by Hope Tarr
“Champagne bubbles, aye?” Lifting each of her feet to rest on his shoulders, he sent her a doubtful look, suggesting he didn’t find the comparison at all complimentary. “Do you like it?” he asked, lowering his head once more.
Champagne or the rather amazing thing he was doing to her with the point of his tongue? “Yes. Yes, I like it very much,” she said, aware that perspiration had begun to film the backs of her knees and that a heavy liquid warmth had settled inside her thighs.
Slipping one finger inside her, then two, he asked, “And when I kiss you here, and lick you, and suckle that wee rosebud of yours ’til you cry out, is it champagne bubbles then?”
Fingers deep inside her, he drew her clitoris between his lips and gently nipped. Claudia nearly came off the bed, gasping as pleasure that skirted pain streaked through her like a bolt of lightning from the top of her spine to the tips of her suddenly curling toes.
Recovering, she managed to shift her damp head side to side on the pillow. “Non, more like fireworks, nice fireworks, exploding inside me.”
He lifted his head and beamed up at her as if fireworks met with his approval. “That explains it, then.”
“Comment…what…what does it explain, chéri?”
“How it is you can be both so scalding and so slippery wet.”
This time she lifted her head from the pillow to scowl down at him. “Monsieur, if you liken me to marsh grass one more time I am going to get up from this bed.” It was an idle threat, of course. Short of an explosion—a real one—she wasn’t going anywhere.
“Wheesht, if you maun know, I was minded of the morning dew on a rose petal.” He contrived to look wounded though his clever fingers continued to strum her.
A sharp rap outside their door had Claudia collapsing back against the pillows with a groan. “Must we answer it? Can we not pretend to be sleeping still?”
But Jack was already springing from the bed. He paused to wrap a blanket about his hips before bounding to the door. Looking back at her over his shoulder, he grinned. “I’d a’most forgot, I’ve one last wee giftie for you.”
Sitting upright, Claudia reached for her shift, balled up beneath her pillow. Shoving the wrinkled garment over her head, she said, “Jack, no more gifts. You will beggar yourself.”
But Jack’s last wee giftie, perhaps the most precious of all, proved to be a very full, very hot bath. Claudia had barely reached for her cloak to cover herself when the chambermaid, Lettie, entered with another maid. Between the two of them, they rolled in an enormous hipbath set on casters.
Too ecstatic even to be angry at the way the girls’ gazes slipped over Jack’s naked chest and lower to where his erection caused the blanket to tent, Claudia hurried over. Bending to trail a hand in the deliciously warm water, she registered the chamber door clicking closed.
Once more alone with Jack, she straightened to tug off her cape. Tossing it into a nearby chair, she whirled to face him. “You did all this, for me?” She spread her arms to indicate the tub and whirls of steam rising from its copper rim.
A shy nod served as his answer. “You’re pleased then?”
“Pleased? Pleased! Oh, Jack,” she cried, launching herself into his arms so that he lost hold of the blanket, which fell to the floor. “You are so good to me.” Rising up on her toes, she sprinkled kisses over his stubbled jaw and flushed throat.
Threading his fingers through her tangled hair, he smiled down at her. “Ah well, lass, maybe I canna give you fine things and servants to wait upon you, but a hot bath I can manage.”
He was so big and warm-hearted, so generous and kind, Claudia felt her heart overflowing with love even as her eyes threatened to overflow with bittersweet tears. “Oh, Jack,” she said, catching his hand and pressing a kiss into the callused palm. “You give me so much, chéri, everything I need, all I could possibly want and more.”
He rolled his broad shoulders, but he was pleased, she could tell. “In that case dinna stand there, woman, but get in whilst it’s hot. I’ll wash your back for you.”
“Yes, you will,” she said, already tugging the shift over her head and then off. “And then, cher Jack, I will wash yours.”
Sometime later, Claudia leaned back against Jack, the warm water sluicing their freshly scrubbed flesh. The tub was narrow and not terribly deep but at her insistence he’d joined her. Now he leaned against the hooded back, long legs bent at the knees and Claudia tucked between them.
