Eighteen
A boot scraped on the step behind Brenna, the sound making Michael’s lawfully wedded—and bedded—wife jump as a pistol shot would have.
Sebastian St. Clair emerged from the stairway, the wind snatching at his hair and at his Stuart plaid kilt.
“Hugh is dealing with the details, below. The musicians had first go at the food, and Elspeth is sending the rest home with various families or to the kirk. The barrel and the desserts went to the inn.”
He went on, barking out information in his precise, aristocratic English, and at some point, Michael rose from the stones, his hand still grasping Brenna’s. He’d never seen his former commanding officer rattled—not ever—and yet, shutting St. Clair up was imperative.
Angus was dead, and the musicians had first go at the buffet?
“Maeve and Lachlan?” Michael asked.
“Saw nothing,” St. Clair replied, the first useful piece of information he’d shared.
“Thank God for that mercy. When word spread Maeve was trapped up here, the children were all hustled away. Maeve and Lachlan are drinking chocolate in the solar, and they’ll not be allowed to stir from there until they’re put to bed. ”
“My thanks for the report.” Michael could somehow form words—a relic from soldiering days—while Brenna remained a silent wraith whose hand he would never let go. She should leave him, of course, and not for a paltry nine years. “St. Clair, if you would continue to manage things, my wife and I…”
He trailed off and took the shawl from around his shoulders, using it to envelope Brenna and bring her against his body.
“This view, these damned stones, they remind me of France,” St. Clair muttered. “Of that bloody Chateau. Come down, you two, before you catch your—before you catch a lung fever. I’ll send Milly up here next if you don’t come with me now.”
“We’re coming,” Michael said. “Give us a moment.”
St. Clair disappeared down the steps, his muttering, if Michael weren’t mistaken, including a deal of French cursing. St. Clair had faced more hardened officers on the field of honor than any other five men of Michael’s acquaintance, and yet, the baron had been near tears.
Why had Michael disclosed his knowledge of that damned sketchbook to Brenna, and why now?
Because his common sense was another of the bloody heaps on the cobbles below. God help him, his marriage was probably down there, bleeding its last as well.
“You’re shivering,” Michael said. “I should be shivering. Come along.”
She resisted as he moved toward the steps. “Michael Brodie, where are you taking me?”
Michael had been like this on their wedding night. Soft-spoken, considerate, distracted, and utterly fixed on some purpose Brenna could not divine—until she’d woken to his note, explaining that he’d gone to join his regiment early.
He’d been planning his escape from their marriage then, and perhaps he was planning it anew.
“I’m taking you out of this wind, Brenna Maureen. You’ll want Elspeth, and a wee dram, and—” He stopped in the doorway to the stairs, shadows and granite behind him, night coming on over the castle roof. “You can’t possibly want me for a husband. I don’t see how you could want any husband.”
They held hands, and yet Michael leaned not against his wife, but against the cold, hard stones of the castle.
“How could you have me, Brenna? How could you bear to be intimate with me, after what you’d suffered as a child? I can understand why Angus chose death, I can understand—” Michael’s breath gave an odd hitch, and he shook loose of Brenna’s grasp. “You’ll want to check on Maeve.”
A shudder went through him, and Brenna knew, by the sick sinking in her bones, she knew, Michael was just then piecing together the threat Angus had posed to Maeve.
“I’ll not lose you too, Michael Brodie.” She marched past him, snatched his wrist into her grasp, and dragged him into the stairwell.
“Much was taken from me by that awful man, but I will not lose you too. If I must explain the whole of it to you, I shall, but there will be no more running off, keeping our well-meant silences, and allowing pains that should bring us together to separate us.”
For she wanted to run off, wanted to tear off across the hills and never look back. Angus had doomed her to looking back, but she could at least look back with Michael’s company to fortify her.
“You don’t have to tell me, Brenna,” he said, following her down the winding steps. “I can move my things. You’ll have peace, at least. You won’t have to see me strutting about, so proud of my—”
He stopped, back to the wall, eyes closed, and Brenna had the sense her husband was in the grip of an illness, one that might overtake him if she allowed it.
“Stop this,” she said, slipping her arms around him.
“You are entitled to your self-loathing, if that’s what this is.
You are entitled to loathe me, but you are not entitled to leave me again, Michael Brodie.
