The Laird (Captive Hearts) (39 page)

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.”

“Brenna, you need not be anxious. My wishes prevailed for nine years, and even had they not…” He could give her this. He could give her absolute control over their fate, and she deserved that, at least. “Even had they not, based on what has transpired, our marriage will be as you wish it to be.”

“You’re daft,” she said, marching off down the hill. “Marriage isn’t a matter of taking turns being the baby or the queen or the laird. We don’t take turns running the castle or scurrying off to France. We’re
married
.”

He had scurried off to France. Tail between his legs. “You have some definite notions about this marriage business.”

She was quiet for the time it took them to wind down the path to the river, and Michael had to approve of her choice of location. The sound of the Dee at summer ebb was soothing, the moonlight on the water lovely. Maybe what they had to say to each other would profane such beauty, or maybe the water could carry all the hurt and misery away, down to the sea, and out of their lives.

Out of their hearts.

Brenna snapped out the blankets and more or less flung them on the grass. Michael tossed his sporran down as well.

“I don’t want to tell you a thing, Michael Brodie. Angus is dead, and I want all his wrongdoing to die with him. Keep marching, you know, like a good Scots regiment, even after the colors have fallen and the pipers are silent.”

Michael could not stand that she was so afraid. Despite whatever he might be feeling himself—nothing at all, too much, and everything in between—he stepped up to his wife and put his arms around her.

“What Angus did will live in your heart and mine unless we deal with it.” Even then, even if Brenna shared with him every jot and tittle of her recollections, she’d still not empty her mental coffers of Angus’s pernicious legacy. The same way a soldier could be felled by memories of battles past, a shaft of sunlight, a snippet of laughter, any small sensory impression might dredge up more experiences she’d shuffled away from her mind’s notice.

“I am too tired of dealing with Angus to hate him,” Brenna said. “Though I expect to get a second wind on my hatred. I pray for it.”

“Because,” Michael said, looping his arms around her shoulders, “beneath the hatred lies the hurt and the fear. Tell me about the hurt, Brenna Maureen. Tell me all about it.”

***

Michael Brodie was a brave man, though he’d be years understanding that about himself. For now, he’d see only that he’d abandoned his sixteen-year-old wife, and while there was a story there—one Brenna sensed lay at Angus’s far-from-sainted feet—she’d lead the way and tell her miseries first.

“I was lonely,” she said against her husband’s shoulder. For years and years, she’d been lonely, but she was fiercely pleased that when she stood in Michael’s embrace she was no longer lonely.

“Let’s sit,” Michael said, and perhaps that was wise, because Brenna’s knees had gone weak at the effort to push out three honest words. “I’m sorry you were lonely. If it’s any consolation, I have some acquaintance with loneliness myself.”

When Brenna might have taken up a position beside her husband, the better to keep her thoughts straight and her emotions far from her own notice, he instead sat behind her, hiked his knees up, and drew her down against his chest. She was surrounded by Michael as surely as the keep was surrounded by the bailey walls. Though Michael was a good deal warmer than granite, he was no less solid.

“I don’t mean I was lonely when you left for the military, though I was. I mean, I was lonely from the day I arrived to Castle Brodie. My ma had died the year before, my father and brothers were reeling with it, and there I was. Eight years old, and I knew not one soul, but that tall, green-eyed boy named Michael, who would someday be my husband.”

Michael’s lips grazed her temple. “He is your husband. He wants always to be your husband.”

She nuzzled his throat, which bore the scent of vetiver.

“I’ve had some time to think on it, Michael, and while I liked you—you were
my
Michael—I also did not want you to leave me as my family had.”

“Bloody hell.”

“Leave me when I was small, I mean. I’d watch you, and sometimes, you’d watch me, but if my own father and brothers could pass me into the keeping of strangers, then I was easy to leave, you see. I didn’t want to do anything to make you leave me before you were truly mine.”

“So you were shy and coy, and I was fascinated with you.”

“Angus was fascinated with me too.” While Brenna wanted to focus on Michael’s admission—wasn’t he fascinated with her any longer?—the part about Angus was what needed telling now. “Angus was diabolically sly, Michael. He did not approach me indecently—he was kind and understanding. He answered the questions I could not ask anybody else. He offered the occasional pat on the shoulder or passing hug. He made me feel…”

Oh, this hurt. This hurt awfully, to think of how vulnerable she’d been, what easy prey.

“He made you feel special,” Michael said, his voice carefully flat. “He made you feel safe, and as if you had at least one friend in the world, a friend you would protect and trust. He was the serpent in the garden of your childhood, promising much, though the cost of what he offered you was beyond your ken.”

Brenna’s fingers ached—she’d curled them that tightly in the wool of Michael’s sash.

“Exactly. So when he’d sit me in his lap, even though I wasn’t exactly comfortable, I wasn’t entirely uncomfortable either. I felt privileged to be Angus’s ‘special little girl.’”

For a long moment, the river murmuring to the moonlight was the only sound other than Brenna’s breathing. It was too soon to give way to tears, for they had much more ground to cover.

“He graduated to kissing me, on the cheek at first, and then he offered to show me how a grown-up girl kisses.”

“I’m glad he’s dead too,” Michael muttered against her hair. “Very glad. And then what?”