The Laird (Captive Hearts) (9 page)

“Honestly? No. I’m of a mind to take your measurements.”

“I’m not of a mind to have them taken.” Though taking his measurements would mean Brenna had to touch him, or nearly touch him. She had consumed her food at the very edge of their shared blanket, and let the murmuring of the nearby River Dee serve as their conversation. Any passerby might have thought from their lack of talk that they’d been married for years.

Which they had, goddammit.

She hiked her knees and wrapped her arms around them, putting Michael in mind of a citadel raising its drawbridge and dropping its portcullis.

“What was it like, after I left?” He didn’t want to know, but he suspected this was part of the general apology he owed her.

“So we’re to talk?”

“Married couples often do.” They often wrote letters to each other when separated too. She spared him that observation.

“When you left…” She stared at the river, as if trying to recall the second line of an obscure ballad. “It was a relief, in a way.”

“Like it was a relief to leave my home and family and everything I knew?”

Some fool who’d had too much ale in the village had said those words, some fool who could not abide the sadness he’d seen in Cook’s old eyes, or the careful lack of emotion in Brenna’s.

Her smile now was
kind
. Possibly forgiving, even.

“Your da explained it to me. He said young men are restless. They need to at least see the world even if they can’t conquer it, and a wife is sure proof a fellow will never get his chance at that big, wide world.”

“I wish somebody had explained it to me.”

“I think you figured it out. What was it like, in Spain?”

She would be hurt if he brushed her question aside, and yet, he was reluctant to answer it.

“First came Portugal, then Spain, and then France. They were successive circles of hell on one level, and yet, the land was beautiful, and there’s much about war that makes a man feel alive.” For a while, and then it made him wish he were dead, and then it made him dead inside if not in the absolute sense. “Cook says you took over the running of the castle from the time I left.”

She brushed her hand over the grass. “I needed something to do, and the castle needed running. Your father adjusted, eventually, to your mother’s being gone for most of the year, but I don’t think he ever got used to being without your sisters.”

“Neither did I.”

Brenna stroked her hand over the grass again, and because Michael did not want to behold her patient green eyes, he lay back on the tartan blanket and folded his hands behind his head.

“They were too little to be sent away, and Erin was not well.”

He stared up at a brilliant blue sky full of puffy white clouds, not very different from the sky over Spain, Portugal, France, or Ireland, and yet, a feeling like homesickness swamped him.

Brenna stirred on the blanket several feet away.

“Erin rallied a bit, in Ireland. The softer weather probably gave her a few more good years. Your da wrote to them often.”

While Michael had not written often at all.

“I didn’t want them to go. A fellow expects to see his sisters married off, eventually, but they were children, and in a sense, I felt responsible for them. I feared I would never see Erin again, and I was right.”

He closed his eyes, the sun being too bright, and the sound of the river too soothing.

“Was that part of what sent you off to the regimental offices with your funds in hand? Your mother and sisters were leaving, and your father wasn’t stopping them?”

“Aye.” Though nobody had said as much openly. In preparation for Michael’s wedding to Brenna, all had been good cheer and bright—false—smiles.

He dozed off then, which was a mercy, because he’d failed utterly to interrogate his wife regarding the early years of their marriage. She hadn’t been lying when she’d said his absence was a relief, but Michael had the sense she was presenting the only facet of the truth she could bear to look on herself.

When he opened his eyes again, it was to see that Lady I-Want-to-Take-Your-Measurements Strathdee had also surrendered to the arms of Morpheus. She was curled on her side, her tartan shawl wrapped around her, a four-leaf clover in her fingers.

They had passed a night in slumber, but that had been in pitch darkness. In the bright sunshine of a pretty summer day, Brenna asleep was an intriguing picture. She looked less severe, less busy, and less formidable—also tired.

What had sent her looking for lucky clovers?

Michael extricated her little treasure from her fingers and folded it in his handkerchief, then considered what a man was supposed to do, when he’d endured as much talking as he could possibly stomach in the course of one picnic and he found himself on a blanket with his pretty, sleepy wife.

***

Brenna had been dreading the business of measuring her husband for his new kilts, and so, of course, she dreamed of his knees, which somehow managed to be handsome, for all they were
knees
. She dreamed of the way sunlight caught the red in the hair on his arms, and of the way his back curved down from broad, muscular shoulders.

And between one thought and the next, her awareness became filled not with adult masculine muscle and contours, but with a particular combination of panic and nausea familiar to her from long acquaintance.

She tried to sit up and strike out in one motion, though something prevented her from rising. “Get off me! Get off me
now
!”

She flailed about wildly, and had just recalled that a stout kick in a certain location would win her free, when reason intruded.

“Brenna Maureen, cease!”

Michael had flattened her to the blanket with the simple expedients of his weight applied to her person and his hands manacled around her wrists. “You’ll unman me, you daft woman.”

“Get off me.” She’d meant to crack the words over his idiot head, but they’d come out as a whisper.

“Nothing I’d like better.” He rose up, first on his hands and knees, then to kneeling, his expression suggesting he feared for her sanity.

Brenna scrambled away to sit up and wipe the back of her wrist over her mouth. “What were you about? Did you try to kiss me?”

“Yes. Yes, I did try. On the cheek. You looked so pretty, and there’s nobody about, and a man should kiss his wife every now and again, because she sure as hell isn’t showing any signs of kissing him.”

For all his faults, and for all the errors and omissions he had committed, Michael wasn’t wrong about this. He was also sporting a red patch along one side of his jaw.

“I’m sorry if I struck you. I don’t like kissing.” While she positively loathed the seething dread suffusing her every limb and organ.

