The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [516]
There was a bucket of well water by the stoop. Yawning and grimacing, she slid the bolt from its brackets and set it gently down—though Jem slept so soundly at night, there wasn’t much danger of waking him.
Still, she opened the door with care and stepped out, shivering slightly as the cold air twitched the shift about her legs. She bent and groped in the darkness. No bucket. Where—
She saw a flicker of movement from the corner of her eye and whirled. For an instant, she thought it was Obadiah Henderson, sitting on the bench beside her door, and her heart clenched like a fist as he stood up. Then she realized, and was in Roger’s arms before her mind could consciously sort out the details of him.
Pressed against him, speechless, she had time to notice things: the arch of his collarbone against her face, the smell of clothes gone so long worn, so long unwashed that they didn’t smell even of sweat any longer, but of the wood he walked through and the earth he slept upon, and mostly of the bitter smoke he breathed. The strength of his arm about her and the rasp of his beard on her skin. The cracked cold leather of his shoes beneath her bare toes, and the shape of the bones of his feet within them.
“It’s you,” she said, and was crying. “You’re home!”
“Aye, I’m home,” he whispered in her ear. “You’re well? Jem’s well?”
She relaxed her hold on his ribs and he smiled at her, so strange to see his smile through a growth of thick black beard, the curve of his lips familiar in the moonlight.
“We’re fine. You’re all right?” She sniffed, eyes overflowing as she looked at him. “What are you doing out here, for heaven’s sake? Why didn’t you knock?”
“Aye. I’m fine. I didn’t want to scare ye. Thought I’d sleep out here, knock in the morning. Why are ye crying?”
She realized then that he wasn’t whispering from any desire to avoid waking Jem; what voice he had was a ragged husk, warped and breathless. And yet he spoke clearly, the words unforced, without the painful hesitation he had had.
“You can talk,” she said, wiping hastily at her eyes with the back of a wrist. “I mean—better.” Once, she would have hesitated to touch his throat, fearful of his feelings, but instinct knew better than to waste the sudden intimacy of shock. The strain might come again, and they be strangers, but for a moment, for this moment in the dark, she could say anything, do anything, and she put her fingers on the warm ragged scar, touched the incision that had saved his life, a clean white line through the whiskers.
“Does it still hurt to talk?”
“It hurts,” he said, in the faint croaking rasp, and his eyes met hers, dark and soft in the moonlight. “But I can. I will—Brianna.”
She stepped back, one hand on his arm, unwilling to let go.
“Come in,” she said. “It’s cold out here.”
I HAD ANY NUMBER of objections to hearthfire, ranging from splinters under the fingernails and pitch on the hands to blisters, burns, and the sheer infuriating contrariness of the element. I would, however, say two things in its favor: it was undeniably warm, and it cast the act of love in a light of such dim beauty that all the hesitations of nakedness could safely be forgotten.
Our mingled shadows flowed together on the wall, here a limb, there the curve of back or haunch showed clean, some part of an undulating beast. Jamie’s head rose clear, a great maned creature looming over me, back arched in his extremity.
I reached up across the stretch of glowing skin and trembling muscle, brushed the sparking hairs of arms and chest, to bury my hands in the warmth of his hair and pull him down gasping to the dark hollow of my breasts.
I kept my eyes half-closed, my legs as well, unwilling to surrender his body, to give up the illusion of oneness—if illusion it was. How many more times might I hold him so, even in the