The Laird (Captive Hearts #3)

One

“Elspeth, I believe a Viking has come calling.”

“Lovely horse,” Elspeth remarked.

Highland hospitality had grown tattered and threadbare in some locations, but not at Castle Brodie, and it would not, as long as Brenna had the running of the place.

“He looks familiar,” Elspeth said as the rider swung off his beast.

“The horse?”

No, Elspeth hadn’t meant the horse, because now that the rider was walking his mount toward the groom approaching from the stables, Brenna had the same sense of nagging familiarity. She knew that loose-limbed stride, knew that exact manner of stroking a horse’s neck, knew—

Foreboding prickled up Brenna’s arms, an instant before recognition landed in a cold heap in her belly.

“Michael has come home.” Nine years of waiting and worrying while the Corsican had wreaked havoc on the Continent, of not knowing what to wish for.

Her damned husband hadn’t even had the courtesy to warn her of his return.

Elspeth peered over the stone crenellations, her expression dubious. “If that’s the laird, you’d best go welcome him, though I don’t see much in the way of baggage. Perhaps, if you’re lucky, he’ll soon be off larking about on some new battlefield.”

“For shame, Elspeth Fraser.”

A woman ought not to talk that way about her laird, and a wife ought not to think that way about her husband. Brenna wound down through the castle and took herself out into the courtyard, both rage and gratitude speeding her along.

She’d had endless Highland winters to rehearse the speech Michael deserved, years to practice the dignified reserve she’d exhibit before him should he ever recall he had a home.

Alas for her, the cobbles were wet from a recent scrubbing, so her dignified reserve more or less skidded to a halt before her husband.

Strong hands steadied her as she gazed up, and up some more, into green eyes both familiar and unknown.

“You’ve come home.” Not at all what she’d meant to say.

“That I have. If you would be so good, madam, as to allow the lady of the—Brenna?”

His hands fell away, and Brenna stepped back, wrapping her tartan shawl around her more closely.

“Welcome to Castle Brodie Michael.” Because somebody ought to say the words, she added, “Welcome home.”

“You used to be chubby.” He leveled this accusation as if put out that somebody had made off with that chubby girl.

“You used to be skinny.” Now he was all-over muscle. He’d gone away a tall, gangly fellow, and come back not simply a man, but a warrior. “Perhaps you’re hungry?”

She did not know what to do with a husband, much less this husband, who bore so little resemblance to the young man she’d married, but Brenna knew well what to do with a hungry man.

“I am…” His gaze traveled the courtyard the way a skilled gunner might swivel his sights on a moving target, making a circuit of the granite walls rising some thirty feet on three sides of the bailey.

His expression suggested he was making sure the castle, at least, had remained where he’d left it. “I am famished.”

“Come along then.” Brenna turned and started for the entrance to the main hall, but Michael remained in the middle of the courtyard, still peering about. Potted geraniums were in riot, pink roses climbed trellises under the first-floor windows, and window boxes held all manner of blooms.

“You’ve planted flowers.”

Another near accusation, for nine years ago, the only flowers in the keep were stray shrubs of heather springing up in sheltered corners.

Brenna returned to her husband’s side, trying to see the courtyard from his perspective. “One must occupy oneself somehow while waiting for a husband to come home—or be killed.”

He needed to know that for nine years, despite anger, bewilderment, and even the occasional period of striving for indifference toward him and his fate, Brenna had gone to bed every night praying that death did not end his travels.

“One must, indeed, occupy oneself.” He offered her his arm, which underscored how long they’d been separated and how far he’d wandered.

The men of the castle and its tenancies knew to keep their hands to themselves where Brenna MacLogan Brodie was concerned. They did not hold her chair for her, did not assist her in and out of coaches, or on and off of her horse.

And yet, Michael stood there, a muscular arm winged at her, while the scent of slippery cobbles, blooming roses, and a whiff of vetiver filled the air.

“Brenna Maureen, every arrow slit and window of that castle is occupied by a servant or relation watching our reunion. I would like to walk into my home arm in arm with my wife. Will you permit me that courtesy?”

He’d been among the English, the military English, which might explain this fussing over appearances, but he hadn’t lost his Scottish common sense.

