Nine #3
She didn’t flinch away, so Michael had to be the one to straighten and busy himself banking the fire.
As the Baron St. Clair’s combination valet, man of business, and self-appointed bodyguard, Michael had dwelled in a household full of London servants.
He hadn’t realized how much he craved the sort of privacy he had with Brenna in their chambers.
“Did you find anything of interest in my ledgers?”
He’d found confirmation that a careful girl had become a meticulous woman, one who ran a household with efficiency and common sense.
“I found that reading over numbers makes my eyes cross, and I found out why quartermasters were invariably difficult. Window open or closed?”
She’d want it open. Brenna was a lady who craved fresh air.
“Open, but wait until the candles are blown out,” she said, rising. “The nights will soon be getting longer, and I’m not sorry for it.”
A husband could only be cheered by that pronouncement. He waited until Brenna had warmed the sheets and pillows before unpinning his kilt. In a state of breezy undress, he opened the window and lingered for a moment. “No moon tonight.”
Perhaps his wife had coughed; perhaps she’d snickered.
“Come to bed, you daft man. You’ll catch your death by that window.”
A zephyr off the loch blew out the candle on the sill, but Michael made a slow tour of the room, blowing out the others.
While Brenna watched him. She did not peek at his semierect cock; she frankly studied it, and his chest and belly and flanks too. A woman who kept tidy ledgers could be expected to take inventory.
“You are a handsome specimen, Michael Brodie.” Brenna’s tone rendered this observation something less than a compliment, not quite a complaint.
“I’m a tired specimen,” he said, climbing in beside her. “Will you cuddle up, Wife?”
She answered him by draping herself along his side, her head on his shoulder.
“You want to have relations,” she said, sounding as prim as a Presbyterian minister winding up for his second three-hour sermon of the day.
“Aye. With you. Eventually.” Often too. “How are the preparations for the gathering coming?”
He’d thrown her off stride with that question, which wasn’t what he wanted to ask her.
He’d wanted to ask if she’d take his cock in her hand and relieve his sexual frustration, except she likely did not know how.
He wanted to ask her to use her wide, lush, prim mouth to pleasure him, and to tell her—to hell with asking—to sink her fingernails into the muscles of his tired arse as she did.
The room was cooling down as the night air wafted in. Michael tossed back the covers so his left side was available to the chilly breeze while Brenna nattered on about some damned thing or other.
“…and heaven only knows if Davey will show up sober or drunk,” Brenna was saying. “He’s always worse this time of year.”
Her hand caressed Michael’s chest, her nails drifting through the hair trailing down the center to his belly.
“Why is he worse?”
“His sons left in high summer. Angus would not allow them to pay rent after harvest, like everybody else. They’d taken possession of their crofts in high summer, and Angus said the rents were annual.
Without a crop ripe to sell, they could not make rent, and so they emigrated.
Angus had their crop harvested by the remaining tenants. ”
The chilly breeze barely registered against Michael’s lusty inclinations, but something cool in Brenna’s tone did distract him.
“You are angry about this.” Michael was angry about it too, if the situation had been as Brenna said. Angry, furious, and heartsick.
“Angus wanted the land for his damned sheep, so he burned Davey’s boys out. If Davey hadn’t run into the flames to retrieve the youngest, the girl would likely have perished.”
This went on all over the Highlands, had been going on all over the Highlands for decades if not centuries.
With one difference. “If they could not afford to pay the rent, how could these families afford to take ship, Brenna? How is it they did not join the hordes of Highlanders starving in the cities or trying to live off kelp and salted mackerel on the coast?”
“They could afford passage to Baltimore.”
Nowhere in Brenna’s careful ledger had she tracked the funds that would allow such an undertaking, and yet, Michael was sure she’d provided these families what they needed to leave the shire, and likely to find a decent start in the New World.
“Angus should not have burned them out,” Michael said. “My father never burned out anybody who was making an honest effort. Never. If the old laird made an example of the rare slacker, he made sure the family was provided for first. We don’t burn out our own because they’ve fallen on hard times.”
Angus would have known that.
“We should not speak of upsetting matters when it’s time for sleep,” Brenna said. “You had best kiss me to take your mind off burnings and mayhem.”
Daft, dear woman. “You think a kiss good night will settle me down?” The topic under discussion had settled him down—some.
“Perhaps a kiss good night will settle me down.”
Michael seized on this opportunity, because the nights were, indeed, getting longer.
“Brenna Maureen MacLogan Brodie, if you’ve a mind to kiss your husband, you needn’t go mincing about, hinting and suggesting. I am yours to kiss at your whim and pleasure. God knows, you did without my kisses long enough. I’d never begrudge you such a small thing now.”
He expected her to roll over in puzzled silence. He expected he’d have to go sit in the windowsill until his ballocks froze to the size of raisins. Perhaps a swim in the loch—
The covers rustled. A warm female breast brushed over Michael’s arm. Soft fingers feathered his hair back from his brow, and the merest touch of lips graced his mouth.
“I don’t know how to ask, Michael. I don’t know what to ask for.”
A man should be honest with his wife, particularly when she demonstrated such courage.
“Brenna, kiss me, please. I’ll go mad if you don’t kiss me right now.”
He went mad anyway, waiting for her to gather yet more courage, to touch her lips to his once more. She was shy and careful and naked.
Very, very naked, though Michael had no idea when she’d managed that feat of marital magic.
Michael lay on his back, heart pounding, as Brenna learned the shape of his mouth with her own. She licked, she sucked on his top lip, then the bottom, then went a-plundering over his brow to take his earlobe between her teeth.
“I am so proud of you.” Michael was proud of himself too, for not closing his hand around the luscious weight of her bare breast.
Brenna swung a leg across his thighs and mounted him. “Because I give our people safe passage across the sea?”
“That too.” He closed his eyes, lest he be enthralled by the glints of gold and scarlet the firelight found in her braid.
She hiked the covers over him, including his chilled left side, then leaned down, grazing his chest with lovely, warm, soft breasts. “You’re becoming aroused. You desire your wife.”
Not a sermon this time, but curiosity and more pride. She was pleased to be tormenting him, and he’d soon be hard as a pike staff.
“Shall I arouse you too, Brenna Maureen? A husband isn’t worth the name unless he pleases his lady.”
Her answer was to sit up, so the evidence of his arousal was snugged against her sex. “Give me your hands, Husband.”
Michael gave her his hands and a bit of his heart. She settled one of his palms over each breast, experimentally, and his cock leaped.
“Touching me did that to you?”
“Aye.”
“Touch me some more.”