Fourteen #2
MacLogan scooped up some rich, black dirt and let it fall through his fingers. “If you clear off everybody who doesn’t like your wife, who will pay your rents? Who will work your lands?”
“Wrong answer, MacLogan. Perhaps you’d best start packing. Brenna will miss you.”
MacLogan rose and dusted his palms together. “Brenna is no thief, and I’m her kin. If she was robbed when I was tasked with keeping her safe, the responsibility is mine. I’ve said as much to her.”
“You needed to say as much to the village, and you have not. Not in years of allowing your cousin to suffer from being the victim of a crime.”
MacLogan tilted his head up, as if a stray beam of sunshine might find its way to him despite the dense canopy overhead.
“I’ll say as much now, and Neil will too, but, Laird, what good will it do you to send from your home every tenant and relation who thinks your wife guilty?”
MacLogan was a good man, maybe even better than most, but he was a man who’d gone for years without a woman in his life, without a woman in his heart.
“When Brenna faces rejection and judgment on every hand, it isn’t a home for her.
It’s a place to live, a place to work herself to exhaustion, a place to fret over and lay fires in the winter.
She’s making camp between battles and sieges, not making a home.
Castle Brodie is not a home for her until she’s loved and respected here, rather than merely tolerated.
I love her and I respect her, and I will see others treat her appropriately or escort them to the property line. ”
MacLogan studied the trees for a moment, then dug in his sporran. “Read this.”
“What is it?”
“A letter from my middle brother. He talks about the markets, and the best place to land cattle if we’re thinking of exporting. His choice is Baltimore, but you’ve seen something of the world. Your opinion might be worth hearing.”
A man could not export beef from Aberdeen if he’d taken ship himself. Michael stuffed the letter in a pocket, admitting to himself that he was relieved MacLogan would not tuck tail and run for the coast.
“I’ll read it. Where are you off to?”
“I’ve a notion to pay a call on our minister. Give my regards to Brenna.”
He ambled off, intent on his confessions—or something—leaving Michael with a letter in his pocket and a towering need to kick somebody’s kilted backside.
Anger wouldn’t sway anybody’s opinion of Brenna—MacLogan had been right about that—and Michael wasn’t exclusively angry. He was also worried, maybe even scared.
Brenna had let him hold her last night, but nothing more than that, and while they’d exchanged a few civilities over the issue of Maeve’s safety, the topic had become a lit grenade launched in the direction of their fragile marital trust.
Michael had no idea why this might be so, and Brenna wasn’t about to pass along any clues.
Which made it all the more imperative that he search Angus’s quarters sooner rather than later.
What few people were left in the Highlands managed to generate as much drama as a garrison of French soldiers and their families, and the entire population of greater London.
“Take it,” Sebastian St. Clair said, holding an ivory silk handkerchief out to the Baroness Strathdee. He used neither his commanding officer voice nor even his Baron St. Clair voice. He used his devoted nephew and doting husband voice, which provoked the lady to a fierce glower.
Michael probably adored that glower on his Brenna, though he’d be horrified to see the lady in tears.
“My thanks, Baron. Good day.”
She would have stormed off with his little flag of truce, but Sebastian could not allow that. He fell in step beside her.
“What had you barreling out of those trees like a fox who’s heard two packs in full cry?”
“I’ve things to see to,” the lady said, her pace picking up to that of a whirlwind. “If you’ll excuse me.”
“Alas, that I cannot do,” he said, taking Michael’s wife by her wrist. She wrenched free with a speed and strength Sebastian might have expected of a seasoned fighter.
“What are you about, Baron? You are a guest in my home, and every courtesy must be shown you, but I’ll not tolerate bullying.”
She stood her ground, when she might have made a grand, offended exit.
Sebastian liked this woman, and Milly liked this woman, which mitigated in favor of leaving the lady in peace.
Michael, however, loved the Baroness Strathdee.
Brenna Brodie had been the emotional ballast keeping her husband sane even across international borders and roiling seas, though she apparently failed to grasp this herself.
Because Michael loved his Brenna, Sebastian was doomed to interrogate her. “Michael would kill me if I bullied you, and thanks to me, he knows all manner of clever ways to ensure I suffer terribly in the process. Let’s stroll a bit, shall we?”
She sent a look back toward the trees, one of longing and hurt, and yet, she would not be rude to a guest. “A short walk only.”
