Free The Laird (Captive Hearts) by Grace Burrowes Page A

of fowl, more of the cheese Brenna was so proud of, rye bread, and ale—but Michael could not appreciate it.
    “The food doesn’t agree with you?” Brenna’s question was gratingly casual.
    The company did not agree with him, but he’d asked for this picnic, so he’d make use of it. “The food is fine. Would you like to walk for a bit?”
    “Honestly? No. I’m of a mind to take your measurements.”
    “I’m not of a mind to have them taken.” Though taking his measurements would mean Brenna had to touch him, or nearly touch him. She had consumed her food at the very edge of their shared blanket, and let the murmuring of the nearby River Dee serve as their conversation. Any passerby might have thought from their lack of talk that they’d been married for years.
    Which they had, goddammit.
    She hiked her knees and wrapped her arms around them, putting Michael in mind of a citadel raising its drawbridge and dropping its portcullis.
    “What was it like, after I left?” He didn’t want to know, but he suspected this was part of the general apology he owed her.
    “So we’re to talk?”
    “Married couples often do.” They often wrote letters to each other when separated too. She spared him that observation.
    “When you left…” She stared at the river, as if trying to recall the second line of an obscure ballad. “It was a relief, in a way.”
    “Like it was a relief to leave my home and family and everything I knew?”
    Some fool who’d had too much ale in the village had said those words, some fool who could not abide the sadness he’d seen in Cook’s old eyes, or the careful lack of emotion in Brenna’s.
    Her smile now was kind . Possibly forgiving, even.
    “Your da explained it to me. He said young men are restless. They need to at least see the world even if they can’t conquer it, and a wife is sure proof a fellow will never get his chance at that big, wide world.”
    “I wish somebody had explained it to me.”
    “I think you figured it out. What was it like, in Spain?”
    She would be hurt if he brushed her question aside, and yet, he was reluctant to answer it.
    “First came Portugal, then Spain, and then France. They were successive circles of hell on one level, and yet, the land was beautiful, and there’s much about war that makes a man feel alive.” For a while, and then it made him wish he were dead, and then it made him dead inside if not in the absolute sense. “Cook says you took over the running of the castle from the time I left.”
    She brushed her hand over the grass. “I needed something to do, and the castle needed running. Your father adjusted, eventually, to your mother’s being gone for most of the year, but I don’t think he ever got used to being without your sisters.”
    “Neither did I.”
    Brenna stroked her hand over the grass again, and because Michael did not want to behold her patient green eyes, he lay back on the tartan blanket and folded his hands behind his head.
    “They were too little to be sent away, and Erin was not well.”
    He stared up at a brilliant blue sky full of puffy white clouds, not very different from the sky over Spain, Portugal, France, or Ireland, and yet, a feeling like homesickness swamped him.
    Brenna stirred on the blanket several feet away.
    “Erin rallied a bit, in Ireland. The softer weather probably gave her a few more good years. Your da wrote to them often.”
    While Michael had not written often at all.
    “I didn’t want them to go. A fellow expects to see his sisters married off, eventually, but they were children, and in a sense, I felt responsible for them. I feared I would never see Erin again, and I was right.”
    He closed his eyes, the sun being too bright, and the sound of the river too soothing.
    “Was that part of what sent you off to the regimental offices with your funds in hand? Your mother and sisters were leaving, and your father wasn’t stopping them?”
    “Aye.” Though nobody had said as much