Michael had asked her to accommodate him. Brenna wrapped one hand around his thick forearm and allowed him to escort her to the castle.

He could bed his wife. The relief Michael Brodie felt at that sentiment eclipsed the relief of hearing again the languages of his childhood, Gaelic and Scots, both increasingly common as he’d traveled farther north.

To know he could feel desire for his wedded wife surpassed his relief at seeing the castle in good repair, and even eclipsed his relief that the woman didn’t indulge in strong hysterics at the sight of him.

For the wife he’d left behind had been more child than woman, the antithesis of this red-haired Celtic goddess wrapped in the clan’s hunting tartan and so much wounded dignity.

They reached the steps leading up to the great wooden door at the castle entrance. “I wrote to you.”

Brenna did not turn her head. “Perhaps your letters went astray.”

Such gracious indifference. He was capable of bedding his wife—any young man with red blood in his veins would desire the woman at Michael’s side—but clearly, ability did not guarantee he’d have the opportunity.

“I meant, I wrote from Edinburgh to let you know I was coming home.”

“Edinburgh is lovely in summer.”

All of Scotland was lovely in summer, and to a man who’d scorched his back raw under the Andalusian sun, lovely in deepest winter too. “I was in France, Brenna. The King’s post did not frequent Toulouse.”

Outside the door, she paused and studied the scrolled iron plate around the ancient lock.

“We heard you’d deserted, then we heard you’d died. Some of the fellows from your regiment paid calls here, and intimated army gossip is not to be trusted. Then some officer came trotting up the lane a month after the victory, expecting to pay a call on you.”

Standing outside that impenetrable, ancient door, Michael accepted that his decision to serve King and Country had left wounded at home as well as on the Continent.

And yet, apologizing now would only make things worse.

“Had you seen the retreat to Corunna, Brenna, had you seen even one battle—” Because the women saw it all, right along with their husbands and children.

Trailing immediately behind the soldiers came a smaller, far more vulnerable army of dependents, suffering and dying in company with their menfolk.

“I begged you to take me with you.” She wrenched the door open, but stepped back, that Michael might precede her into the castle.

She had pleaded and cried for half their wedding night, sounding not so much like a distressed bride as an inconsolable child, and because he’d been only five years her senior, he’d stolen away in the morning while she’d slept, tears still streaking her pale cheeks.

He searched for honest words that would not wound her further.

“I prayed for your well-being every night. The idea that you were here, safe and sound, comforted me.”

She plucked a thorny pink rose from a trellis beside the door and passed the bloom to him.

“Who or what was supposed to comfort me, Michael Brodie? When I was told you’d gone over to the enemy? When I was told you were dead? When I imagined you captured by the French, or worse?”

They stood on the castle steps, their every word available to any in the great hall or lurking at nearby windows. Rather than fret over the possibility that his wife had been unfaithful to him—her questions were offered in rhetorical tones—Michael stepped closer.

“Your husband has come home, and it will be his pleasure to make your comfort his greatest concern.”

He even tried a smile, letting her see that man and wife might have some patching up to do, but man and woman could deal together well and very soon.

She looked baffled—or peevish. He could not read his own wife accurately enough to distinguish between the two.

“Have you baggage, Husband?”

Yes, he did. He gestured for her to go ahead of him into the hall. “Last I heard, the coach was following, but I haven’t much in the way of worldly goods.”

“I’ll have your things put in the blue bedroom.”

When she would have gone swishing off into the bowels of the castle, Michael grabbed her wrist and kept her at his side. She remained facing half-away from him, an ambiguous pose, not resisting, and not exactly drinking in the sight of her long-lost husband, either.

“What’s different?” He studied the great hall he’d stopped seeing in any detail by his third birthday. “Something is different. This place used to be…dark. Like a great ice cave.”

And full of mice and cobwebs.

She twisted her hand free of his.

“Nothing much is different. I had the men enlarge the windows, whitewash the walls, polish the floors. The room wanted light, we had a bit of coin at the time, and the fellows needed something to do.”

“You put a balcony over the fireplace.” She’d also had the place scrubbed from the black-and-white marble floor to the blackened crossbeams, freeing it of literally centuries of dirt.

“The ceilings are so high we lose all the warmth. When we keep the fires going, the reading balcony is warmer than the hall below it.”