And yet, if she’d asked her husband to rejoin his regiment, he could not have looked more confused. “I kissed you last night.”

“On the—” Brenna touched her finger between her brows. “Here, and I was awake.”

Michael settled beside her on the blanket, sitting tailor fashion, his bare knees much in evidence. “You don’t like kissing, or you don’t like my kisses?”

“Kissing isn’t sanitary.”

“For God’s—” He peered over at her, likely to see if she’d spoken in jest. “You’re serious.” Another look, full of consternation. “Kissing is
just
kissing
, Brenna. It’s harmless. It’s sweet and tender and arousing and—”

If he kept up with that litany, Brenna would soon cry, but he fell mercifully silent.

The river babbled by, and a breeze riffled the grass. The scent of horses in the next field graced the air, and Brenna’s shawl—woven with a goodly complement of lamb’s wool—was soft beneath her fingers. She concentrated on those simple realities while her breathing gradually slowed and despair edged out panic.

“So no kissing you awake of a morning,” Michael said. “In case you’re interested, I would not object if you sought to take a comparable liberty with my person.”

As if she could. “I’ll remember that.”

They gathered up the remains of the picnic, Brenna carrying the blanket and Michael the hamper. In a fit of contrariness Brenna could not explain to herself, she wished Michael might take her hand as they walked.

And when he didn’t, she wished she might have the courage to take his.

***

“You’ll be pleased to know, Uncle, that a party is being planned.”

Michael wasn’t pleased. Roughly twenty-four hours ago, his very own wife had nearly kneed him in the ballocks, and not entirely by accident. The notion still upset him.

Angus pulled a pipe from between his teeth. “A gathering, ye say? Imagine that. Best start sobering old Davey up now. If he arrives drunk, then we’ll no’ be dancing after midnight. Man plays a mean fiddle, and he’s the best piper in the shire, drunk or sober.”

The first of the tenant calls lay ahead of them, and for Michael, another difficult night beside his difficult wife lay behind him.

“I’m sure Brenna will see to Davey’s state of sobriety. Tell me about these cousins of hers.”

Angus slipped his pipe into his pocket, a mannerism that had fascinated Michael as a small boy. He’d waited in vain for the day when his uncle’s jacket caught fire.

“They’re hard workers.”

When a man could say nothing else complimentary about another fellow, he offered that very observation. Among the English, “he can hold his liquor” was a similar sort of damning with faint praise.

“What are their names?” Because this was another of the many topics Brenna had been unforthcoming about—or perhaps Michael hadn’t had the fortitude to ask her directly.

“Three remain, two having gone for the fair woods of Pennsylvania. The oldest is Hugh, and the other two take their direction from him. The middle one’s Neil, and the youngest is Dantry. Stubborn, the lot of them. Typical MacLogans. They think to raise cattle, and yer da gave them good bottom land to do it.”

“Cattle? Up here?”

“Aye.”

Many a female would have said Angus was in his prime, and yet he had the elderly ability to put contempt in a single syllable.

“There’s demand for beef.”

“Let the Lowlanders raise their beef. Cattle require fencing, and fodder in winter, and they take nigh a year to produce a single calf. Cattle produce no wool, and a good sheep hide will answer most any need for leather.”

Michael turned the topic rather than listen to another panegyric to the ovine.

“Other than a profane interest in cattle, have you any complaints against the MacLogans, or will they have any against me?”

Campbell tried to snatch a mouthful of grass, for which Angus whacked him smartly on the shoulder with his crop, sending the animal dancing sideways.

“The MacLogans keep mostly to themselves,” Angus said when he’d brought his horse under control. “Hugh lets Lachlan help out around the castle, because he knows Brenna will give the boy a few coins and will teach him to read, though you ask me, reading isn’t always a good thing. Letters put ideas in a fellow’s head, and there’s no dealing with a female who reads anything other than her prayer book or her recipes.”

Brenna read. Michael had found her with a book more often than not when she’d been a girl.

“Has Hugh MacLogan only the one child?”

“He also has a daughter.”

Again, the way Angus said only a few words suggested having a daughter ranked along with raising cattle and allowing a son to learn to read, though clearly, the worst transgression was—as it had been for centuries in the Highlands—having the wrong last name.

“Hugh, Dantry, and Neil. The boy’s name is Lachlan. They’re interested in raising cattle, and they’ve good land to work with. What else?”

Angus drew up at the foot of a track that lead off to a pair of whitewashed stone crofts. “You forgot stubborn, contrary, and independent.”

“Now that’s odd,” Michael said, nudging Devil down the track. “Those are the very same qualities that distinguished many a Highland soldier when the fighting was at its worst. We stormed walled cities, climbed mountains, marched on nonexistent rations, and beat the damned Corsican’s men clear back to France—all on the strength of stubborn, contrary, and independent.”

None of which, in Michael’s mind, had to necessarily result in the sort of close-minded, judgmental pontificating Angus was in a mood to dole out. The idea that Brenna had endured years of Angus’s tiresome sermonizing added another dreary dimension to an already dreary day.

“You’ll see,” Angus muttered. “Can’t tell a MacLogan a damned thing. Never could. The lot of ’em are contrary and half-daft.”

Because Michael knew little about raising cattle, he didn’t try to tell his tenants anything. Hugh MacLogan had Brenna’s red hair, her height, and the lanky build of many a crofter. Hard work and Highland weather had planed him down to muscle and bone. Being a MacLogan on a Brodie holding likely accounted for a lack of small talk and smiles.

“You don’t interbreed the Highlands with the Angus?” Michael asked as he and Hugh walked along a stone wall between two pastures. Country-fashion, they traveled opposite sides of the wall, each man stopping occasionally to replace a tumbled stone from whence it had fallen.