Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [451]
I knelt down and slid under the blanket, the fur soft against my skin. Without stopping to think too much, I rolled to face him, pressing my nakedness against him, face buried in his shoulder.
“Jamie,” I whispered to him. “I’m cold. Come and warm me. Please?”
He turned to me, wordless, with a quiet ferocity that I might have thought the hunger of desire long stifled—but knew now for simple desperation. I sought no pleasure for myself; I wanted only to give him comfort. But opening to him, urging him, some deep wellspring opened too, and I cleaved to him in a sudden need as blind and desperate as his own.
We clung tight together, shuddering, heads buried in each other’s hair, unable to look at each other, unable to let go. Slowly, as the spasms died away, I became aware of things outside our own small mortal coil, and realized that we lay in the midst of strangers, naked and helpless, shielded only by darkness.
And yet we were alone, completely. We had the privacy of Babel; there was a conversation going on at the far end of the longhouse, but its words held no meaning. It might as well have been the hum of bees.
Smoke from the banked fire wavered up outside the sanctuary of our bed, fragrant and insubstantial as incense. It was dark as a confessional inside the cubicle; I could see no more of Jamie than the faint curve of light that rimmed his shoulder, a transient gleam in the locks of his hair.
“Jamie, I’m sorry,” I said softly. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Who else?” he said, with some bleakness.
“Everyone. No one. Stephen Bonnet, himself. But not you.”
“Bonnet?” His voice was blank with surprise. “What has he to do with it?”
“Well … everything,” I said, taken aback. “Er … doesn’t he?”
He rolled halfway off me, brushing hair out of his face.
“Stephen Bonnet is a wicked creature,” he said precisely, “and I shall kill him at the first opportunity I have. But I dinna see how I can blame him for my own failings as a man.”
“What on earth are you talking about? What failings?”
He didn’t answer right away, but bent his head, a humped shadow in the dark. His legs were still entangled with mine; I could feel the tension of his body, knotted in his joints, rigid in the hollows of his thighs.
“I hadna thought ever to be so jealous of a dead man,” he whispered at last. “I shouldna have thought it possible.”
“Of a dead man?” My own voice rose slightly, with astonishment, as it finally dawned on me. “Of Frank?”
He lay still, half on top of me. His hand touched the bones of my face, hesitant.
“Who else? I have been worm-eaten wi’ it, all these days of riding. I see his face in my mind, waking and sleeping. Ye did say he looked like Jack Randall, no?”
I gathered him tight against myself, pressing his head down so that his ear was near my mouth. Thank God I hadn’t mentioned the ring to him—but had my face, my traitorous, transparent face, somehow given away that I thought of it?
“How?” I whispered to him, squeezing hard. “How could you think of such a thing?”
He broke loose, rising on one elbow, his hair falling down over my face in a mass of flaming shadows, the firelight sparking gold and crimson through it.
“How could I not?” he demanded. “Ye heard her, Claire; ye ken well what she said to me!”
“Brianna?”
“She said she would gladly see me in hell, and sell her own soul to have her father back—her real father.” He swallowed; I heard the sound of it, above the murmur of distant voices.
“I keep thinking he would not have made such a mistake. He would have trusted her; he would have known that she … I keep thinking that Frank Randall was a better man than I am. She thinks so.” His hand faltered, then settled on my shoulder, squeezing tight. “I thought … perhaps ye felt the same, Sassenach.”
“Fool,” I whispered, and didn’t mean him. I ran my hands down the long slope of his back, digging my fingers into the firmness of his buttocks. “Wee idiot. Come here.”
He dropped