She hadn’t had a choice about that, though. Her jaw tightened, and her hand splayed flat against her belly. She hadn’t had a choice about a lot of things. But she had made one choice—to keep her child—and now she’d have to live with the consequences of it.
She was beginning to shiver. Abruptly she turned away from the storm, and went to the fire. A small tongue of flame played along the blackened back of a red-crackled log, the heart of the embers glowing gold and white.
She sank down on the hearth rug, closing her eyes as the heat of the fire sent waves of comfort over her cold skin, caressing as the stroke of a hand. This time she kept all thought of Bonnet at bay, refusing him entrance to her mind, concentrating fiercely instead on the few precious memories she had of Roger.
… put your hand on my heart. Tell me if it stops … She could hear him, half breathless, half choked between laughter and passion.
How the hell do you know that? The rough feel of curly hairs under her palms, the smooth hard curves of his shoulders, the throb of the pulse in the side of his throat when she’d pulled him down to her and put her mouth on him, wanting in her urgency to bite him, to taste him, to breathe the salt and dust of his skin.
The dark and secret places of him, that she knew only by feel, recalled as soft weight, rolling and vulnerable in her palm, a complexity of curve and depth that yielded reluctantly to her probing fingertips (Oh, God, don’t stop, but careful, aye? Oh!), the strange wrinkled silk that grew taut and smooth, filled her hand rising, silent and incredible as the stalk of a night-blooming flower that opens as you watch.
His gentleness as he touched her (Christ, I wish I could see your face, to know how it is for you, am I doing well by ye. Is it good, just here? Tell me, Bree, talk to me …), as she explored him, and then the moment when she had pushed him too far, her mouth on his nipple. She felt again the sudden amazing surge of power in him, as he lost all sense of restraint and seized her, lifting her as though she weighed nothing, rolled her back against the straw and took her, half hesitating as he remembered her freshly riven flesh, then answering the demand of her nails in his back to come to her fiercely, forcing her past the fear of impalement, into acceptance, and welcome, and finally into a frenzy that matched his own, rupturing the last membrane of reticence between them, joining them forever in a flood of sweat and musk and blood and semen.
She moaned out loud, shuddered and lay still, too weak even to move her hand away. Her heart was thumping, very slowly. Her belly was tight as a drum, the last of the spasms slowly relaxing its grip on her swollen womb. One half of her body blazed with heat, the other was cool and dark.
After a moment she rolled onto her hands and knees, and crawled away from the fire. She hauled herself onto the bed like a wounded beast, and lay half stunned, ignoring the currents of heat and cold that played over her.
At last she stirred, pulled a single quilt over her, and lay staring at the wall, hands crossed in protection above her baby. Yes, it was too late. Sensation and yearning must be put aside, along with love and anger. She must resist the mindless pull of both body and emotion. There were decisions to be made.
* * *
It took three days to convince herself of the virtue of her plan, to overcome her own scruples, and, at last, to find a suitable time and place in which to catch him alone. But she was thorough and she was patient; she had all the time in the world—nearly three months of it.
On Tuesday, her opportunity came at last. Jocasta was closeted in her study with Duncan Innes and the account books, Ulysses—with a brief, inscrutable look at the closed door of the study—had gone to the kitchen to superintend the preparations for yet another lavish dinner in his Lordship’s honor, and she had gotten rid of Phaedre by sending her on horseback to Barra Meadows to fetch a book Jenny Ban Campbell had promised her.
With a fresh blue camlet gown that matched her eyes, and a heart beating in her chest like a trip-hammer, she set out to stalk her victim. She found him in the library, reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius by the French windows, the morning sun streaming over his shoulder making his smooth fair hair gleam like buttered toffee.
He looked up from his book when she came in—a hippopotamus could have made a more graceful entrance, she thought crossly, catching her skirt on the corner of a bric-a-brac table in her nervousness—then graciously laid it aside, springing to his feet to bow over her hand.
“No, I don’t want to sit down, thank you.” She shook her head at the seat he was offering her. “I wondered—that is, I thought I’d go for a walk. Would you like to come with me?”
There was frost on the lower panes of the French door, a stiff breeze whining past the house, and soft chairs, brandy, and blazing fire within. But Lord John was a gentleman.
“There is nothing I should like better,” he gallantly assured her, and abandoned Marcus Aurelius without a backward glance.
It was a bright day, but very cold. Muffled in thick cloaks, they turned into the kitchen garden, where the high walls gave them some shelter from the wind. They exchanged small, breathless comments on the brightness of the day, assured each other that they were not cold at all, and came through a small archway into the brick-walled herbary. Brianna glanced around them; they were quite alone, and she would be able to see anyone coming along the walk. Best not waste time, then.
“I have a proposal to make to you,” she said.
“I am sure any notion of yours must necessarily be delightful, my dear,” he said, smiling slightly.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” she said, and took a deep breath. “But here goes. I want you to marry me.”
He kept smiling, evidently waiting for the punch line.
“I mean it,” she said.
The smile didn’t altogether go away, but it altered. She wasn’t sure whether he was dismayed at her gaucherie or just trying not to laugh, but she suspected the latter.