Resting her head against his chest, she released a sigh of pure contentment, for what once she’d taken for granted now seemed the most decadent of luxuries. “In Paris I used to bathe in milk twice a week.”
He lifted a hand from the water, amusing himself by trailing a little stream from her breast to her belly. “Seems a daft thing to do.”
“It is supposed to keep the skin soft and supple,” she said, her breath catching when, beneath the water, he slid his hand along the inside of her thigh.
“In your case it must have worked.” Chin resting atop her head, he asked, “D’ye ever miss your old life?”
Claudia ran a finger down his forearm draped along the tub’s curved edge as she considered the question. A month before, the mention of Paris would have stirred a sharp pang of homesickness as well as a hornet’s nest of fierce emotions at having been forced to flee. Now, however, she found she felt only a vague sadness.
“Parts of it. The city is beautiful always but it is at night that she comes alive. But I do not miss it as I did before.” Pleased that the horrors of her last months in the city, those last weeks especially, need no longer blacken her memories of happier days, she almost added, Before I met you, but stopped before she did.
“Mayhap you’ll go back someday?”
She thought of the tumbrels bearing their shackled victims to the Place de la Revolution, the pitiless mob hurling obscenities and rotted fruit, the street dogs lapping the blood pooling in the square and despite the warm water and the heat of Jack’s big body engulfing hers, she shivered. “I do not think so.”
He lifted his head, angling it to look down at her. “I’m sorry for what happened to your maither.” He hesitated, and against her back Claudia could feel the vibration of his heart picking up pace. “My maither, she was killed, too.”
She hesitated, then admitted, “I know.”
He drew a sharp breath. “You do?”
She nodded. “Milread told me. She said that she was murdered by a highwayman and that…that you and your brother were there.”
“Aye,” he said around a sigh and settled back once more, sending a current of water shifting about them. “But I dinna remember much, anything really. ’Tis like a great black hole in my brain, a cloud covering o’er the sun. Only bits and pieces from just before and…and after. How hot the sun felt burning through the back of my shirt. The hair ribbon Mam wore—’twas the same bonny blue as the sky that day. The fly that kept landing on the bridge of my nose nay matter how many times I swatted it away. And then afterward the smell of the blood, so strong I could taste it on my tongue. And Callum beside me, arms wrapped about himself, howling like a banshee.” He drew a deep, ragged breath. Pressing a kiss onto her shoulder, he teased, “But tell me, Mistress Curiosity, how it is that you kept from making mention of it all these many months?”
Glad he wasn’t angry with her, she replied, “I was waiting for you to tell me in your own time. I can be patient when I must.”
“Can you now?” He swept her freshly washed hair over her shoulder and leaned forward to brush his mouth along her nape. “Well, I for one am growing verra impatient…impatient to finish what that wee knock on the door interrupted.”
Beneath the water Claudia could feel his arousal abutting her backside as well as her body’s answering call. The cooling bathwater suddenly seemed boiling, the throbbing inside her thighs pounding apace with Jack’s heart.
Even so, she’d never have a better opportunity to ask him the question that had been lurking on the ed
ges of her mind for the past three days and nights. “Jack?”
“Hmm?” he said, curving a hand to the side of her breast.
“Why is it you never took a lover before me?”
His hand stilled and his whole body beneath hers went tense. She was about to withdraw the question when he answered, “I told you, like you I never kent my faither.”
She ran a hand down his forearm, the wet hairs forming a brownish red queue along his pale flesh. “It is hard, I know, to grow up without a father, without a name. Though perhaps easier in Paris than here?”
In Paris bastards had been as plentiful as boats on the Seine or tulips in the gardens of the Tuileries. The few playmates she’d had growing up, all children of her mothers’ friends, hadn’t had fathers either. The circumstances of her birth had never been a subject to remark upon. But Scotland was a different world. The clan system may have died on Culloden Moor, but for most Scots, “broken” men and women though they were, familial bonds remained strong.
