Four #2
And…chubby. Also quiet. “I assume Mother provided some instruction?”
“Yer darling mother visited in the summers, though whether it was out of regard for your father, for the appearances, or for Brenna, I do not know. She was a good woman, was Lady Catherine.”
A good woman who’d essentially deserted her husband and taken her daughters with her.
“You’re saying Brenna faced a challenge.”
“You never were stupid, Michael Brodie. Brenna faced a war. Your parents were too absorbed with their own dramatics, and everybody from Goodie MacCray to Angus Brodie assumed you’d left to get away from your bride.”
This was, unfortunately, not far from the truth, though Michael hadn’t expected his departure to be blamed on Brenna.
“People must gossip about something, and many young fellows join their regiments before the appointed day.”
“One and twenty is young, is it?”
So what does that make sixteen?
“I was due to report in a matter of weeks. Brenna knew that when we married. The whole shire knew it.”
If he’d been a little boy, Cook’s sad, patient expression would have had him searching his conscience for sins to confess, and his pockets for crumbs. When he remained silent, she shoved to her feet.
“You’d best be off on that picnic, hadn’t you?”
Michael rose as well and snatched a wicker hamper from the counter. “Yes, I had best be off, while the beautiful weather lasts.”
The meal would have been ambrosial to a soldier on the march—some sort of fowl, more of the cheese Brenna was so proud of, rye bread, and ale—but Michael could not appreciate it.
“The food doesn’t agree with you?” Brenna’s question was gratingly casual.
The company did not agree with him, but he’d asked for this picnic, so he’d make use of it. “The food is fine. Would you like to walk for a bit?”
“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.