Brenna made to rise, only to find her husband assisting her.
“You are tired from riding all over the shire with Herman, and you likely didn’t get a proper dinner at the pub. I am tired from trying to figure out when you’re teasing, when you’re flirting, and when you’re merely making conversation.”
He kissed her nose. “So stop trying to figure it out and talk to me. What occupied you this lovely day? I know you did not go riding with your husband.”
Out of habit, Brenna never lit many candles after dark, but one had to see clearly to deal with hems and measurements and such. Now that she was looking at Michael’s face rather than his knees, feet, or calves—all of which were interesting—she could see he was not happy.
“Was I supposed to go riding with you, Husband?”
“Yes, you were, but Herman kidnapped me, and I suspect Angus put him up to it. Ouch, damn it.”
He’d stomped over to the privacy screen, which made the kilt swish about his lordly knees, and likely impaled those same knees on a half-dozen pins.
“I’ll be back.” Brenna left him swearing in French and possibly Spanish behind the privacy screen, and took herself down to the kitchen. Bread, butter, cheese, and a few strawberries went onto a tray, along with a pitcher of cold lemonade.
When she returned to the laird’s chambers, Michael was in a dressing gown—thank heavens for small mercies—and standing near a branch of candles on the mantel.
“I’d forgotten you keep a journal,” he mused.
“Some years more than others.” Some years, not at all.
“You don’t seem concerned I might read it.”
Brenna set the tray on the desk near the windows.
“You’re a great one for conversation. Why would you read my journal when you might instead plague me with talk? Come eat.”
He set the little book on the mantel and took the seat at his desk. “Lemonade?”
“You favored it as a boy.” She pulled a chair up on the other side of the desk, when what she should have done was set the food out in their sitting room. “I can take the tray to the other room—”
Her husband regarded her with a smile that was both approving and male.
“You recalled that I enjoy lemonade. Please sit, Wife. The other room is bound to be chilly by now, while our bedroom is cozy. I hardly recognized anybody at the pub.”
Brenna took a seat, still trying to understand that smile, and what it meant when the laird didn’t recognize his tenants.
“Herman didn’t handle the introductions?”
Michael made himself a sandwich of buttered bread and cheese, the soldier in him apparently happy to eat with his fingers.
“It was odd. Nobody came over to greet us, though some tipped their hats or otherwise acknowledged us. Angus showed up and pointed out this tenant or that new bride.”
“Have some strawberries.”
Michael paused, his half-eaten sandwich in his hand. “You have some strawberries. What aren’t you telling me, Brenna Brodie?”
“Angus showed up. Do you think your tenants would barge in on a conversation between you and Angus?”
Another bite disappeared, though he chewed more slowly. “You’re saying my tenants avoid Angus.”
Everybody avoided Angus, but Brenna could hardly tell her husband that.
“He’s the steward, and he doesn’t usually come around unless trouble’s afoot or rents are due.” She stuffed a strawberry in her mouth rather than say more. The berry had appeared perfectly ripe, but turned out to be one of those fruits that looked much better than it tasted.
“Makes sense. You aren’t having a sandwich?”
“I had a decent meal.” With Maeve, who had tried hard not to let her disappointment at Michael’s absence show. Brenna appropriated a sip of Michael’s lemonade, the better to keep that sentiment silent as well.
“Herman says the yearlings are ready to take in to Aberdeen for sale. I’ve half a mind to go along.”
He wasn’t asking her permission to leave—or was he? “You must do as you see fit. Angus usually accompanies the livestock going to sale.”
Something flickered across Michael’s face, something a wife of nine years ought to be able to read.
“We’ll send Angus. A change of scenery will do him good, and he, at least, won’t be tempted to take ship for the New World.”
Brenna did not mutter if only he would, because Angus was the devil she knew, and inflicting him on others all unsuspecting wouldn’t be honorable.
“Will you have another sandwich?”