Michael had stomped down the postern path at roughly the same velocity as Michael’s wife had emerged from the woods.
“I was a torturer, you know, in service to France.”
He took perverse pleasure in admitting his prior profession before polite company, enjoyed watching lords and ladies squirm when he said what they all murmured behind perfumed gloves and painted fans.
The admission held no joy now, but rather felt like reciting the sentence an innocent accused would endure if convicted of a serious crime.
Brenna Brodie snorted. “Are you intent on torturing me now? It’s already been tried, and yet I’m still enjoying excellent health, aren’t I?”
“You were crying, my lady.” Her admission about already having been tortured upset Sebastian. One lost the knack of detachment when one was ferociously loved, and for the queer pang in his heart, he had Milly to blame.
Or thank.
Somebody had abused the Baroness Strathdee’s trust at length, though Sebastian did not believe she regarded her husband as her betrayer. Not yet.
“Do you suppose I should be confiding in you, my lord?” she said, churning along into the castle’s back gardens. “My husband is home after nine years away with little contact. We’re bound to encounter the occasional rough patch.”
Sebastian tried to snap her off a white-and-yellow daisy, but daisies were tough and fibrous, and he ended up half pulling the thing out by its roots. His bungled gallantry had done the unexpected and made the lady pause.
“Here,” she said, producing a folding knife from a skirt pocket. “Daisies want trimming.”
She smiled too, mostly with big green eyes that had recently been crying. The effect was lovely, if conducive to more pangs of a half-French heart. Sebastian took the knife and trimmed dirt and roots from the flower stem.
He presented the blossom to the lady. “Do you know what daisies stand for?”
She took it, but didn’t do anything so foolish as bring it to her rather definite nose. “They stand for a bit of cheer and a deal of weeding. For some they stand for provocation to sneeze. Thank you.”
“They stand for innocence.”
Well, hell. This drawing-room trivia had the tears welling again. She tossed the flower back among its kin.
“I must be—”
He took her by the arm, gently, lest she draw his cork and shout down the castle walls, because Brenna Brodie was that sensitive to a man’s mishandling of her.
“You promised me a short walk,” he said, steering her in the direction of a thriving if somewhat raggedy hedge.
She remained trenchantly silent, which lack of resistance alarmed the husband in Sebastian and appeased the interrogator.
Women were not as likely to break under torture, but kindness and attentiveness could lay siege to their carefully constructed defenses, particularly when offered from an unexpected quarter.
For this lady, based on Milly’s disclosures, kindness from any quarter would be unexpected.
“Let’s sit for a moment, shall we?” Sebastian pushed open an old wooden door and led the baroness into a walled garden. She went unresisting and even allowed him to settle her on a sunny bench.
“I hate this place.” She directed her sentiments to his handkerchief, which was hopelessly wrinkled as she spread it in her lap. “I hate this garden.”
“Hating is a great effort.”
“Hating can keep one safe.”
What harm could befall a woman in a sunny, walled garden right up against the castle’s solid granite walls?
“You don’t hate your husband,” Sebastian observed, coming down beside her. “My wife says you’re besotted with each other.” Which had been a relief beyond imagining, because most of Michael’s long absence from Scotland had been on Sebastian’s behalf.
“I am besotted.” More daisies grew here, more innocence, along with pansies in a riot of cheerful colors.
“A woman usually announces such a thing with a hint of joy, a coy smile, some wonderment. What has upset you, my lady?”
She didn’t flinch at his question, wasn’t surprised by it. Her answer, however, was a surprise to Sebastian, who’d heard many unusual answers in his time in France.
“My husband loves me. He truly loves me. He defends me to my own relations when he has no proof that I’m blameless.”
When Sebastian had come to the conclusion that Milly loved him, the world had at once come right and gone spinning off its axis.
“You can’t do anything about his love for you, you know. Michael is stubborn and loyal to the bone. He might be suffering simple infatuation, though. The joy of homecoming, marital pleasures, that sort of thing?”
Michael Brodie was head over ears for his Brenna. A career prying truths from reluctant sources hadn’t been necessary for Sebastian to see that.
She swiped at her cheeks with her knuckles.
“He loves me. It isn’t infatuation, it isn’t a homecoming rut, it isn’t…
anything simple. I heard him giving Hugh MacLogan a verbal birching, confronting my cousin about things that happened years ago, and now my husband must campaign over old territory, and it’s all—”