The Laird (Captive Hearts) (21 page)

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.”

Ten

Brenna’s breasts had been her salvation: her breasts and her height. Women had breasts; girls did not. Girls were small, flat-chested, and invisible. A tall, shapely woman was noticed, and in that notice lay measures of freedom and safety.

These realizations had come upon Brenna slowly, dimly, as she’d seen that for one man, her developing breasts had not been objects of curiosity or desire, but rather, disappointment—disgust, even. She’d loved her breasts ever since.

“Brenna Maureen.” Just that, her name, but uttered like a prayer, while Michael treated her breasts to a slow, warm caress that could only be called reverent. “Kiss me, please.”

She loved her breasts, and loved Michael too. Loved that for all he’d gone for a soldier, he would never force her, never tell her to hush and be still while he stole from her what should only be freely given.

He levered up to nuzzle her jaw, asking for kisses when he might have demanded them.

“I won’t break,” Brenna whispered, brushing her mouth over his. “I’m not that fragile.”

She wasn’t that fragile
any
longer
. As Michael’s tongue delicately traced her lower lip, Brenna realized that all his years away had served a purpose. Ten years ago, even five years ago, she could not have been a true wife to her husband.

But she could be now.

“Tell me,” Michael said, closing a thumb and forefinger over her nipple. “Is that what you want? More? Less?”

“Both,” she said, bracing herself on her elbows. “Both breasts at the same time. And your kisses.”

For a man who’d been years without female company, Michael was good at making love. He could fondle her breasts with both hands, kiss her, and shift about beneath her in such a fashion that Brenna lost track of the specifics and surrendered to a general pleasuring.

For long minutes, she kissed him while he stroked her breasts, teased her nipples, and undulated that male part of him against Brenna’s increasingly damp sex. Brenna sat up, the better to grab a much-needed deep breath. “Perhaps we should close the window, and some of these covers are—”

Michael drew a finger down the midline of her brow. “Stop weighing and measuring. Every knife, fork, and spoon will still be in its appointed drawer come morning.”

Brenna’s wits had abandoned their assigned drawer, and for once, this made her happy. “I want to make love with my husband, and he has yet to explain to me—”

Michael’s thumb glided up the crease of her sex. “When I make love with you for the first time, it won’t be with the candles out, under the covers, not even moonshine to illuminate your passions.”

“Our passions,” Brenna managed, but he’d touched her again with his thumb, a slick, sweet pressure and retreat that flung her entire mental store of silver high into sparkling beams of sunshine. “I want to see you too.”

She would
need
to see him. Need to see that it was her Michael and no other with her in the bed.

“I’m right here, Brenna.” He caressed her breast with just the right balance between assurance and entreaty. “Close your eyes.”

“No.”

By the light of the dying fire, Michael’s smile bloomed, naughty, approving, and tender. “You disobey the husband you vowed obedience to?”

“In this bed, I obey no one but myself.”

And his thumb, oh, his thumb. She obeyed that single part of him, moved into his touch in a rhythm that came from him like a gift, not a command at all.

She accepted that rhythm and made it her own.

“Brenna Maureen, dearest wife, I could not love ye more.”

She wanted to hold the sight of Michael’s fierce, tender smile close, wanted to cling to it, a final reassurance of the rightness of what she felt, but the pleasure was too much. She went soaring, into a brilliant, magical darkness of bodily joy, into a marital benediction for the trust she’d placed in her spouse and in herself.

Brenna did not recall closing her eyes, did not make a decision to moan softly as the pleasure took her, did not intend to collapse on her husband’s chest as the bright, trailing streams of ecstasy faded like so many stars falling through her body.

And she most assuredly did not give herself permission to cry.

“Hush, now,” Michael whispered, his hand drifting over her hair. “Settle yourself, and we’ll talk.”

Few men would have made that offer—few would have known it was needed.

Brenna used a corner of the sheet to swipe at her tears. “No words, Husband. Hold me.”

Fundamental fairness suggested she ought not to be issuing orders if she wouldn’t take any. She batted that sensible thought away and touched her tongue to the pulse in Michael’s throat. This made him smile. She could
feel
that it made him smile, so she did it again.

Her husband held her; he kissed her temple; he stroked her hair. Never did a man put right so many wrongs without needing a hint how to go about it.

Brenna sorted through words and gestures that might communicate her vast appreciation for his consideration and generosity, but none accommodated both her full heart and her flagging courage. With her last waking shred of awareness, Brenna hoped falling asleep in Michael’s arms would convey the many tender sentiments her silence did not.

***

Never had torment and bliss so neatly intertwined to choke a man’s selfish impulses and leave him aching in body and pleased with himself in spirit as he lay beneath his sleeping, sated wife.

Brenna had gone off like the fireworks displayed in such abundance in the victory celebrations, and yet, Michael wasn’t entirely sure what foe had been vanquished in their bed.

Time and distance had gone down to defeat, surely, for nine years of separation might easily leave husband and wife with unbridgeable differences.

Fear had suffered a loss as well, fear that their marriage would limp along, a convenience and a convention rather than a covenant.

Brenna had also surrendered something to him, and he something to her—his heart, at least—and yet, Michael drifted off with a sense of having come upon a greater wilderness than he’d anticipated.

One he would explore, hand in hand with his lady wife.

They awoke to a brilliant sunny morning, some little brown bird singing its fool feathers off at the windowsill. Michael slid a hand over the warm female flank snuggled up to him. “Good morning, Lady Strathdee.”

Her ladyship mumbled something, suggesting she didn’t share the bird’s, or her baron’s, charity with the day.

Michael brushed Brenna’s hair aside and spoke right against her ear. “Brenna Maureen, it’s a beautiful day. Wake up and kiss the husband who loves you.”