“I would have my wife feed me some strawberries.” He sat back, his blue dressing gown gaping open, a smile lurking in his eyes. “If she’s willing.”
The food had calmed him, or maybe the small talk had. Brenna chose a medium-sized berry and held it up to his lips.
“Whom did you recognize in the pub?”
He took the berry from her fingers with his teeth, carefully. “I know the old people, mostly. They were old when I left, and they’re ancient now. Vera MacDonald still holds court from the inglenook. Another berry, please?”
Brenna chose a larger specimen, though the largest berries were seldom the tastiest. “Who else?”
“William Campbell, Thomas Miller. A few others by sight, but not by name. These are good.”
“More lemonade?”
This time, he took the berry from her fingers then trapped her hand in his. “This is wooing, Brenna.” He kissed her knuckles, while a warmth that had nothing to do with the cozy fire spread up from Brenna’s middle.
“You’re not so hard to woo, then.”
Because Brenna was studying the empty plate, she wasn’t expecting it when her husband came half out of his chair, leaned across the desk, and gave her a strawberry-flavored kiss on the mouth.
“Neither are you. Let’s to bed, shall we?”
Brenna took a sip of the lemonade, set the last glass on the night table, and then put the tray in the corridor while Michael banked the fire.
***
The end of their evenings had become routine, and that pleased Michael inordinately. Most people tidied up at the end of the day, tended to their ablutions, and shed their clothes before climbing into bed. Soldiers tried to maintain a semblance of the same mundane order, though battle doomed those efforts to periodic failure.
Brenna used the wash water first and emerged from behind the privacy screen in a dressing gown made from the dark Brodie hunting plaid. Michael was coming to think of the pattern—soft blues, green, and black, with red-and-yellow accents—as Brenna’s personal tartan.
“Did you leave me any warm water, Wife?”
“Of course not. You’ll have to go wash in the loch,” she said, filling the warmer with coals. “The young men in these parts pride themselves on being able to wash in the loch when it isn’t frozen over.”
He’d washed earlier, when Brenna had retreated to the kitchens, but he washed again, because his wife had not only left him warm water, but she’d scented it with lavender.
“Bathing in the loch isn’t necessarily about getting a young man clean,” he said from behind the screen.
“It’s about flirting with lung fever?”
“It’s about flirting with the young ladies who might be peeking from the battlements or the bushes. Then too, the cold water can douse a fellow’s most mischievous preoccupations, at least temporarily.”
That provoked a silence. Michael peeked over the screen as he used his tooth powder and saw Brenna untying the sash of her dressing gown. While he watched, she let the garment fall to her hips, an unconsciously graceful unveiling of her naked back, down to the swell of her hips.
Perhaps bathing in the loch had something to recommend it, even when a man no longer considered himself young. Michael’s teeth should have been sparkling by the time he put aside his toothbrush, blew out the last candle, and shed his dressing gown.
Because he’d banked the coals, the room w
as nearly pitch-dark. Brenna’s voice came floating through that darkness.
“Would you like a sip of lemonade?”
“Yes, please.”
Lemonade and tooth powder was not a pleasant combination, but accepting the drink let Michael touch his wife’s hand, and then wrap her fingers around the glass when he was done.
“You never did tell me what you got up to today, Baroness.”
He punctuated his observation with a casual toe run up her calf. He loved her calves. They were sturdy, dusted with fine red-gold hair, and yet, elegant too.
“I lost Maeve for a time.” Her tone said this was both a worry and a transgression—on her part.
“And I’ve lost you. If you’re going to hoard your report for when we’re abed, you’ll at least cuddle up when you deliver it.”
He waited. Brenna was in bed without a stitch of clothing, and whether and when to build on that display of courage had to be her decision.
She surrendered with characteristic grace, tucking herself against his side.
“You spend the afternoon swilling ale with the fellows, and expect me to throw myself into your arms when you come toddling up the hill, half-seas over?”
While she groused and got comfortable, Michael wrapped an arm around her shoulders.