Jack shifted, sending water lapping the tub’s sides. “It got easier as I grew older. I was twice the size of most lads my age and after splitting a few lips and denting a skull or two, they learnt to keep their less flattering remarks about my maither to themselves. But I kent what it was to be a bastard and swore to myself and maybe God, too, that I’d no inflict such a state on an innocent bairn.”
A wiser woman would have left it at that but, being Claudia, she had to ask, “And yet you never married?”
“Ah, well, there’s no all that many faithers eager to wed their daughters to a bastard and one who’s the hangman at that.” She started to protest that he was a fine man, handsome and strong, clever and kind, when he interrupted. “And maybe, too, I wasna all that eager to risk my heart.”
They were silent for a while, the imminent journey to Linlithgow weighing heavy on their thoughts, the wash water growing tepid about them. At length Jack said, “I wish ye might stay to see the springtime.” I wish I might stay forever, Claudia thought, glad he couldn’t see her face. Her brief time with Jack had shaped her into a better, finer person; their lovemaking these past days had exceeded every fantasy she’d ever entertained. He never rushed, never hurt her as Phillippe had, but always took his time. Exploring the juncture of her neck and shoulder, the texture of an inner thigh, the folds of her woman’s flesh were journeys in themselves, not means to an end. He liked to call her his “wee witch” and said he felt the most fortunate of men to be in her thrall, but if she stayed on, it was inevitable he would tire of her. Jack might not have a dishonorable bone in his big beautiful body, but then he’d only just begun to explore his physical side. She’d yet to meet the man who could be satisfied with one woman indefinitely. Phillippe’s dalliances had drawn little feeling from her beyond a vague anxiety for the security of her future. But loving Jack as she did, she’d be hard-pressed not to scratch out her rival’s eyes. Far better to leave with an intact storehouse of beautiful, unblemished memories than to stay and court the risk of them becoming tainted with regrets.
Sounding as if his mind had traveled far, far away, he said, “Every spring I take Elf and head north to Loch Rannoch—’tis in the Highlands, in Perthshire. From the distance the crags look to be fair near the same deep blue as the water and sky, and the woods are so thick with pine that the scent clings to your clothes long after you come away. Ah, lass,” he said, his voice a bare, rough whisper against the shell of her ear, “I dinna have the words to describe the beauty of it but trust me ’tis a bonny place, a place like nowhere else on earth.”
Like nowhere else on earth. The more cynical Claudia of a few months past would have pointed out that, as he’d likely never been outside Scotland, he was hardly in a position to make that claim. But her short time with Jack had changed her and there would be no turning back even if she’d wished to. He’d worn down the sharper edges of her nature not with force but with patience and kindness, gentleness and caring. Because of him she would go to Linlithgow and to her father a kinder and better person.
But now she wanted not to go to Linlithgow and her father but to the Highlands with Jack, to his special place. And if she couldn’t do so physically, at the very least she could accompany him there in her mind.
And so twisting about to look into his face, she stroked a hand down his lean, hard cheek and said, “Tell me, chéri, what is it about the Highlands, this place, that you like best? If you could show me only one thing, what would it be?”
He answered with a fierce shake of his head that sent water flying from the ends of his loosened hair. “You’ll think me daft.”
“Tell me. Tell me, please. I want to know.” She smiled encouragement and tucked an errant lock behind his ear, the tip of which was wreathed in bright red. Cher Jack, only he could manage to make blushing seem not only manly but also erotic. Now that she knew just how far his blushes extended, she couldn’t seem to stop herself from saying and doing things calculated to coax the color to come.
“Verra well.” He picked up a lock of wet hair from her shoulder and, studying it intently, said, “The wildflowers.”
“Heather, you mean?” Could it be that of all the legendary scenery the Scottish Highlands boasted, he wanted her to stay to witness the blooming of what was at best a wildflower, at worst a weed?
He shook his head. “’Tis no in spring but in late summer and early fall that the heather blooms. But in springtime there’s Bell Heather, which is more reddish than purple and fair near the same color as…as the woman’s flesh inside your thighs. And there’s twinflower, the funnel-shaped petals as delicate and pinkish white as your skin, and an orchid called Creeping Lady’s-tresses—’tis a’most the color of your eyes, lass. Och, but just the thought of it all clears my mind.”
