Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [252]
“Penny for your thoughts,” I said, running a finger down the deep groove of his backbone. He moved just far enough to avoid my touch, and took a deep breath.
“Well, I was wondering—” he began, and then stopped. He was looking down, fiddling with a tiny flower that sprang out of the grass.
“You were wondering what?”
“What it was like…with Louis.”
I thought my heart had stopped for a moment. I knew all the blood had left my face, because I could feel the numbness of my lips as I forced the words out.
“What…it…was like?”
He looked up then, making only a passing-fair attempt at a lopsided smile.
“Well,” he said. “He is a king. You’d think it would be…different, somehow. You know…special, maybe?”
The smile was slipping, and his face had gone as white as my own. He looked down again, avoiding my stricken gaze.
“I suppose all I was wondering,” he murmured, “was…was he…was he different from me?” I saw him bite his lip as though wishing the words unsaid, but it was far too late for that.
“How in hell did you know?” I said. I felt dizzy and exposed, and rolled onto my stomach, pressing myself hard to the short turf.
He shook his head, teeth still clenched in his lower lip. When he finally released it, a deep red mark showed where he had bitten it.
“Claire,” he said softly. “Oh, Claire. You gave me all yourself from the first time, and held nothing back from me. You never did. When I asked ye for honesty, I told ye then that it isna in you to lie. When I touched ye so—” His hand moved, cupping my buttock, and I flinched, not expecting it.
“How long have I loved you?” he asked, very quietly. “A year? Since the moment I saw you. And loved your body how often—half a thousand times or more?” One finger touched me then, gently as a moth’s foot, tracing the line of arm and shoulder, gliding down my rib cage ’til I shivered at the touch and rolled away, facing him now.
“You never shrank from my touch,” he said, eyes intent on the path his finger took, dipping down to follow the curve of my breast. “Not even at the first, when ye might have done so, and no surprise to me if ye had. But you didn’t. You gave me everything from the very first time; held nothing back, denied me no part of you.”
“But now…” he said, drawing back his hand. “I thought at first it was only that you’d lost the child, and maybe were shy of me, or feeling strange after so long apart. But then I knew that wasn’t it.”
There was a very long silence, then. I could feel the steady, painful thudding of my heart against the cold ground, and hear the conversation of the wind in the pines down below. Small birds called, far away. I wished I were one. Or far away, at any rate.
“Why?” he asked softly. “Why lie to me? When I had come to you thinking I knew, anyway?”
I stared down at my hands, linked beneath my chin, and swallowed.
“If…” I began, and swallowed again. “If I told you that I had let Louis…you would have asked about it. I thought you couldn’t forget…maybe you could forgive me, but you’d never forget, and it would always be there between us.” I swallowed once more, hard. My hands were cold despite the heat, and I felt a ball of ice in my stomach. But if I was telling him the truth now, I must tell him all of it.
“If you’d asked—and you did, Jamie, you did! I would have had to talk about it, live it over, and I was afraid…” I trailed off, unable to speak, but he wasn’t going to let me off.
“Afraid of what?” he prodded.
I turned my head slightly, not meeting his eye, but enough to see his outline dark against the sun, looming through the sun-sparked curtain of my hair.
“Afraid I’d tell you why I did it,” I said softly. “Jamie…I had to, to get you freed from the Bastille—I would have done worse, if I’d had to. But then…and afterward…I half-hoped someone would tell you, that you’d find out. I was so angry, Jamie—for the duel, and the baby. And because you’d forced me to do it…to go to Louis. I wanted to do