“I don’t want any of your money,” she assured him. “I’ll sign a paper saying so. And you don’t need to live with me, either, though it’s probably a good idea for me to go to Virginia with you, at least for a little while. As for what I could do for you …” She hesitated, knowing that hers was the weaker side of the bargain. “I’m strong, but that doesn’t mean much to you, since you have servants. I’m a good manager, though—I can keep accounts, and I think I know how to run a farm. I do know how to build things. I could manage your property in Virginia while you were in England. And … you have a young son, don’t you? I’ll look after him; I’d be a good mother to him.”
Lord John had stopped dead in the path during this speech. Now he leaned slowly back against the brick wall, casting his eyes up in a silent prayer for understanding.
“Dear God in heaven,” he said. “That I should live to hear an offer like that!” Then he lowered his head and gave her a direct and piercing look.
“Are you out of your mind?”
“No,” she said, with an attempt at keeping her own composure. “It’s a perfectly reasonable suggestion.”
“I have heard,” he said, rather cautiously, with an eye to her belly, “that women in an expectant condition are somewhat … excitable, in consequence of their state. I confess, though, that my experience is distressingly limited with respect to … that is—perhaps I should send for Dr. Fentiman?”
She drew herself up to her full height, put a hand on the wall and leaned toward him, deliberately looking down on him, menacing him with her size.
“No, you should not,” she said, in measured tones. “Listen to me, Lord John. I’m not crazy, I’m not frivolous, and I don’t mean it to be an inconvenience to you in any way—but I’m dead serious.”
The cold had reddened his fair skin, and there was a drop of moisture glistening on the tip of his nose. He wiped it on a fold of his cloak, eyeing her with something between interest and horror. At least he’d stopped laughing.
She felt mildly sick, but she’d have to do it. She’d hoped it could be
avoided, but there seemed no other way.
“If you don’t agree to marry me,” she said, “I’ll expose you.”
“You’ll do what?” His usual mask of urbanity had disappeared, leaving puzzlement and the beginnings of wariness in its stead.
She was wearing woolen mittens, but her fingers felt frozen. So did everything else, except the warm lump of her slumbering child.
“I know what you were doing—the other night, at the slave quarters. I’ll tell everyone; my aunt, Mr. Campbell, the sheriff. I’ll write letters,” she said, her lips feeling numb even as she uttered the ridiculous threat. “To the Governor, and the Governor of Virginia. They put p-pederasts in the pillory here; Mr. Campbell told me so.”
A frown drew his brows together; they were so fair that they scarcely showed against his skin when he stood in strong light. They reminded her of Lizzie’s.
“Stop looming over me, if you please.”
He took hold of her wrist and pulled it down with a force that surprised her. He was small but much stronger than she had supposed, and for the first time, she was slightly afraid of what she was doing.
He took her firmly by the elbow and propelled her into motion, away from the house. The thought struck her that perhaps he meant to take her down to the river, out of sight, and try to drown her. She thought it unlikely, but still resisted the direction of his urging, and turned back into the square-laid paths of the kitchen garden instead.
He made no demur, but went with her, though it meant walking head-on into the wind. He didn’t speak until they had turned once more, and reached a sheltered corner by the onion bed.
“I am halfway tempted to submit to your outrageous proposal,” he said at last, the corner of his mouth twitching—whether with fury or amusement, she couldn’t tell.
“It would certainly please your aunt. It would outrage your mother. And it would teach you to play with fire, I do assure you.” She caught a gleam in his eye that gave her a sudden surge of doubt about her conclusions as to his preferences. She drew back from him a bit.
“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that—that you might … men and women both, I mean.”
“I was married,” he pointed out, with some sarcasm.
“Yes, but I thought that was probably the same kind of thing I’m suggesting now—just a formal arrangement, I mean. That’s what made me think of it in the first place, once I realized that you—” She broke off with an impatient gesture. “Are you telling me that you do like to go to bed with women?”
He raised one eyebrow.
“Would that make a substantial difference to your plans?”
“Well …” she said uncertainly. “Yes. Yes, it would. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have suggested it.”
“ ‘Suggested,’ she says,” he muttered. “Public denunciation? The pillory? Suggested?”
The blood burned so hotly in her cheeks, she was surprised not to see the cold air turn to steam around her face.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wouldn’t have done it. You have to believe me, I really wouldn’t have said a word to anybody. It’s only when you laughed, I thought—anyway, it doesn’t matter. If you did want to sleep with me, I couldn’t marry you—it wouldn’t be right.”
He closed his eyes very tight and held them squinched shut for a minute. Then he opened one light blue eye and looked at her.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because of Roger,” she said, and was infuriated to hear her voice break on the name. Still more infuriated to feel a hot tear escape to run down her cheek.
“Damn it!” she said. “Damn it to hell! I wasn’t even going to think about him!”
She swiped the tear angrily away, and clenched her teeth.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe it is being pregnant. I cry all the time, over nothing.”
“I rather doubt it is nothing,” he said dryly.
She took a deep breath, the cold air hollowing her chest. There was one last card to play, then.