“I had two pints. Where did you find Maeve?”
“I didn’t. She came skipping back up into the great hall just as I was about to send Lachlan for you, except I couldn’t find the boy either. Hugh doesn’t like having his son take the laird’s coin, but somebody has to teach the child to read, and a position in the kitchen was all I could think of.”
“Nobody teaches our children to read?”
“Their parents do, when they have time, but Lachlan’s a boy, and his menfolk are busy. I figure if I can teach Lachlan, he’ll teach Annie.”
In Michael’s absence, Angus had been a sort of self-appointed steward, and Michael was grateful for that, but Brenna had apparently become the laird.
“Maeve can read quite well. I expect she already has some French too. What else did you do today?”
He half cared what she’d got up to, but mostly he wanted to hear her voice. Brenna recounted a feud among the footmen regarding days off, a discussion at the herb woman’s in the village over who ought to lead some infernal committee at the kirk, and an inventory of goods and stores in anticipation of the upcoming gathering.
Her recitation was probably the longest speech he’d had from her, and she’d give it to him only in the dark.
“You resist a natural urge toward cuddling,” Michael observed when she’d paused. He caught her leg behind the knee and hiked it across his thighs. “Though you do give an admirably detailed recounting, if a man is persistent enough in asking for it. You mustn’t worry about Maeve wandering on a pretty day.”
She nuzzled his shoulder, though her gesture had the feel of a horse nose-butting a preoccupied groom.
“Michael, the child could get lost. She could come to harm, and no one would know where to look for her. She could fall from the battlements.”
“Nobody sober has fallen from the battlements in five hundred years of Clan Brodie history. You used to disappear for hours when you weren’t much bigger than Maeve.”
Sometimes, he’d followed her, telling himself a fellow ought to guard his future wife, but mostly he’d simply been curious about her disappearances. Angus had caught him a few times and accused him of spying.
“Maeve is a visitor,” Brenna replied. “She can’t know to stay away from the village drunk, or that the Miller’s billy goat is a menace to all in his pasture.”
“The goat’s damned stench ought to warn her of that, and Davey MacCray is no threat to anybody except himself. Shall I have a word with Maeve?”
Was that what this was about? He did not take issue with Brenna’s characterization of his small sister as a visitor, because the main point was valid: Maeve did not know her way around. Exploring was a child’s natural inclination, but the line between exploring and getting lost had more to do with when sunset fell than with a child’s common sense.
“Please. A very direct word.”
“You didn’t have that word?” Brenna could be direct, though Michael was coming to realize she didn’t enjoy confrontation. Dreaded it, in fact.
“You’re her brother and the laird. If I rebuke her, she’ll resent me. If you rebuke her, she’ll listen.”
Probably right. Recruits listened to the general who’d never fought the enemy hand-to-hand, while ignoring the advice of the battle-hardened sergeants.
“You think I’m laird here?”
Her arm fell across his midriff. “I know it. You’ll know it soon too.”
Because the loch was a half mile distant—and because he was in bed with his wife and not a stitch of clothing between them—Michael captured Brenna’s hand in his and laced their fingers.
“I do not like this business of being laird.”
He hadn’t been teasing, and the tension he felt suffuse his wife suggested she knew that. “You’d rather go back to murdering in the King’s name?”
“Protecting,” he said, enunciating each syllable. “I took it upon myself to protect a certain delicately placed fellow—Sebastian St. Clair—and my task proved infernally difficult. But no, I do not want to rejoin the army, so stop fretting that you’ll waken and I’ll be gone.” Again. He kissed her fingers—in long overdue apology? “I have to wonder though, what’s the point of coming home from war if I spend all day missing my little sister, a girl I’ve never even seen before this week?”
The tension in Brenna’s body shifted, to a listening sort of attentiveness. “You missed your sister today?”
