“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’ll have you.”
“I think …” he began, then stopped. He fumbled loose the buckle of his kilt, but then looked up at me, bunching his hands at his sides. He spoke with difficulty, controlling something so powerful that his hands shook with the effort. “I’ll not … I can’t … Claire, I canna be gentle about it.”
I had time only to nod once, in acknowledgment or permission, before he bore me back before him, his weight pinning me to the bed.
He did not pause to undress further. I could smell the road dust in his shirt, and taste the sun and sweat of travel on his skin. He held me, arms outstretched, wrists pinioned. One hand brushed the wall, and I felt the tiny scrape of one wedding ring chiming against the stone. One ring for each hand, one silver, one gold. And the thin metal suddenly heavy as the bonds of matrimony, as though the rings were tiny shackles, fastening me spread-eagled to the bed, stretched forever between two poles, held in bondage like Prometheus on his lonely rock, divided love the vulture that tore at my heart.
He spread my thighs with his knee and sheathed himself to the root in a single thrust that made me gasp. He made a sound that was almost a groan, and gripped me tighter.
“You’re mine, mo duinne,” he said softly, pressing himself into my depths. “Mine alone, now and forever. Mine, whether ye will it or no.” I pulled against his grip, and sucked in my breath with a faint “ah” as he pressed even deeper.
“Aye, I mean to use ye hard, my Sassenach,” he whispered. “I want to own you, to possess you, body and soul.” I struggled slightly and he pressed me down, hammering me, a solid, inexorable pounding that reached my womb with each stroke. “I mean to make ye call me ‘Master,’ Sassenach.” His soft voice was a threat of revenge for the agonies of the last minutes. “I mean to make you mine.”
I quivered and moaned then, my flesh clutching in spasms at the invading, battering presence. The movement went on, disregarding, on and on for minutes, striking me over and over with an impact on the edge between pleasure and pain. I felt dissolved, as though I existed only at the point of the assault, being forced to the edge of some total surrender.
“No!” I gasped. “Stop, please, you’re hurting me!” Beads of sweat ran down his face and dropped on the pillow and on my breasts. Our flesh met now with the smack of a blow that was fast crossing the edge into pain. My thighs were bruising with the repeated impact, and my wrists felt as though they would break, but his grip was inexorable.
“Aye, beg me for mercy, Sassenach. Ye shallna have it, though; not yet.” His breath came hot and fast, but he showed no signs of tiring. My entire body convulsed, legs rising to wrap around him, seeking to contain the sensation.
I could feel the jolt of each stroke deep in my belly, and cringed from it, even as my hips rose traitorously to welcome it. He felt my response, and redoubled his assault, pressing now on my shoulders to keep me pinned under him.
There was no beginning and no end to my response, only a continuous shudder that rose to a peak with each thrust. The hammering was a question, repeated over and over in my flesh, demanding my answer. He pushed my legs flat again, and bore me down past pain and into pure sensation, over the edge of surrender.
“Yes!” I cried. “Oh God, Jamie, yes!” He gripped my hair and forced my head back to meet his eyes, glowing with furious triumph.
“Aye, Sassenach,” he muttered, answering my movements rather than my words. “Ride ye I will!” His hands dropped to my breasts, squeezing and stroking, then slid down my sides. His whole weight rested on me now as he cupped and raised me for still greater penetration. I screamed then and he stopped my mouth with his, not a kiss, but another attack, forcing my mouth open, bruising my lips and rasping my face with bearded stubble. He thrust harder and faster, as though he would force my soul as he forced my body. In body or soul, somewhere he struck a spark, and an answering fury of passion and need sprang from the ashes of surrender. I arched upward to meet him, blow for blow. I bit his lip and tasted blood.
I felt his teeth then on my neck and dug my nails into his back. I raked him from nape to buttocks, spurring him to rear and scream in his turn. We savaged each other in desperate need, biting and clawing, trying to draw blood, trying each to pull the other into ourselves, tearing each other’s flesh in the consuming desire to be one. My cry mingled with his, and we lost ourselves finally in each other in that last moment of dissolution and completion.
