The Laird (Captive Hearts) (22 page)

He nudged her with his half-erect cock, a reminder of what he had planned for her in the broad and beautiful light of day, and a distraction from the words she’d likely find a bit awkward the first thousand times he spoke them to her.

“Go away.”

“I’ve married a shy woman.” Though, bless her, not at all shy about giving orders in bed. “Perhaps a cup of tea will restore your courage.”

A tousled head emerged from the pillows. “Tea won’t help with that.”

Trust would help; tea wouldn’t hurt.

“Keep the bed warm for me, Wife.” Michael tossed the covers aside and paraded to the door, returning with the breakfast tray and more than the beginnings of a morning salute.

Brenna’s expression, however, was less than tantalized, and she was a lady who did enjoy her tea. Michael set the tray across her lap and sneaked a kiss to her cheek.

“Brenna, are you yet a maiden?”

The question needed to be asked. The way she stared at the teapot, at a loss for words, at a loss even for an expression, assured Michael it did.

“Why do you ask?”

Rather than climb in beside her, Michael perched at her hip and brushed her hair back from her cheek.

“A woman can be faithful and loyal to her husband, and yet, there are those who would trespass against her chastity. I went to war, Brenna. I saw what men will do when their morals have died on the battlefield. I wasn’t here to protect you. If you came to any harm, the fault lies with me.”

Those words needed to be said too.

She unwrapped the teapot and lifted it, as if to pour, though her hand shook. Rather than risk a scalding, Michael didn’t interfere.

“I am yet a maid, as much as you left me a maid when you went to war,” she said, setting the pot down and wrapping it back up in its white toweling. “Your absence did not put me at risk of harm.”

She stirred cream and honey into the mug of tea, while Michael weighed her words. His wife was being kind, sparing him an accurate accounting. Perhaps she hadn’t suffered the loss of her maidenhead, but somebody had trespassed nonetheless.

She offered him the tea. He wrapped his hands around hers and held the cup to her lips instead.

“Will you tell me, someday, Brenna, what burdens I left you with? I know it wasn’t easy, and the telling won’t be easy either, but a husband and wife should be able to talk about anything.”

She held the cup to his mouth. “Will you tell me about France?”

Michael took a swallow of hot, sweet fortification. The covers had dipped, exposing the curve of a lovely, pale breast. He twitched them back up as Brenna returned their tea to the tray.

“Why would you want to know about privation, misery, cold, bad rations, and a lot of stinking, drunken—”

Her smile was slight, the first pale glimmer on the eastern horizon of humor. “It’s the same thing. I want to know about you, and if that means accursed Frenchmen and sore, stinking feet, then that’s what it means.”

She had him, because he’d reveal every dingy, craven, weak corner of his soul to gain his wife’s trust. Almost.

“France was complicated,” Michael said, offering her the tea. “Nobody warns a fellow that war is a great seductress. The handsome uniforms are the start of it. The sprightly tunes come into it too. Then you wake up one morning before you’ve even taken ship, and your job that day is to attend the execution of a deserter, or some poor blighter who took the King’s shilling a few too many times. Every single man marches past the bullet-riddled remains, eyes right. You get a sense that this is serious business, that your part in it—even your small, bumbling part—matters greatly.”

Brenna set the tray on his side of the bed. No more taking tea, then.

“And the battles?”

“The battles.” God, the battles. Out on the window ledge, the bird was no longer warbling its joy for all the world to hear. “Even in the battles, there’s seduction. You march about for weeks, and you hear rumors. We’ll engage the enemy this week, perhaps tomorrow. There are skirmishes and raids, to get your blood up, and still, you do not
fight
.”

How easily he’d forgotten this corrosion of the nerves, this gradual peeling away of the civilized man to expose the beast who could kill joyously.

Brenna took his hand. “But then you do battle.”

“You fight. You fight past the limits of your endurance. You fight amid carnage of indescribable violence. The sieges were the worst, and there were many sieges.”

He had gone to France gladly, to get away from the sieges. When Brenna drew him down against her, he went unresisting into her embrace too.

“You lost friends.”

“No, I did not. In the space of his first battle, a soldier learns not to make friends. One has comrades, fellows, camp mates, drinking companions, all of whom can be killed in an instant, all of whom he would die to protect, but one avoids friendships.”

And that habit apparently took a long time to shed. Brenna’s arms came around him. Michael closed his eyes.

“These men who aren’t your friends, whom you would die for, are they why you stayed away so long?”