“We crossed paths, but she was more enamored of Lachlan, of the cat, of the very beams of sunshine in the bailey than of her older brother. And that isn’t the worst of it.” He was whining, and he’d waited until he had the cover of darkness to do it. Some brave soldier, he.
“What was the worst of it?” This time she didn’t nuzzle his shoulder, she sniffed at him.
“I bathed, I’ll have you know.”
“What was the worst of it, Husband?”
She was laughing at him, and while his pride winced, some other part of him, maybe the part that was learning to be a husband, thought that was a good thing.
“I’ve come home from war, and supposedly I’m laird here, but all I do the livelong day is listen to people complain about things I must address, while I stand around looking patient and missing the hell out of my wife.”
Brenna was cuddled up along his side, so he felt her silent laughter, felt her try to fight it, and felt her lose.
And then he felt something else: he felt the wife he had missed all day, the wife he loved in some fashion, the wife naked in bed with him, hike up on her elbow and press her lips to his. A solid, mouth on mouth, hint-of-lemonade kiss, which by exercise of self-discipline alone, Michael allowed to remain a simple kiss.
She did it again, a quick in-case-he-missed-the-first-one kiss, then subsided against him, her arm wrapped across his middle, her leg across his thighs. As if her bare, warm breasts hadn’t briefly brushed against Michael’s chest, as if he was supposed to think after being teased so cruelly.
“Good night, Husband. I’m sorry your day was such a trial. Tomorrow will be an improvement, I’m sure.”
Brenna fell asleep wrapped in her spouse’s arms, while Michael thought of frigid lochs, tooth powder, and lemonade. She was right, of course. Tomorrow would be better. Any child knew, and most husbands did too, that kisses made everything better.
Eight
Kissing was not dignified. Kissing accomplished nothing. Kissing was a stupid, messy, uncomfortable inconvenience invented by men, because men were not concerned with anything save their own base impulses.
Some men.
“Are you angry?” Maeve posed the question while admiring her own needlework.
“No, I am not angry.” Th
ough Brenna had been stabbing at her embroidery as if trying to commit murder-by-needle on the heather and thistles adorning Michael’s handkerchief. “How are your stitches coming?”
Maeve held up a hoop, upon which simple chain stitches outlined an orange cat.
“Preacher will be vain, to know you’ve immortalized him with your sewing,” Brenna said. “Will you embroider him a butterfly to bat at, or some grass to sit upon?”
Maeve budged closer on the sofa of Brenna’s sitting room. “I knew I wanted to have Preacher on my handkerchief, but I’ll have to sketch the rest.”
Brenna put her hoop aside and ran a hand over Maeve’s coppery braid. “I know the perfect place to sketch. Come with me.”
They stowed their hoops, gathered up a lap desk from the bedroom, and repaired to the battlements.
“Over here,” Brenna said, “we’re out of the breeze, and we have a fine view of the loch. There’s Cook, gathering some herbs from the kitchen garden, and you can watch Herman Brodie shoeing Bannockburn.”
“Herman calls the horse Banshee.”
Herman called the horse other things too, things a child would delight in overhearing.
“You can sketch your cat an entire garden, a herd of mice, or a flock of butterflies. Be sure to think about what color each flower or butterfly would be.”
While Brenna could sit in the sunshine and come to terms with a revelation.
“Butterflies,” Maeve said, opening the lap desk. “I don’t like that Preacher kills the mice.”
“He’s a cat. Cook adores him for killing the mice.”
“No, she does not.” In the way of children, Maeve was handling each pencil in the desk, evaluating them one by one for some quality known only to her little-girl fingers. “She feeds him scraps and leftover cream, and he has no need to kill mice.”
Such were the insights gained by a child who’d already realized Cook was an ally to the young and the hungry, both.
“So don’t draw him any mice to terrorize. Draw him butterflies he cannot catch.”
Butterflies, like the butterflies that had risen up in Brenna’s belly last night, when—too late to check herself—she’d realized she was about to kiss her husband out of his pout.
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