* * *
I returned only slowly to myself, lying half on Jamie’s breast, sweated bodies still glued together, thigh to thigh. He breathed heavily, eyes closed. I could hear his heart under my ear, beating with the preternaturally slow and powerful rhythm that follows climax.
He felt me wake, and drew me close, as though to preserve a moment longer the union we had reached in those last seconds of our perilous joining. I curled beside him, putting my arms around him.
He opened his eyes then and sighed, the long mouth curling in a faint smile as his glance met mine. I raised my brows in silent question.
“Oh, aye, Sassenach,” he answered a bit ruefully. “I am your master … and you’re mine. Seems I canna possess your soul without losing my own.” He turned me on my side and curled his body around me. The room was cooling in the evening breeze from the window, and he reached to draw a quilt over us. You’re too quick by half, lad, I thought drowsily to myself. Frank never did find that out. I fell asleep with his arms locked hard around me and his breathing warm in my ear.
* * *
I was lame and sore in every muscle when I woke next morning. I shuffled to the privy closet, then to the wash basin. My innards felt like churned butter. It felt as though I had been beaten with a blunt object, I reflected, then thought that that was very near the truth. The blunt object in question was visible as I came back to bed, looking now relatively harmless. Its possessor woke as I sat down next to him, and examined me with something that looked very much like male smugness.
“Looks as though it was a hard ride, Sassenach,” he said, lightly touching a blue bruise on my inner thigh. “A bit saddle-sore, are ye?”
I narrowed my eyes and traced a deep bite-mark on his shoulder with my finger.
“You look a bit ragged around the edges yourself, my lad.”
“Ah, weel,” he said in broad Scots, “if ye bed wi’ a vixen, ye must expect to get bit.” He reached up and grasped me behind the neck, pulling me down to him. “Come here to me, vixen. Bite me some more.”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” I said, pulling back. “I can’t possibly; I’m too sore.”
James Fraser was not a man to take no for an answer.
“I’ll be verra gentle,” he wheedled, dragging me inexorably under the quilt. And he was gentle, as only big men can be, cradling me like a quail’s egg, paying me court with a humble patience that I recognized as reparation—and a gentle insistence that I knew was a continuation of the lesson so brutally begun the night before. Gentle he would be, denied he would not.
He shook in my arms at his own finish, shuddering with the effort not to move, not to hurt me by thrusting, letting the moment shatter him as it would.
Afterward, still joined, he traced the fading bruises his fingers had left on my shoulders by the roadside two days before.
“I’m sorry for those, mo duinne,” he said, gently kissing each one. “I was in a rare temper when I did it, but it’s no excuse. It’s shameful to hurt a woman, in a rage or no. I’ll not do it again.”
I laughed a bit ironically. “You’re apologizing for those? What about the rest? I’m a mass of bruises, from head to toe!”
“Och?” He drew back to look me over judiciously. “Well now, these I’ve apologized for,” touching my shoulder, “those,” slapping my rear lightly, “ye deserved, and I’ll not say I’m sorry for it, because I’m not.”
“As for these,” he said, stroking my thigh, “I’ll not apologize for that, either. Ye paid me full measure already.” He rubbed his sh
oulder, grimacing. “Ye drew blood in at least two places, Sassenach, and my back stings like holy hell.”
“Well, bed with a vixen …” I said, grinning. “You won’t get an apology for that.” He laughed in response and pulled me on top of him.
“I didna say I wanted an apology, did I? If I recall aright, what I said was ‘Bite me again.’ ”
PART FOUR
A Whiff of Brimstone
24
BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS
The hubbub occasioned by our sudden arrival and the announcement of our marriage was overshadowed almost at once by an event of greater importance.
We were sitting at supper in the great Hall the next day, accepting the toasts and good wishes being offered in our honor.
“Buidheachas, mo caraid.” Jamie bowed gracefully to the latest toaster, and sat down amid the increasingly sporadic applause. The wooden bench shook under his weight, and he closed his eyes briefly.
