The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [345]
“Come down,” he said softly.
I hesitated, looking back over my shoulder. A ladylike medley of snores came from the room I had just left. Two slaves were sleeping on the floor in the hall, curled under blankets, but neither moved.
I looked back. He didn’t speak again, but lifted two fingers, beckoning. The scent of smoke and whisky filled the stairwell.
The blood was thrumming in my ears—and elsewhere. My face was flushed, my hair damp at the temples and on my neck; cool air rose up under my shift, touched the patch of dampness at the base of my spine, the film of slickness where my thighs brushed together.
I came down slowly, cautiously, trying not to let the stairs creak under my bare feet. It occurred to me belatedly that this was ridiculous; the slaves thundered up and down these stairs hundreds of times a day. Even so, I felt the need for secrecy; the house was still asleep, and the stairwell was filled with a gray light that seemed as fragile as smoked glass. A sudden sound, a move too quick, and something might explode under my feet, with a flash like a lightbulb popping.
His eyes stayed fixed on me, dark triangles in the paler dark of his face. He stared at me with a fierce intensity, as though to drag me down the stairs by the force of his gaze alone.
I stopped, one step from the bottom. There was no blood on his clothes; thank God for that.
It wasn’t that I’d never seen Jamie drunk before. No wonder he hadn’t come up the stairs to me. I thought he was very drunk now, and yet there was something quite different in this. He stood rock-solid, legs set wide, betrayed only by a certain deliberation in the way he moved his head to look at me.
“What—” I began, whispering.
“Come here,” he said. His voice was low, rough with sleeplessness and whisky.
I hadn’t time either to reply or to acquiesce; he seized my arm and pulled me toward him, then swept me off the last step, crushed me to him, and kissed me. It was a most disconcerting kiss—as though his mouth knew mine all too well, and would compel my pleasure, regardless of my desires.
His hair smelled of a long night’s smoke—tobacco and woodsmoke and the smoke of beeswax candles. He tasted so strongly of whisky that I felt light-headed, as though the alcohol in his blood were seeping into mine through our skins where they touched, through the sealed membranes of our mouths. Something else was seeping into me from him, as well—a sense of overpowering lust, as blind as it was dangerous.
I wanted to remonstrate with him, to push him away. Then I decided that I didn’t, but it wouldn’t have made any difference if I had. He didn’t mean to let go.
One big hand was gripping the back of my neck, warm and hard on my skin, and I thought of a stallion’s teeth closing on the neck of the mare he mounts, and shivered from scalp to sole. His thumb accidentally pressed the great artery under my jaw; darkness swam behind my eyes and my knees began to buckle. He felt it and let go, easing me back so that I was almost lying prone upon the stairs, his weight half on me and his hands seeking.
I was naked under my shift, and the thin muslin might as well not have been there.
The hard edge of a stair pressed into my back, and it occurred to me, in the dim way that things do when you’re drunk, that he was just about to take me right there on the stairs, and devil take anyone who might see.
I got my mouth free of his long enough to gasp, “Not here!” in his ear. That seemed to bring him momentarily to his senses; he lifted his head, blinking like one roused from a nightmare, eyes wide and blind. Then he nodded once, jerkily, and rose, pulling me to my feet with him.
The maids’ cloaks were hanging by the door; he seized one and wrapped it round me, then picked me up bodily and