Throat so thick, so knotted with emotion that she could barely swallow let alone get the words out, she asked, “You would take me there, to your special place?”
“Aye, I would.” The brand of a blush was still upon his cheeks, but the eyes he lifted to hers were golden and clear. “I’d strip you bare and then I’d lay you down on the grass so that your fine black hair was spread out like a fan. And then I’d take the flowers we’d gathered and one by one I’d wreathe them about your hair and lay them upon your breasts, your belly and the black curls between your thighs. And then I’d come into you. And when we cried out our pleasure we’d do so full and free, for there’d be no innkeeper, no chambermaid, to hear us, only the water and sky and the fields and crags and the great God above.”
“Oh, Jack, I wish…” She stopped because she didn’t know what more to say, didn’t dare go on, so she took his face between her hands and brought her mouth down on his for a swift, hard kiss. Drawing back, she whispered, “Make love to me, Jack.” Make me forget I must leave you. “Let us pretend that it is spring and not winter and that the green counterpane on our bed is the green of the field and that the little vial you bought me holds not the scent of roses but of wildflowers.”
He nodded, eyes solemn, and then reached out a hand to steady her when she stood to step over the bath’s edge. Water pooled onto the knotted hearthrug at her feet but Claudia scarcely noticed for all her attention was fixed on Jack.
Like Poseidon rising from the sea’s crashing waves, he climbed from the tub to stand beside her, his swollen sex standing proudly out from the crown of dark auburn curls at his muscular thighs. Wordless, they came into each other’s arms. Hands about her waist, he lifted her high against him and then brought her to slide slowly down the length of him much like the droplets of water sliding down their bodies. Hands joined, they hurried toward the bed, where they came together in a tangle of wet limbs and sodden sheets and low, eager moans. Claudia could hardly wait to take him inside her again, to show him with her lips and tongue, with her fingers and hands, what she was too much of a coward to convey with words. And this time when her satisfaction came, it came from deep within her, the muscles clenching and releasing with such force that sh
e forgot dignity, forgot pride and threw back her head and cried out, “Je t’aime,” again and again until her throat was scraped raw.
Much later, as they dressed to go below for the midday meal, she could only be grateful that Jack didn’t ask after the words’ meaning…for they were the French for “I love you.”
With nowhere to go and no tasks to claim them, they spent most of the rest of Christmas day and then night in bed. Between lovemaking, they held each other close and talked of both everything and nothing at all. Pleasantly exhausted, more sated than she’d ever thought to be, Claudia lay with her back to Jack’s chest and her buttocks to his thighs. His arm draped across her waist, she couldn’t be sure where she ended or he began nor was she entirely sure that if she rose her legs wouldn’t fold beneath her. Not that she cared to stir. For the first time in her life she was exactly where she wanted to be.
Thinking him to be asleep, she started when, without warning, he spoke up from the darkness. “Claudia?”
“Hmm?”
“Earlier, d’ye mind how you were sorry you hadna a gift for me?”
“Yes.”
“There is one I would claim of you now. Not a gift so much as your word.” He smoothed his palm over the flat plane of her belly. “If by chance we did make a bairn together, I want your promise you’ll send for me so I can care for you, the both of you.”
Claudia felt as though the air had just been squeezed from her lungs, and the sensation had nothing to do with the fact that her body was folded into Jack’s. Neophyte to sexual congress though he was, he’d shown remarkable restraint, withdrawing each time they’d joined to release his seed outside her. Not that there was need for such caution. In the seven years she’d been with Phillippe never once had she missed her courses.
“I’m barren,” she confessed, biting her bottom lip, surprised that what had always proven to be such a convenient condition now could hurt so very much.
She hadn’t wanted Phillippe’s children but that wasn’t the same as not wanting children at all. There had been times before the Terror when she had chanced upon families picnicking on the lawn of the Tuileries, children tossing bits of bread to the ducks or floating toy ships on the miniature lake, and the yearning, the emptiness, would rise up.