That didn’t work very well, if you’ll recall, and we’re stronger people now. I forbid you to abandon me again.”
She prayed they were stronger people, though the notion she could forbid her husband anything was a desperate fiction.
“Brenna, he saw you naked. As a child. Many…many times. He touched you, I’m sure of it, and if he—” Michael fell silent. By the flickering light of the sconce below them, tears glistened on his cheeks.
And that…that was the worst of the legacy Angus had left behind. Not that he’d betrayed Brenna’s innocence, preyed upon her loneliness and ignorance, and exploited a child’s trust, but that he’d continued to take from her the normal, prosaic gifts of a happily married woman.
Brenna kissed her husband.
“Angus didn’t—he never…I was a virgin when I first made love with my husband. I have my husband to thank for that. I’d love him to my dying day for that alone, but in fact, I love him for many reasons.”
She’d avoided the word “love” for years. Tender sentiment was a source of weakness and bewilderment, and it flooded her now, rendering her strong in a way that astonished her.
“Brenna, hush.” Michael stayed propped against the wall, head back, eyes closed as if she’d just admitted to hanging felonies. “I don’t deserve your sentimental declarations.”
“I’d slap you with my sentimental declarations if I could. I hoarded them up, storing them where even I couldn’t see the truth of them. We’re leaving this castle, and we shall talk.”
She would talk, and he would listen.
He opened his eyes. His left hand came up, and with one finger he traced her hair back from her brow.
“I owe you that. I didn’t listen to you on our wedding night. I’ll listen now.”
A small portion of Brenna’s anxiety slinked back under her heart, where she’d learned to manage it. The rest flapped about inside her, like the castle pennant in a punishing wind.
“Come with me, then, and we’ll find some quiet, where you can listen to me properly.” Where she could listen to him too.
Cook abetted them, shoving a hamper at Michael and a bundle of blankets at Brenna. Her face was lined with fatigue and grief, but she managed a wan smile when Brenna explained that she and Michael might be gone some time.
They left through the deserted ballroom, walked past all the magnificent flowers, the empty tables and chairs, the crossed swords given pride of place on walls now sporting slashes of moonlight.
Without dozens of overheated human bodies and groaning tables of food, the entire space bore the fragrance of heather and roses.
“We were to have had a celebration tonight,” Michael said, as if he’d not been in charge of repairing the banister railing just two days past. “A welcome home to the long-lost laird who’d come safely through the wars.”
Whoever that fellow was.
“We’ll have a celebration,” Brenna said, pushing through the doors to the back gardens. “Though first, we’ll have a wee natter.”
In the moonshadows of the empty ballroom, Michael was incongruously reminded of Brenna as he’d first seen her. He’d been thirteen, she’d been eight, and he’d been fascinated with her.
“She’ll be yours someday,” his father had said. “If all goes well, and ye don’t muck it up. She’ll be your lady wife, and she’ll be yours.”
Michael had been too young to understand that marriage alone did not confer dominion or possession of a woman’s heart on her spouse. The privilege of keeping a lady’s heart safe was earned, and he’d failed his wife miserably.
And yet, that small Brenna had been much like the lady leading Michael into the summer night.
“You’re still a determined soul,” he said as they passed a patch of daisies looking pale in the moonlight. “You still go after problems instinctively. You attack them without any thought they might have no solutions.”
She shot him a look suggesting the moon was affecting his wits.
“They mostly do have solutions, it’s we who lack the vision to see them, and I’m certainly guilty of that.”
She should leave him. That would solve too many problems, and yet he could not bear it if she did.
“Angus stole our letters, Brenna. Yours and mine, both. I don’t know as he even read them. He simply took them from the post. And from us.”
Brenna paused at the postern gate, while Michael shifted the hamper so he could get at the latch.
“He took more than a few letters, Michael. I’m glad he’s dead, though I understand your feelings are more complicated.”
She reported her position with breathtakingly unapologetic assurance, and of the two—her relief at Angus’s death, and her acceptance that Michael’s emotions might not match her own—the second caught Michael’s interest.
“I don’t want to feel anything.” Though Michael loved his wife, and that was…that was still good.
“You will feel me leaving you here by the gate if you don’t get moving, Michael Brodie. Down to the river with you, before the grass gets any more damp.”