spread arms, imagining that she truly had wings.