The answer was complicated; the scent of Brenna’s soft, soft skin was not. Heather, lavender, and a kind of safety of the heart enveloped him. Michael pillowed his cheek against her breast and sorted through the truths Brenna deserved to hear, and the ones he must not burden her with.

“In large part, yes, loyalty to my duties kept me away. In the company of his mates, the soldier feels alive. He feels that he’s pulling his share of the most important load he’ll ever bear. The misery proves that, you see. The worse he’s wounded, the more urgently he wants to return to his unit, the more bitterly he feels entitled to engage the enemy again. It’s like a drug—not the privation, not even the violence, but the responsibility. The feeling that every single soldier matters vitally.”

Soldiers did not talk about this. Officers didn’t even talk about it, and yet, generals and nations depended on it. Men sought that sense of responsibility even at the risk of their own lives, because within it lay assurances that a fellow, for all his shortcomings, was unassailably honorable.

False assurances though they were.

Brenna’s arms came around him. “You were responsible, in France?”

“I was tasked with protecting one man, and he was devilishly difficult to protect. Many wanted him dead, even after the war ended. Especially then.”

But had Sebastian St. Clair been more important to Michael than his home? Than his wife?

He would tell her the rest of it, the part about him being a coward and a fool and a bad husband—but not just yet.

“I run one castle,” Brenna said, her embrace becoming fierce. “This castle is an entire world to me. I feel as if how I go about my duties here determines not only my own worth, but the course of the planet. If my ledgers did not balance, if I could not find a good price for our wool and lace, something awful would have happened to you. This is not rational, and yet, if harm had befallen you, it would have been my fault. All I could do to protect you was tat lace, add my figures, and save my coins.”

He’d wanted her trust; she’d given him her troth long ago, and he’d gone larking off to play hide-and-seek with death in the frigid mountains of France.

“We have years,” Michael said, kissing her throat. “God willing, we’ll have years to protect each other and save our coins together. You brought me home safely, Brenna. You and your ledgers and your bargaining over wool. I’ll never leave you.”

The words eased something in him, set at rest the part of him that hadn’t yet come home to stay, but was instead in readiness for Brenna to send him away. He kissed her mouth, kissed the tea-sweetness of her lips, and secured a hand around the rope of her braid.

And those other reasons he’d stayed away, someday he might confide even those, when they were silly, distant overreactions she need not be troubled by.

Brenna got a nice firm hold of his hair and kissed him back. She was a fine, bold kisser, his wife, also patient, and clever with her tongue. The confidence of her kiss told Michael that now, right this very morning, he would make love with his wife.

And she with him.

“We need to move the damned tray,” Michael muttered as his hand went questing among the bedclothes for the treasure of her breast. “I’ll not be soaking the covers with tea and—”

Honey had possibilities.

Brenna’s fingers glossed down Michael’s ribs and wrapped right straight, directly around his burgeoning cock.

“You said we’d make love in the sunshine, Michael Brodie. Said our passions would enjoy the broad light of day, and the sun’s well up.”

She gave him a firm pull on the word
up
, and joy blossomed along with arousal.

“My wife heeds my words. I am the most fortunate of husbands.” In so many ways. Michael lifted away and set the tray none too gently on the floor, then straddled his lady. “I’m going to kiss the hell out of you, Brenna.”

Love the hell out of her too.

“Enough announcements,” Brenna muttered, grabbing him behind the neck. “Get under these covers.”

They started kissing and yanking at the covers and laughing, and then kissing some more as Michael got himself tucked in with his wife. He crouched over her, at which point she went still.

And silent.

“I’d rather you were laughing,” Michael informed her right breast. “Or hauling me about, giving me orders. Perhaps I shall tickle you.”

Her hands landed in his hair, so gently as to do nothing more than tug at his heart. “You’re daft. I can’t kiss you when you’re intent on—when you’re focused elsewhere, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I can kiss you.”

Her stillness took on a different quality, a bodily listening, as Michael acquainted her breasts with the pleasures a man’s mouth might bring them. He kept his cock from touching her, kept all of him from touching her, except for his mouth.

The bird hadn’t resumed its fool chirping, which was fine, for the moment wanted all of Michael’s concentration.

“Michael, stop.” She panted this command, her hands stroking over his chin and jaw.

“Brenna, you can’t mean—”

Oh, but she did, for some idiot was knocking softly but insistently at the door.

Michael raised himself up over his wife. “What the hell is it?” he bellowed, while Brenna mashed a smirk into his chest.

