The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [44]
The house was quiet, and the small room seemed removed from everything, a warm refuge in the depths of the night. He felt as though the two of them were castaways, thrown up together on some island by the storms of life, passing uncharted time by exchanging their stories.
It wasn’t the first time. When he had been wounded after Crefeld, he had been taken to Stephan’s hunting lodge at Waldesruh to recover, and once he was able to carry on a conversation that lasted more than two sentences, they had often talked like this, late into the night.
“You are feeling well?” Stephan asked suddenly, picking up his train of thought in the way that close friends sometimes do. “Your wounds—do they still pain you?”
“No,” he said. He had wounds that still did, but not physical ones. “Und dein Arm?”
Stephan laughed with pleasure at hearing him speak German and lifted the stump of his left arm a little.
“Nein. Eine Unannehmlichkeit, mehr nicht.” A nuisance, no more.
He watched Stephan as they talked, now in both languages, seeing the light move on his face, as it went from humor to seriousness and back again, expressions flickering like fire shadow over his broad Teutonic bones. Grey had been startled, as well as moved, by the depth of Stephan’s feeling for his children—though, on consideration, he shouldn’t have been. He’d long been struck by the apparent contradiction in the Teutonic character, swinging from cold logic and ferocity in battle to the deepest romanticism and sentimentality.
Passion, he supposed you’d call it. Weirdly enough, it reminded him of the Scots, who were emotionally much the same, though less disciplined about it.
Master me, he thought. Or shall I your master be?
And with that casual thought, something moved viscerally in him. Well, it had been moving for some time, in all honesty. But with that particular thought, his attraction to Stephan suddenly merged with the things he had been deliberately not thinking—or feeling—with regard to Jamie Fraser, and he found himself grow flushed, discomfited.
Did he want Stephan only because of the physical similarities between him and Fraser? They were both big men, tall and commanding, both the sort that made people turn to look at them. And to look at either of them stirred him, deeply.
It was quite different, though. Stephan was his friend, his good friend, and Jamie Fraser never would be. Fraser, though, was something that Stephan never could be.
“You are hungry?” Without waiting for an answer, Stephan rose and rummaged in a cupboard, coming out with a plate of biscuits and a pot of orange marmalade.
Grey smiled, remembering his earlier prediction regarding von Namtzen’s appetite. He took an almond biscuit from politeness rather than hunger and, with a feeling of affection, watched Stephan devour biscuits spread with marmalade.
The affection was tinged with doubt, though. There was a sense of deep closeness between them, here in the night, quite alone—no doubt at all of that. But what sort of closeness …?
Stephan’s hand brushed his, reaching for a biscuit, and von Namtzen squeezed his fingers lightly, smiling, before letting go and taking up the marmalade spoon. The touch ran up Grey’s arm and straight down his spine, raising hairs in its wake.
No, he thought, struggling for logic, for decency. I can’t.
It wouldn’t be right. Not right to use Stephan, to try to slake his physical need with Stephan, perhaps risk their friendship by trying. And yet the temptation was there, no doubt of that, either. Not only the immediate desire—which was bloody strong—but the ignoble thought that he might by such means exorcise, or at least temper, the hold Fraser had upon him. It would be far easier to face Fraser, to deal with him calmly, if the sense of physical