The Laird

by Grace Burrowes

  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.

  Brenna’s husband was not eager to meet these guests; he was nervous of them. The knowledge came from the slight worry in his eyes, the brevity of his smile, the way he tugged at his handsome dark green paisley waistcoat.

  “You’ll do wonderfully,” Brenna said, kissing his cheek. “My plaid shawl will serve for this occasion. The English are known to exalt appearances over practicalities, but we Scots are more prudent.”

  She passed him her dark green hunting plaid and held still while he draped it around her shoulders.

  When Michael offered her his arm at the head of the stairs, she wanted to roll her eyes, because they were putting on a display for the dratted English invaders. Instead, she took her husband’s arm and even allowed herself to lean on him, just a bit.

  ***

  A commanding officer looked after his men, though Sebastian, Baron St. Clair, had long since accepted that one subordinate regarded St. Clair’s welfare his overriding concern—despite any orders to the contrary.

  “Who’s the girl?” St. Clair asked his host as he and Michael Brodie—Strathdee, for God’s sake—ambled toward the stables.

  “What girl?”

  “The little red-haired sprite who poked her head into the breakfast parlor, hung about in the doorway waiting to be noticed, then flounced away in a snit.”

  Michael came to a halt as an enormous draft horse was led by, silky feathers swirling about its enormous feet with each step.

  “I didn’t see her. That would be my sister Maeve. Your baroness
is in good looks.”

  Sebastian might have bristled, to have his former valet, bodyguard, and factotum complimenting Milly’s appearance, but for two things. First, Milly was lovely. Any man with eyes in his head could see that, and she grew lovelier by the day.

  Second, Michael Brodie offered his compliment as small talk and only small talk. Milly could have sported three hideous heads, horns, and a tail, and Michael would have noted that she was in good looks.

  Such was the effect of reuniting this soldier with the wife he’d never mentioned in all the years Sebastian had known him.

  “Are we to engage in a footrace, Michael?”

  “Perhaps.” He marginally slowed their pace toward the stables. “I’m entitled to revenge for your sneak attack, St. Clair. ‘The note must have gone astray’? Even your dear wife wasn’t fooled. She’ll have a few words with you in private for your rudeness.”

  Yes, she would have a few words with him in private. This penchant for private discussions was part of the reason her ladyship was in a nominally delicate condition.

  “I was worried about you,” Sebastian said, and he managed this disclosure with a feigned casualness learned on the battlefields and perfected in discussions with his wife. “You repair to the North, and I get not so much as a note confirming your safe arrival. Rude of you, some might say.”

  “I’ve been preoccupied.”

  Many a man had enjoyed similar preoccupation; few were so fortunate as to enjoy it with their very own wife.

  They gained the stables, where the early morning activity of mucking, feeding, haying, and scrubbing water buckets had given way to the more placid tasks of bringing in the stock that had pastured overnight and turning out those who’d pasture by day.

  “The light is different this far north, but the smells of a stable are the same,” Sebastian remarked.

  Michael stopped before the stall of a handsome, nervous bay. “You’re different too, St. Clair. Millicent agrees with you. Marriage agrees with you.”

  “As it does with you.”

  Michael stretched his hand out to the horse behind the bars, and the beast spared him a glance but did not leave its pile of hay.

  “My wife already knows how to manage me,” he said, dropping his hand. “She grew up here from the age of eight, and had many years to study her prospective husband.”

  And yet, Lord and Lady Strathdee did not appear to be a settled couple or like people long familiar with each other. “Did you ever take leave, Michael?”

  “I would have used every bit of it coming and going, and other than my own home, there was nowhere I wanted to go.”

  Sebastian’s specialty had been interrogation, but it took no expertise at all to see that Michael was not only preoccupied, he was worrying a problem.

  “Nonetheless, you love that woman to distraction. Was it really that important that you find your way to my command, Michael? You could have taken a position at the Horse Guards, for example.”

  “Patrick, mounts for his lordship and myself. We’ll ride the Dee, and we won’t need a groom.”

  A stable boy moved away toward the center of the barn, where a saddle room was most likely to be found. Michael took off in the opposite direction, toward stone-fenced paddocks out behind the barn.

  “I was under orders,” Michael said. “I took those orders seriously. I also had reasons to avoid my home, or I thought I did. I was an idiot.”

  Had Michael not taken his orders seriously, Sebastian would likely be dead.

  “Did your idiocy have to do with that lovely redhead fluttering her eyelashes at you from over her teacup?”

  “When did you start mincing along like some footman showing off new livery, St. Clair? I’ve yearlings to check on, and at this rate, winter will arrive before I see them. And yes, my idiocy had everything to do with Brenna, and nothing at all.”

  An oak spread over one corner of a paddock, creating shade for a bench some wise soul had built likely centuries before. The scene was restful—horses lipping grass in the lush paddocks, birds flitting about between the barn and the branches of the oak.

  While Michael was in a pucker over something. In years of privation at a French garrison, and more years of duels and difficulties in the wilds of London, Michael Brodie had never once been in a pucker.

