The covers rustled. A warm female breast brushed over Michael’s arm. Soft fingers feathered his hair back from his brow, and the merest touch of lips graced his mouth.
“I don’t know how to ask, Michael. I don’t know what to ask for.”
A man should be honest with his wife, particularly when she demonstrated such courage.
“Brenna, kiss me, please. I’ll go mad if you don’t kiss me right now.”
He went mad anyway, waiting for her to gather yet more courage, to touch her lips to his once more. She was shy and careful and naked.
Very, very naked, though Michael had no idea when she’d managed that feat of marital magic.
Michael lay on his back, heart pounding, as Brenna learned the shape of his mouth with her own. She licked, she sucked on his top lip, then the bottom, then went a-plundering over his brow to take his earlobe between her teeth.
“I am so proud of you.” Michael was proud of himself too, for not closing his hand around the luscious weight of her bare breast.
Brenna swung a leg across his thighs and mounted him. “Because I give our people safe passage across the sea?”
“That too.” He closed his eyes, lest he be enthralled by the glints of gold and scarlet the firelight found in her braid.
She hiked the covers over him, including his chilled left side, then leaned down, grazing his chest with lovely, warm, soft breasts. “You’re becoming aroused. You desire your wife.”
Not a sermon this time, but curiosity and more pride. She was pleased to be tormenting him, and he’d soon be hard as a pike staff.
“Shall I arouse you too, Brenna Maureen? A husband isn’t worth the name unless he pleases his lady.”
Her answer was to sit up, so the evidence of his arousal was snugged against her sex. “Give me your hands, Husband.”
Michael gave her his hands and a bit of his heart. She settled one of his palms over each breast, experimentally, and his cock leaped.
“Touching me did that to you?”
“Aye.”
“Touch me some more.”
Ten
Brenna’s breasts had been her salvation: her breasts and her height. Women had breasts; girls did not. Girls were small, flat-chested, and invisible. A tall, shapely woman was noticed, and in that notice lay measures of freedom and safety.
These realizations had come upon Brenna slowly, dimly, as she’d seen that for one man, her developing breasts had not been objects of curiosity or desire, but rather, disappointment—disgust, even. She’d loved her breasts ever since.
“Brenna Maureen.” Just that, her name, but uttered like a prayer, while Michael treated her breasts to a slow, warm caress that could only be called reverent. “Kiss me, please.”
She loved her breasts, and loved Michael too. Loved that for all he’d gone for a soldier, he would never force her, never tell her to hush and be still while he stole from her what should only be freely given.
He levered up to nuzzle her jaw, asking for kisses when he might have demanded them.
“I won’t break,” Brenna whispered, brushing her mouth over his. “I’m not that fragile.”
She wasn’t that fragile any longer. As Michael’s tongue delicately traced her lower lip, Brenna realized that all his years away had served a purpose. Ten years ago, even five years ago, she could not have been a true wife to her husband.
But she could be now.
“Tell me,” Michael said, closing a thumb and forefinger over her nipple. “Is that what you want? More? Less?”
“Both,” she said, bracing herself on her elbows. “Both breasts at the same time. And your kisses.”
For a man who’d been years without female company, Michael was good at making love. He could fondle her breasts with both hands, kiss her, and shift about beneath her in such a fashion that Brenna lost track of the specifics and surrendered to a general pleasuring.
For long minutes, she kissed him while he stroked her breasts, teased her nipples, and undulated that male part of him against Brenna’s increasingly damp sex. Brenna sat up, the better to grab a much-needed deep breath. “Perhaps we should close the window, and some of these covers are—”
Michael drew a finger down the midline of her brow. “Stop weighing and measuring. Every knife, fork, and spoon will still be in its appointed drawer come morning.”
Brenna’s wits had abandoned their assigned drawer, and for once, this made her happy. “I want to make love with my husband, and he has yet to explain to me—”
Michael’s thumb glided up the crease of her sex. “When I make love with you for the first time, it won’t be with the candles out, under the covers, not even moonshine to illuminate your passions.”
“Our passions,” Brenna managed, but he’d touched her again with his thumb, a slick, sweet pressure and retreat that flung her entire mental store of silver high into sparkling beams of sunshine. “I want to see you too.”
She would need to see him. Need to see that it was her Michael and no other with her in the bed.
“I’m right here, Brenna.” He caressed her breast with just the right balance between assurance and entreaty. “Close your eyes.”
“No.”
By the light of the dying fire, Michael’s smile bloomed, naughty, approving, and tender. “You disobey the husband you vowed obedience to?”
“In this bed, I obey no one but myself.”
And his thumb, oh, his thumb. She obeyed that single part of him, moved into his touch in a rhythm that came from him like a gift, not a command at all.
She accepted that rhythm and made it her own.
“Brenna Maureen, dearest wife, I could not love ye more.”
She wanted to hold the sight of Michael’s fierce, tender smile close, wanted to cling to it, a final reassurance of the rightness of what she felt, but the pleasure was too much. She went soaring, into a brilliant, magical darkness of bodily joy, into a marital benediction for the trust she’d placed in her spouse and in herself.
Brenna did not recall closing her eyes, did not make a decision to moan softly as the pleasure took her, did not intend to collapse on her husband’s chest as the bright, trailing streams of ecstasy faded like so many stars falling through her body.
And she most assuredly did not give herself permission to cry.
“Hush, now,” Michael whispered, his hand drifting over her hair. “Settle yourself, and we’ll talk.”
Few men would have made that offer—few would have known it was needed.
Brenna used a corner of the sheet to swipe at her tears. “No words, Husband. Hold me.”
Fundamental fairness suggested she ought not to be issuing orders if she wouldn’t take any. She batted that sensible thought away and touched her tongue to the pulse in Michael’s throat. This made him smile. She could feel that it made him smile, so she did it again.
Her husband held her; he kissed her temple; he stroked her hair. Never did a man put right so many wrongs without needing a hint how to go about it.
Brenna sorted through words and gestures that might communicate her vast appreciation for his consideration and generosity, but none accommodated both her full heart and her flagging courage. With her last waking shred of awareness, Brenna hoped falling asleep in Michael’s arms would convey the many tender sentiments her silence did not.
***
Never had torment and bliss so neatly intertwined to choke a man’s selfish impulses and leave him aching in body and pleased with himself in spirit as he lay beneath his sleeping, sated wife.
Brenna had gone off like the fireworks displayed in such abundance in the victory celebrations, and yet, Michael wasn’t entirely sure what foe had been vanquished in their bed.
Time and distance had gone down to defeat, surely, for nine years of separation might easily leave husband and wife with unbridgeable differences.
Fear had suffered a loss as well, fear that their marriage would limp along, a convenience and a convention rather than a
covenant.
Brenna had also surrendered something to him, and he something to her—his heart, at least—and yet, Michael drifted off with a sense of having come upon a greater wilderness than he’d anticipated.
One he would explore, hand in hand with his lady wife.
They awoke to a brilliant sunny morning, some little brown bird singing its fool feathers off at the windowsill. Michael slid a hand over the warm female flank snuggled up to him. “Good morning, Lady Strathdee.”
Her ladyship mumbled something, suggesting she didn’t share the bird’s, or her baron’s, charity with the day.
Michael brushed Brenna’s hair aside and spoke right against her ear. “Brenna Maureen, it’s a beautiful day. Wake up and kiss the husband who loves you.”
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 h
e’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.
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