Read Online The Laird (Captive Hearts) by Grace Burrowes - Free Book Online Page A

without his wife, contrary to a previous invitation, but he’d borrowed her mount without even asking her permission first.
    Four
     
    “He says he’ll eat boiled shoe leather,” Brenna reported to Cook. “I am not sure he was jesting.”
    “Army rations,” Cook snorted. “As like to kill a man as the enemy’s fire. He’ll probably like a beefsteak now and again, if he’s been among the English. Some eggs and bacon to go with his bannocks and scones in the morning.”
    Beef was an extravagance, though not quite a luxury. “We can slaughter a cow next week,” Brenna said. “For there’s to be a celebration Friday next, and roasts will be expected. Send the fellows out after some game early in the week, and let Auld Henry know we’ll tap a barrel of the aged whisky.”
    But what to serve Michael for his meals?
    “Have ye a headache coming on, Miss Brenna?”
    Cook was an ageless fixture at the castle, a force to be reckoned with, whose scones and pastries were as a light and insubstantial as she was solid and phlegmatic. If she had a name other than Cook, Brenna had never heard it, nor had she once heard the woman raise her voice.
    “Not a headache.” A husband. The human equivalent of a skittle ball knocking the pins of Brenna’s routines in all directions. “I didn’t eat enough at breakfast.”
    Or at dinner the previous evening.
    Cook shoved away from the kitchen worktable and fetched a tray bearing a rolled sweet bread of some sort and a dish of butter.
    “Can’t have it bruited about that I let our Brenna get peckish,” Cook said, heaving herself onto the bench across from Brenna. “Master Michael was never a difficult lad. I’d go on as you did before, and let him accommodate himself to life here as best he can.”
    Brenna accepted a slice of bread with raisins, nuts, and spices spiraling out from its center. “You mean with the menus?”
    Cook scooped out a bit of butter and passed it on the knife to Brenna.
    “I mean with everything. Angus will keep him busy calling on the tenants for the next few weeks, and the old laird never bothered much with how the household went on. We kept him fed and his sheets clean, and that’s all most men fret over. That and having a decent fire somewhere in the house come winter.”
    She helped herself to a slice of bread, her big hands curiously dainty as she dabbed butter on the bread.
    “This is good,” Brenna said. “I like the walnuts, but the cinnamon comes dear.”
    Cook took a contemplative nibble. “You were naught but a girl when her ladyship turned this castle over to you, Miss Brenna. Woe unto your husband if he criticizes a good effort made on his behalf in his absence. I daresay you’ve done better with the castle than that old man has done with the land.”
    Her ladyship would be Michael’s mother, who as the daughter of an earl had been born a lady, and whose title was preserved by the household as a courtesy and a point of pride long after the lady had left the earthly realm.
    “I don’t interfere with Angus, and he doesn’t interfere with me.” Which arrangement had worked adequately for years, but Michael’s return would upset that balance as well.
    “You mustn’t fret,” Cook said, patting Brenna’s hand. “Master Michael’s a canny lad, and he knows times have been hard. You ask me, he picked a poor time to go a-soldiering. Not enough the damned English must run off every crofter in the Highlands, but they must send our boys away to make war in the King’s name too.”
    “You can’t blame the English for a crofter deciding life in the New World holds more promise than an endless succession of Highland winters.” The Corsican was also not England’s fault—or Michael’s fault.
    Cook took another bite of her bread, and in the very way she chewed, conveyed a respectful difference of opinion with her employer.
    “I’ll keep to the menus we agreed upon, and Master Michael can let us know how good Scottish fare suits