“Getting a bit much for you?” I whispered. He had borne the brunt of the toasting, matching each cup drained on our behalf, while I had so far escaped with no more than token sips, accompanied by bright smiles at the incomprehensible Gaelic toasts.
He opened his eyes and looked down at me, smiling himself.
“Am I drunk, do ye mean? Nay, I could drink this stuff all night.”
“You practically have,” I said, peering at the array of empty wine bottles and stone ale-jars lined up on the board in front of us. “It’s getting rather late.” The candles on Colum’s table burned low in their holders, and the guttered wax glowed gold, the light marking the MacKenzie brothers with odd patches of shadow and glinting flesh as they leaned together, talking in low voices. They could have joined the company of carved gnomic heads that edged the huge fireplace, and I wondered how many of those caricatured figures had in fact been drawn from the patronizing features of earlier MacKenzie lairds—perhaps by a carver with a sense of humor … or a strong family connection.
Jamie stretched slightly in his seat, grimacing in mild discomfort.
“On the other hand,” he said, “my bladder’s going to burst in another moment or two. I’ll be back shortly.” He put his hands on the bench and hopped nimbly up and over it, disappearing through the lower archway.
I turned my attention to my other side, where Geillis Duncan sat, demurely sipping at a silver cup of ale. Her husband, Arthur, sat at the next table with Colum, as befitted the procurator fiscal of the district, but Geilie had insisted on sitting next to me, saying that she had no wish to be wearied by hearing man-talk all through supper.
Arthur’s deepset eyes were half-closed, blue-pouched and sunk with wine and fatigue. He leaned heavily on his forearms, face slack, ignoring the conversation of the MacKenzies next to him. While the light threw the sharp-cut features of the laird and his brother into a high relief, it merely made Arthur Duncan look fat and ill.
“Your husband isn’t looking very well,” I observed. “Has his stomach trouble got worse?” The symptoms were rather puzzling; not like ulcer, I thought, nor cancer—not with that much flesh still on his bones—perhaps just chronic gastritis, as Geilie insisted.
She cast the briefest of glances at her spouse before turning back to me with a shrug.
“Oh, he’s well enough,” she said. “No worse, at any rate. But what about your husband?”
“Er, what about him?” I replied cautiously.
She dug me familiarly in the ribs with a rather sharp elbow, and I realized that there were a fair number of bottles at her end of the table as well.
“Well, what d’ye think? Does he look as nice out of his sark as he does in it?”
“Um …” I groped for an answer, as she craned her neck toward the entryway.
“And you claiming you didna care a bit for him! Cleverboots. Half the girls in the castle would like to tear your hair out by the roots—I’d be careful what I ate, if I were you.”
“What I eat?” I looked down in bafflement at the wooden platter before me, empty but for a smear of grease and a forlorn boiled onion.
“Poison,” she hissed dramatically in my ear, along with a considerable wafting of brandy fumes.
“Nonsense,” I said, rather coldly, drawing away from her. “No one would want to poison me simply because I … well, because …” I was floundering a bit, and it occurred to me that I might have had a few sips more than I had realized.
“Now, really, Geilie. This marriage … I didn’t plan it, you know. I didn’t want it!” No lie there. “It was merely a … sort of … necessary business arrangement,” I said, hoping the candlelight hid my blushes.
“Ha,” she said cynically. “I ken the look of a lass that’s been well bedded.” She glanced toward the archway where Jamie had disappeared. “And damned if I think those are midge bites on the laddie’s neck, either.” She raised one silver brow at me. “If it was a business arrangement, I’d say ye got your money’s worth.”
She leaned close again.
“Is it true?” she whispered. “About the thumbs?”
“Thumbs? Geilie, what in God’s name are you babbling about?”
She looked down her small, straight nose at me, frowning in concentration. The beautiful grey eyes were slightly unfocused, and I hoped she wouldn’t fall over.
