Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [151]
I smoothed the wet spot on my sleeve, feeling the air chill through the cooling silk. I struggled to regain my former light tone.
“Or are those the scars of honorable combat, gained in defending your virtue?” Somehow the light tone didn’t quite come off. Listening to myself, I had to admit that the overall tone was really quite nasty. I was rapidly ceasing to care.
No slouch at reading tones of voice, Jamie narrowed his eyes at me and seemed about to reply. He drew in his breath, then apparently thought better of whatever he had been going to say and let it out again.
“Yes,” he said calmly. He fished about in the tub between his legs, coming up at length with the cake of soap, a roughly shaped ball of white slickness. He held it out on his palm.
“Will ye help me to wash my hair? His Highness vomited on me in the coach coming home, and I reek a bit, all things considered.”
I hesitated a moment, but accepted the olive branch, temporarily at least.
I could feel the solid curve of his skull under the thick, soapy hair, and the welt of the healed scar across the back of his head. I dug my thumbs firmly into his neck muscles, and he relaxed slightly under my hands.
The soap bubbles ran down across the wet, gleaming curves of his shoulders, and my hands followed them, spreading the slickness so that my fingers seemed to float on the surface of his skin.
He was big, I thought. Near him so much, I tended to forget his size, until I saw him suddenly from a distance, towering among smaller men, and I would be struck anew by his grace and the beauty of his body. But he sat now with his knees nearly underneath his chin, and his shoulders filled the tub from one side to the other. He leaned forward slightly to assist my ministrations, exposing the hideous scars on his back. The thick red welts of Jack Randall’s Christmas gift lay heavily over the thin white lines of the earlier floggings.
I touched the scars gently, my heart squeezed by the sight. I had seen those wounds when they were fresh, seen him driven to the edge of madness by torture and abuse. But I had healed him, and he had fought with all the power of a gallant heart to be whole once more, to come back to me. Moved by tenderness, I brushed the trailing ends of his hair aside, and bent to kiss the back of his neck.
I straightened abruptly. He felt my movement and turned his head slightly.
“What is it, Sassenach?” he asked, voice slow with drowsy contentment.
“Not a thing,” I said, staring at the dark-red blotches on the side of his neck. The nurses in the quarters at Pembroke used to conceal them with jaunty scarves tied about their necks the morning after their dates with soldiers from the nearby base. I always thought the scarves were really meant as a means of advertisement, rather than concealment.
“No, not a thing,” I said again, reaching for the ewer on the stand. Placed near the window, it was ice-cold to the touch. I stepped behind Jamie and upended it on his head.
I lifted the silk skirts of my nightdress to avoid the sudden wave that spilled over the side of the bath. He was sputtering from the cold, but too shocked yet to form any of the words I could see gathering force on his lips. I beat him to it.
“Just watched, did you?” I asked coldly. “I wouldn’t suppose you enjoyed it a bit, did you, poor thing?”
He thrust himself back in the tub with a violence that made the water slosh over the sides, splattering on the stone floor, and twisted around to look up at me.
“What d’ye want me to say?” he demanded. “Did I want to rut with them? Aye, I did! Enough to make my balls ache with not doing it. And enough to make me feel sick wi’ the thought of touching one of the sluts.”
He shoved the sopping mass of his hair out of his eyes, glaring at me.
“Is that what ye wanted