“Company, milady, milord,” Elspeth Fraser’s voice replied. “They arrived very late last night and said not to disturb you, a Lord and Lady St. Clair, from London. We thought you would want to join them at breakfast.”

***

Brenna’s fury bewildered her.

“Did you invite these people?” she asked her husband.

He crouched back, his hair in disarray Brenna had caused, and his cock…

Brenna had plans for that part of her husband, and those plans did not include making polite conversation over breakfast with a pair of English interlopers.

“The last person I would expect to see this summer is the Baron St. Clair and his new wife.”

And yet, Michael was apparently curious, possibly even pleased, to spend more time with this man who’d nearly cost Brenna her marriage. The longer Michael was home, the higher that toll loomed in her awareness.

“I suppose we’d best welcome them.” She put not forbearance, but martyrdom in her tone, which caused her damned husband to smile.

“We’ll have many sunrises, Brenna Maureen. I promise you that.”

He’d promised to love and cherish her too. A lump rose in her throat for no discernible reason. She hated the Baron St. Clair, and his lady wife had much to answer for as well.

Michael hopped off the bed. “Come, love. Our first guests deserve nothing less than our cheeriest smiles.”

He had the most interesting backside, beautiful even. Brenna smiled at that instead. “May a woman have a cup of tea before producing this cheery smile you seem to think is in order?”

Michael shrugged into his dressing gown. “She may share a cup of tea with her husband. I can’t think what St. Clair is doing in Scotland, much less here in Aberdeenshire.”

“Maybe he’s passing through on a tour of the Highlands.” In which case, the fool Englishman might have at least sent a note. Brenna left the bed and went to the window, letting the chilly breeze blow the last of the sleep from her mind.

“You resent this interruption,” Michael said, his arms wrapping around her middle from behind.

“I hate this interruption,” Brenna said. “The moment was right, and I wasn’t sure we’d have any right moments.”

Michael stood behind her, tall and solid, the waning evidence of his arousal snugged against Brenna’s backside. “Will you ever tell me who treated you ill, Brenna?”

For years, Brenna had trotted about in her thoughts, like a kitchen dog turning a spit, wondering how things would have been different had Michael not left her.

“The fool made a nuisance of himself long before you married me, Michael.” Cook had once muttered something about devils who preferred lamb to mutton. Brenna couldn’t quite manage that much honesty.

The man at her back went still, and the breeze off the window had gone from refreshing to chilly. “Long before I married you, you were but a child.”

“Girls grow up early in the Highlands. He hasn’t dwelled at Castle Brodie for years. I’m happily married now, and we’ve guests waiting.”

Only an invasion by this particular Englishman could have served to change the subject. Michael’s arms dropped away.

“We do, but we’ll revisit this topic, Brenna Maureen.”

He disappeared behind the privacy screen, while Brenna stole a quick cup of tea for herself and made a second one to share with her husband. In a very short time, he was dressed and ready to descend to the breakfast parlor, while Brenna…

Dithered.

“Leave the damned bed for the maids to make,” Michael said. “Shall I brush out your hair for you?”

“The maids do not come into this room, the footmen either,” Brenna said, taking her turn behind the privacy screen. “I allow them into the sitting room, and they leave the coal and wood, the washing water, and the trays there.”

As Brenna patted her face dry with a towel Michael had already used—vetiver was a lovely scent in the morning—her husband watched her over the top of the privacy screen.

“You’re not a chambermaid, that you should be making beds and replacing candles.”

“I like my privacy,” she said, untangling her braid. “Sometimes you are entirely too tall, Michael Brodie.”

He moved off, and Brenna heard the wardrobe opening. “You are particularly pretty in green, and today should be nearly warm. Will this cotton frock do? And this is a lovely cashmere shawl.”

Brenna dealt with her hair, wondering why Michael had to be so eager to leave their bed and have breakfast with his Englishman. She allowed her husband to do up her hooks, her resentment mounting when he didn’t even bother to tease her with a kiss to her nape.

“You look quite fetching,” he pronounced as Brenna slipped into her shoes. Even his compliment irritated her.

“I care not for any man’s estimation of my appearance, save yours. Your English friends are welcome, Michael, but their timing is horrid.”

His smile was the sort of flirtation only a husband could turn on his wife. “Anticipation is a pleasure unto itself, my love. The sun shines at midday and afternoon as well as morning, you know.” He turned to survey himself in the mirror. “Will I do?”

He smoothed his fingers over his hair, putting Brenna in mind of the bachelors who stood milling about the punch bowl at the infrequent local gatherings.