“Surely ye know that? Everyone knows! A man’s thumbs tell ye the size of his cock. Great toes, too, of course,” she added judiciously, “but those are harder to judge, usually, what wi’ the shoon and all. Yon wee fox-cub,” she nodded toward the archway, where Jamie had just reappeared, “he could cup a good-sized marrow in those hands of his. Or a good-sized arse, hm?” she added, nudging me once more.
“Geillis Duncan, will … you … shut … up!” I hissed, face flaming. “Someone will hear you!”
“Oh, no one who—” she began, but stopped, staring. Jamie had passed right by our table, as though he didn’t see us. His face was pale, and his lips set firmly, as though bent on some unpleasant duty.
“Whatever ails him?” Geilie asked. “He looks like Arthur after he’s eaten raw turnips.”
“I don’t know.” I pushed back the bench, hesitating. He was heading for Colum’s table. Should I follow him? Plainly something had happened.
Geilie, peering back down the room, suddenly tugged at my sleeve, pointing in the direction from which Jamie had appeared.
A man stood just within the archway, hesitating even as I was. His clothes were stained with mud and dust; a traveler of some sort. A messenger. And whatever the message, he had passed it on to Jamie, who was even now bending to whisper it in Colum’s ear.
No, not Colum. Dougal. The red head bent low between the two dark ones, the broad handsome features of the three faces taking on an unearthly similarity in the light of the dying candles. And as I watched, I realized that the similarity was due not so much to the inheritance of bone and sinew that they shared, but to the expression of shocked grief that they now held in common.
Geilie’s hand was digging into the flesh of my forearm.
“Bad news,” she said, unnecessarily.
* * *
“Twenty-four years,” I said softly. “It seems a long time to be married.”
“Aye, it does,” Jamie agreed. A warm wind stirred the branches of the tree above us, lifting the hair from my shoulders to tickle my face. “Longer than I’ve been alive.”
I glanced at him leaning on the paddock fence, all lanky grace and strong bones. I tended to forget how young he really was; he seemed so self-assured and capable.
“Still,” he said, flicking a straw into the churned mud of the paddock, “I doubt Dougal spent more than three years of that with her. He was generally here, ye ken, at the Castle—or here and there about the lands, doing Colum’s business for him.”
Dougal’s wife, Maura, had died at their estate of Beannachd. A sudden fever. Dougal himself had left at dawn, in company with Ned Gowan and the messenger who had brought the news the night before, to a
rrange the funeral and dispose of his wife’s property.
“Not a close marriage, then?” I asked curiously.
Jamie shrugged.
“As close as most, I should reckon. She had the children and the running of the house to keep her busy; I doubt she missed him greatly, though she seemed glad enough to see him when he came home.”
“That’s right, you lived with them for a time, didn’t you?” I was quiet, thinking. I wondered whether this was Jamie’s idea of marriage; separate lives, joining only infrequently for the breeding of children. Yet, from the little he had said, his own parents’ marriage had been a close and loving one.
With that uncanny trick of reading my thoughts, he said, “It was different wi’ my own folk, ye ken. Dougal’s was an arranged marriage, like Colum’s and a matter more of lands and business than the wanting of each other. But my parents—well, they wed for love, against the wishes of both families, and so we were … not cut off, exactly; but more by ourselves at Lallybroch. My parents didna go often to visit relatives or do business outside, and so I think they turned more to each other than husband and wife usually do.”
He laid a hand low on my back and urged me closer to him. He bent his head and brushed his lips across the top of my ear.
“It was an arrangement between us,” he said softly. “Still, I would hope … perhaps one day—” He broke off awkwardly, with a crooked smile and a gesture of dismissal.
Not wanting to encourage him in that direction, I smiled back as neutrally as I could, and turned toward the paddock. I could feel him there beside me, not quite touching, big hands gripping the top rail of the fence. I gripped the rail myself, to keep from taking his hand. I wanted more than anything to turn to him, offer him comfort, assure him with body and words that what lay between us was more than a business arrangement. It was the truth of it that stopped me.
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