Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [153]
“Oh, that.” He grinned. “No, I didna think you’d kill me, much as ye might like to.” He sobered quickly. “No, it was…well, those women. What I felt like with them. I didna want them, truly not…”
“Yes, I know,” I said, reaching for him, but he wasn’t stopping there. He held back from me, looking troubled.
“But the…the lusting, I suppose ye’d call it…that was…too close to what I feel sometimes for you, and it…well, it doesna seem right to me.”
He turned away, rubbing at his hair with the linen towel, so his voice came half-muffled.
“I always thought it would be a simple matter to lie wi’ a woman,” he said softly. “And yet…I want to fall on my face at your feet and worship you”—he dropped the towel and reached out, taking me by the shoulders—“and still I want to force ye to your knees before me, and hold ye there wi’ my hands tangled in your hair, and your mouth at my service…and I want both things at the same time, Sassenach.” He ran his hands up under my hair and gripped my face between them, hard.
“I dinna understand myself at all, Sassenach! Or maybe I do.” He released me and turned away. His face had long since dried, but he picked up the fallen towel and wiped the skin of his jaw with it, over and over. The stubble made a faint rasping sound against the fine linen. His voice was still quiet, barely audible from a few feet away.
“Such things—the knowledge of them, I mean—it came to me soon after…after Wentworth.” Wentworth. Where he had given his soul to save my life, and suffered the tortures of the damned in retrieving it.
“I thought at the first that Jack Randall had stolen a bit of my soul, and then I knew it was worse than that. All of it was my own, and had been all along; it was only he’d shown it to me, and made me know it for myself. That’s what he did that I canna forgive, and may his own soul rot for it!”
He lowered the towel and looked at me, face worn with the strains of the night, but eyes bright with urgency.
“Claire. To feel the small bones of your neck beneath my hands, and that fine, thin skin on your breasts and your arms…Lord, you are my wife, whom I cherish and I love wi’ all my life, and still I want to kiss ye hard enough to bruise your tender lips, and see the marks of my fingers on your skin.”
He dropped the towel. He raised his hands and held them trembling in the air before his face, then very slowly brought them down to rest on my head as though in benediction.
“I want to hold you like a kitten in my shirt, mo duinne, and still I want to spread your thighs and plow ye like a rutting bull.” His fingers tightened in my hair. “I dinna understand myself!”
I pulled my head back, freeing myself, and took a half-step backward. The blood seemed all to be on the surface of my skin, and a chill ran down my body at the brief separation.
“Do you think it’s different for me? Do you think I don’t feel the same?” I demanded. “That I don’t sometimes want to bite you hard enough to taste blood, or claw you ’til you cry out?”
I reached out slowly to touch him. The skin of his breast was damp and warm. Only the nail of my forefinger touched him, just below the nipple. Lightly, barely touching, I drew the nail upward, downward, circling round, watching the tiny nub rise hard amid the curling ruddy hairs.
The nail pressed slightly harder, sliding down, leaving a faint red streak on the fair skin of his chest. I was trembling all over by this time, but did not turn away.
“Sometimes I want to ride you like a wild horse, and bring you to the taming—did you know that? I can do it, you know I can. Drag you over the edge and drain you to a gasping husk. I can drive you to the edge of collapse and sometimes I delight in it, Jamie, I do! And yet so often I want”—my voice broke suddenly and I had to swallow hard before continuing—“I want…to hold your head against my breast and cradle you like a child and comfort you to sleep.”
My eyes were so full of tears that I couldn’t see his face clearly; couldn’t see if he wept as well. His arms went tight around me and the damp heat of him