(from Much Ado about Highlanders)
Dear Kenna—
What man could possibly love a woman who runs away from her husband on their wedding night and hides behind the cloistered walls of a priory? A woman who ties up an old nun like a trussed chicken, takes her clothes, and climbs down a tower wall to escape him? A woman who leaps from a high cliff into a pool of water the size of a kerchief? A woman who brandishes a sharp-edged dirk and threatens to make him her wife? A woman who then nearly drowns this husband in a racing river? What man could possibly love her?
True, our marriage was arranged, a contract, no love match. And yet I still couldn’t let you go when you were doing all you could to prove you were the most contentious woman in Scotland.
And now, six months later, the moon that casts its glowing light on your sleeping face and the sun that rises with your smile both yield, without challenge, to the supremacy of your beauty.
You stood by me as our enemies hunted us and fortune deserted us. You fought like a warrior, risking your own life in the face of menacing dangers. You shed tears over my wounds and nurtured me when I bled like a wounded boar and would have died. You loved me, healed me, saved me.
One day a poet will write that the course of true love never did run smooth.
What man could possibly love you, Kenna Mackay?
Your man. Your Highlander.
Your Alexander.