“If you do like women … I couldn’t—I mean, I don’t want to sleep with you regularly. And I wouldn’t mind your sleeping with anybody else—male or female—”
“Thank you for that,” he muttered, but she ignored him, bent only on the need to get it all out.
“But I can see that you might want a child of your own. It wouldn’t be right for me to keep you from having one. I can give you that, I think.” She glanced down at herself, arms clasped across the round of her belly. “Everyone says I’m made for childbearing,” she went on steadily, eyes on her feet. “I’d—just until I got pregnant again, though. You’d have to put that in the contract, too—Mr. Campbell could draw it up.”
Lord John massaged his forehead, evidently suffering the onslaught of a massive headache. Then he dropped his hand and took her by the arm.
“Come and sit down, child,” he said quietly. “You’d best tell me what the devil you’re up to.”
She took a deep, savage breath to steady her voice.
“I am not a child,” she said. He glanced up at her and seemed to change his mind about something.
“No, you’re not—God help us both. But before you startle Farquard Campbell into an apoplexy with your notion of a suitable marriage contract, I beg you to sit with me for a moment and share the processes of your most remarkable brain.” He motioned her through the archway into the ornamental garden, where they would be invisible from the house.
The garden was bleak, but orderly; all the dead stalks of the year before had been pulled out, the dry stems chopped and scattered as mulch over the beds. Only in the circular bed around the dry fountain were there signs of life; green crocus spikes poked up like tiny battering rams, vivid and intransigent.
They sat, but she couldn’t sit. Not and face him. He got up with her, and walked beside her, not touching her but keeping pace, the wind whipping strands of blond hair across his face, not saying a word, but listening, listening as she told him almost everything.
“So I’ve been thinking, and thinking,” she ended wretchedly. “And I never get anywhere. Do you see? Mother and—and Da, they’re out there somewhere—” She waved an arm toward the distant mountains. “Anything could happen to them—anything might have happened to Roger already. And here I sit, getting bigger and bigger, and there’s nothing I can do!”
She glanced down at him and drew the back of a mittened hand under her dripping nose.
“I’m not crying,” she assured him, though she was.
“Of course not,” he said. He took her hand and drew it through his arm.
“Round and round,” he murmured, eyes on the path of crazy paving as they circled the fountain.
“Yes, round and round the mulberry bush,” she agreed. “And it’ll be Pop! goes the weasel in three months or so. I have to do something,” she ended, miserably.
“Believe it or not, in your case waiting is doing something, though I admit it may not seem so,” he answered dryly. “Why is it that you will not wait to see whether your father’s quest is successful? Is it that your sense of honor will not allow you to bear a fatherless child? Or—”
“It’s not my honor,” she said. “It’s his. Roger’s. He’s—he followed me. He gave up—everything—and came after me, when I came here to find my father. I knew he would, and he did.
“When he finds out about this—” She grimaced, cupping a hand to the swell of her stomach. “He’ll marry me; he’ll feel as though he has to. And I can’t let him do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I love him. I don’t want him to marry me out of obligation. And I—” She clamped her lips tight on the rest of it. “I won’t,” she ended firmly. “I’ve made up my mind, and I won’t.”
Lord John pulled his cloak tighter as a fresh blast of wind came rocketing in off the river. It smelled of ice and dead leaves, but there was a hint of freshness in it; spring was coming.
“I see,” he said. “Well, I quite agree with yo
ur aunt that you require a husband. Why me, though?” He raised one pale brow. “Is it my title or my wealth?”
“Neither one. It was because I was sure that you didn’t like women,” she said, giving him one of those candid blue looks.
“I do like women,” he said, exasperated. “I admire and honor them, and for several of the sex I feel considerable affection—your mother among them, though I doubt the sentiment is reciprocated. I do not, however, seek pleasure in their beds. Do I speak plainly enough?”
“Yes,” she said, the small lines between her eyes vanishing like magic. “That’s what I thought. See, it wouldn’t be right for me to marry Mr. MacNeill or Barton McLachlan or any of those men, because I’d be promising something I couldn’t give them. But you don’t want that anyway, so there isn’t any reason why I can’t marry you.”
He repressed a strong urge to bang his head against the wall.
“There most assuredly is.”
“What?”
“To name only the most obvious, your father would undoubtedly break my neck!”
“What for?” she demanded, frowning. “He likes you; he says you’re one of his best friends.”
“I am honored to be the recipient of his esteem,” he said shortly. “However, that esteem would very shortly cease to exist, upon Jamie Fraser’s discovering that his daughter was serving as consort and brood mare to a degenerate sodomite.”
“And how would he discover that?” she demanded. “I wouldn’t tell him.” Then she flushed and, meeting his outraged eye, suddenly dissolved into laughter, in which he helplessly joined.
“Well, I’m sorry, but you said it,” she gasped at last, sitting up and wiping her streaming eyes with the hem of her cloak.
“Oh, Christ. Yes, I did.” Distracted, he thumbed a strand of hair out of his mouth, and wiped his running nose on his sleeve again. “Damn, why haven’t I a handkerchief? I said it because it’s true. As for your father finding out, he’s well aware of the fact.”
The Outlander Series 7-Book Bundle Page 426