  “Do you know why I have arrived to your doorstep, Michael? Why I have brought my new wife, whose health is supposed to be delicate—though she scoffs at such a notion—hundreds of miles north, risking your wrath and handily earning your baroness’s displeasure?”

  “You surely did that—earned Brenna’s displeasure.”

  Sebastian gestured toward the bench. “Shall we sit?”

  Hospitality meant Michael must accommodate his guest’s request, and the interrogator in Sebastian also knew that constraining the movements of a restless man meant words might escape that the man would otherwise keep inside.

  Michael sat, his gaze going to the battlements where a pennant flapped in a crisp breeze.

  “That flag did not fly from the time my father died until the day I arrived back here. That’s the tradition, and Brenna would not have it any other way.”

  Sebastian took a place beside him, the stone making for a cold, hard seat, though Michael didn’t seem to notice the discomfort.

  “Why did you stay away from your home so long? You adore that woman, and in this environment, you move differently, you speak differently, you even look different.” And Michael apparently cared not one whit why a commanding officer had traveled hundreds of miles with an expecting wife to enjoy the frigid summer air of Scotland.

  Keen green eyes assessed Sebastian, the first direct look Sebastian had endured from his host. “Different, how?”

  “More yourself. More a laird of Clan Brodie. You belong here. You didn’t belong in London, and neither of us belonged in France.”

  Even mention of the country seemed to blight the pretty morning, but it felt good to say the words to the one person who could understand them.

  “You belong with your Milly, and I belonged with my Brenna, though I handily forgot that bit of truth.”

  “A soldier’s guilt at this late hour, Michael?”

  Across the paddock, a pair of leggy chestnut yearlings began the sort of mock battle that honed the reflexes, built strength, and occasionally resulted in the ruin of a good animal.

  “My wife told me this morning—as you were barging into my very breakfast parlor—that some fellow had made a nuisance of himself to her long before her marriage, though at some point, the blighter apparently emigrated.”

  “The lot of a female is seldom easy.” Sebastian did not allow himself to reflect on what his Milly had endured, lest he take to kicking Michael’s venerable granite wall.

  “She was sixteen when I married her, and she confirmed that her troubles antedated our vows.”

  “Ladies can be very attractive at sixteen.” Though Sebastian had never been drawn to youth in such abundance.

  “You miss the point, St. Clair. When I went off to war, Brenna was apparently not troubled by any more fools. What sort of man pesters a very young woman—and Brenna’s womanhood was yet developing when we married—but leaves her alone once she has no man on hand to protect her?”

  The implication was disgusting, though the legal age of sexual consent was twelve. Michael was a friend, so St. Clair offered what comfort he could.

  “The kind of man who desists once a lady’s spoken for?”

  “Brenna was engaged to marry me from the age of eight. She was a sweet, quiet, retiring little dumpling, and never gave anybody a bit of trouble.”

  Sebastian had watched the sweet, quiet lady over breakfast, and suspected she was capable of causing a good deal of trouble—now. He’d have to compare notes with Milly, though, when she’d finished her reconnaissance in the lady’s solar.

  “Your wife will tell you of her past when she’s ready. You spoke vows years ago, but you’re newly married. One has
to unlearn the habit of silence, as you well know.”

  “Her cousin said as much, and warned me my wife’s silence was a kindness. I am not owed any kindness by the wife I abandoned for years.”

  Soldiers were an interesting lot. They offered their lives for generals and kings who would not break bread with them; they fought harder battles upon coming home than they’d faced on foreign shores.

  And never talked about any of it.

  “You fought to keep that wife safe, Michael, and all the wives and children. Nobody broke up more domestic squabbles at the garrison than you, most of them without my having to say a thing. Your wife might like to know that about you.”

  “I think not.” Michael rose and regarded the two yearlings rearing and squealing at each other when they might have been grazing or napping in the sun. “Talking to one’s wife becomes a habit too, and there are some things Brenna doesn’t need to know about why I left, and why I stayed away as long as I did.”

  Sebastian got to his feet, movement being a good idea after a man had done days of penance in a traveling coach.

  “Perhaps you should trust your wife with those confidences, Michael. She might surprise you with a few more of her own.”

  Michael marched off, the yearlings continued their mock battle, and the Brodie pennant whipped and snapped above the battlements in a stiff, chilly breeze.

  Eleven

  “I want to go home,” Maeve declared. Except, where was home? “When I was in Ireland, Bridget didn’t yell at me for walking out to the paddocks, and Kevin gave me carrots and apples to give the horses.”

  Preacher was not impressed by this declaration. He continued to sit beside Maeve in the saddle room, licking the daylights out of his left paw. Preacher could eat mice; he did not have to brave a breakfast room with strangers in it—English strangers, who talked very oddly indeed.

  “I hate Scotland. I shall run away.”

  The door to the saddle room opened, and Patrick, a red-haired groom, stood in the door. Patrick had a lot of freckles and he smiled. He had extra names for the horses, the same way Uncle Kevin had.