One #3
Brenna pretended to test the temperature of the water, which was wonderfully hot. “You haven’t developed a taste for southern attire?”
“I’ve had a bellyful of southern everything. I’ve missed home, missed it terribly.” The second boot came off, and he held them out to her.
He hadn’t missed her terribly, and while that ought to be a relief, it also rankled. Exceedingly.
Brenna took his boots and found wee Lachlan waiting for them outside the door, which denied her the excuse of taking the boots all the way down to the kitchen.
“Thank you, Lachlan, and mind you do a good job. Fetch me one of your da’s work kilts and a clean shirt from the laundry, and leave them in the sitting room before you start on the boots.”
The boy scampered off, his grin revealing two missing front teeth. Behind her, Brenna heard her husband rising from the rocking chair.
“You will be happy to know you’re a baroness,” he said, unbuttoning his waistcoat. “Or you will be shortly. I was hoping to escape with a mere knighthood, or a baronetcy, but the Regent gets sentimental about his soldiers.”
“I’m a baroness?” If he’d told her she was with child, she could not have been more surprised. “You’re to be given a title?”
He draped the waistcoat over the shoulders of the rocker, where it looked both odd and cozily appropriate. “When you heard I’d gone over to the enemy, I was in fact on the King’s business, or so my superior officer would have it. Would you help me with this knot?”
Brenna crossed the room and stood before him as he raised his chin. “Conducting the King’s business in Toulouse could not have been very safe, Michael Brodie.” She loosened the knot, which he had indeed yanked into something entirely unfashionable.
Staring at the breadth of his shoulders, Brenna was abruptly reminded that in addition to being her errant husband—and now a peer of the realm!—Michael Brodie was the smiling, teasing, decent man who’d married her when he might have repudiated the bargain their fathers had struck years ago.
How many times had he cheated death in the past nine years?
A queer feeling assaulted her knees as she studied his throat. “I would not have liked to find myself your widow.”
Whatever emotions she was battling—anger, resentment, bewilderment, relief—any of them was a better bargain than sorrow.
His arms as they came around her were tentative, but surprisingly welcome. “One is cheered to hear this.”
“You sound English,” she said, pulling back but smiling to be able to insult him. “You dress English.”
“And yet, the English could barely understand me, at first.” He passed her his wrinkled cravat, which she hung over his waistcoat. “You are not pleased about being a baroness.”
The voluminous linen shirt he unbuttoned probably cost enough to feed a crofter and his family for months, and yet, Michael expected her to be pleased about this title business.
“A title is another surprise, and I do not like surprises. Have you ambitions to join the Scottish delegation?”
“No, I do not. Those poor bastards must mince about London for much of the year, pretending they have some influence with a group of lords who’ve never dug a potato or imbibed decent whisky in their fat, pampered lives.
No more French for me, no more English, and I’m not entirely keen on the Irish or the Germans at present, either. ”
The shirt came off over his head, which necessitated that Brenna test the water again. It had not cooled in the least. “Your mother was Irish, sir, and the daughter of an Irish earl. A true lady.”
And his sisters had been sent to Ireland not long after he’d left the castle.
“As Wellington is Irish,” he said, tossing her his shirt, “though His Grace disdains mention of it. It was the duchess’s friendship with Mama that brought me to Wellington’s notice.”
Brenna folded the shirt, an extravagance of pale fabric, meticulous seams, and tiny stitches, a shirt she might have made for him had he remained at home. A shirt he might have died wearing.
This peculiar, domestic conversation juxtaposed with increasing displays of Michael’s bare skin had anxiety cresting up toward panic in Brenna’s belly.
“Are you used to ladies assisting you at your bath?” Because she was surely not used to this casual disrobing he accomplished all too quickly.
Maybe a soldier learned this lack of modesty, along with how to march and shoot.
Michael’s chest and shoulders rippled with muscle, his arms were roped with it, and his belly…
She draped the shirt ever so carefully over the chair back.
Michael paused, his hands on his falls. “I am not used to having anybody’s assistance with a bath.
For months, the only places I could bathe were ponds and streams, and to do so was to risk the loss of my clothing, if not my liberty or my life.
” He undid a couple of buttons on each side of his breeches and shot her a puzzled look. “Are you shy, Brenna Maureen?”
He’d gone a bit Scottish on her. Are ye shy?
While she’d gone a bit red in the cheeks. “I’ve seen many a naked man, more than I’ve ever wished to.”
She shouldn’t have said that, and not because it piqued her husband’s interest.
“Oh, have you now?” He prowled across the room. “So if I drop these breeches you won’t be torn between the urge to shamelessly stare at the long-lost family jewels and the inclination to run from the castle in a maidenly fright?”
In the next room, somebody opened the door, then a moment later, closed it.
“That will be Lachlan with your clean clothes.”
Brenna might have ducked past her husband, but he stood there, naked to the waist, his tone not quite teasing, and his mouth not quite smiling. “Brenna Maureen?”
She’d always liked the way he said her name, musically, like an endearment. Now was an inconvenient moment to recall such a thing.
And yet, as angry as she was with Michael, she did not want to hurt him avoidably, not even for the sake of her pride.
“I see my cousins and the fellows from the village bathing in the loch all the time. They know good and well when Elspeth and I are on the parapets or in the solar, and those men have no modesty. Elspeth finds them vastly entertaining. She fancies Lachlan’s papa, though I doubt he’s aware of her feelings. ”
Michael peered down at her. “What does Lachlan’s mother think of a devotion to cleanliness that requires strutting and pawing in the altogether before decent women?”
“Annie’s been gone five years, Michael.” Brenna moved off to the wardrobe, where she stored her soaps and flannels. She rummaged longer than necessary, trying to locate her emotional balance and failing.
“Would you mind fetching my clean clothes?” Michael asked. “You’ll have to make me a list of who’s left us, who’s been born or wed. I ought to know these things before I start on my tenant calls.”
He sounded neither resigned nor resentful, but perhaps resolute.
Brenna left the room, starting that list in her head, for many families had departed for the New World, and in nine years, any family seat would see its share of deaths—also a few births.
When she returned to the bedroom, Michael was ensconced in the tub and busily lathering his chest.
Which was a kindness on his part, truly it was.