The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [252]
“Sorry,” he said, words muffled in her warmth. “I’d forgotten it entirely. I’d have brought you and Jem something, if I’d thought.”
“Like what? A piece of Isaiah Morton’s hide?” She laughed and let go, straightening up to smooth her hair. She was wearing the bracelet he’d given her on an earlier Christmas Eve; the hearthlight glinted off the silver as she lifted her arm.
“Aye, ye could cover a book in it, I suppose. Or make a pair of wee boots for Jem.” It had been a long ride, men and horses pushing past tiredness, eager for home. He felt boneless, and would have asked no better present himself than to go back to bed with her, pressed tight together in warmth, to drift toward the inviting depths of deep black sleep and amorous dreams. Duty called, though; he yawned, blinked, and heaved himself up.
“Are the geese for our supper tonight, then?” he asked, squatting to poke through the discarded pile of mud-caked garments he’d shucked earlier. He might have a clean shirt somewhere, but with the Chisholms in his cabin, and Bree and Jem temporarily lodged here in the Wemysses’ room, he had no idea where his own things were. No sense to put on something clean only to go and muck out a byre and feed horses, anyway. He’d shave and change before supper.
“Uh-huh. Mrs. Bug has half a hog barbecuing in a pit outside for tomorrow’s Christmas dinner. I shot the geese yesterday, though, and she wanted to use them fresh. We were hoping you guys would be home in time.”
He glanced at her, picking up the same undertone in her voice.
“Ye don’t care for goose?” he asked. She looked down at him, with an odd expression.
“I’ve never eaten one,” she answered. “Roger?”
“Aye?”
“I was just wondering. I wanted to ask if you knew . . .”
“If I know what?”
He was moving slowly, still wrapped in a pleasant fog of exhaustion and lovemaking. She had put her gown on, brushed her hair, and put it up neatly in a thick coil on her neck, all in the time it had taken him to disentangle his stockings and breeches. He shook the breeks absentmindedly, sending a shower of dried mud fragments pattering over the floor.
“Don’t do that! What’s the matter with you?” Flushed with sudden annoyance, she snatched the breeks away from him. She thrust open the shutters and leaned out, flapping the garment violently over the sill. She jerked the shaken breeks back in and threw them in his general direction; he dived to catch them.
“Hey. What’s the matter with you?”
“Matter? You shower dirt all over the floor and you think there’s something wrong with me?”
“Sorry. I didn’t think—”
She made a noise deep in her throat. It wasn’t very loud, but it was threatening. Obeying a deep-seated masculine reflex, he shoved a leg into his breeches. Whatever might be happening, he’d rather meet it with his trousers on. He jerked them up, talking fast.
“Look, I’m sorry I didn’t think of it being Christmas. It was—there were important things to deal with; I lost track. I’ll make it up to ye. Perhaps when we go to Cross Creek for your aunt’s wedding. I could—”
“The hell with Christmas!”
“What?” He stopped, breeks half-buttoned. It was winter dusk, and dark in the room, but even by candlelight, he could see the color rising in her face.
“The hell with Christmas, the hell with Cross Creek—and the fucking hell with you, too!” She punctuated this last with a wooden soap dish from the washstand, which whizzed past his left ear and smacked into the wall behind him.
“Now just a fucking minute!”
“Don’t you use language like that to me!”
“But you—”
“You and your ‘important things’!” Her hand tightened on the big china ewer and he tensed, ready to duck, but she thought better of it and her hand relaxed.
“I’ve spent the last month here, up to my eyeballs in laundry and baby shit and screeching women and horrible children while you’re out doing ‘important things’ and you come marching in here covered in mud and tromp all over the clean floors