“More than good.” The water was so buoyant that I felt I might float away if I loosed my hold on the bench. I looked upward into the black shadows of the roof.
“Does anything live in this cave? Bats, I mean? Or fish?”
He shook his head. “Nothing but the spirit of the spring, Sassenach. The water bubbles up from the earth through a narrow crack back there”—he nodded toward the Stygian blackness at the back of the cave—“and trickles out through a dozen tiny openings in the rock. But there’s no real opening to the outside, save the door into the monastery.”
“Spirit of the spring?” I said, amused. “Sounds rather pagan, to be hiding under a monastery.”
He stretched luxuriously, long legs wavering under the glassy surface like the stems of water plants.
“Well, whatever ye wish to call it, it’s been here a good deal longer than the monastery.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
The walls of the cave were of smooth, dark volcanic rock, almost like black glass, slick with the moisture of the spring. The whole chamber looked like a gigantic bubble, half-filled with that curiously alive but sterile water. I felt as though we were cradled in the womblike center of the earth, and that if I pressed my ear to the rock, I would hear the infinitely slow beat of a great heart nearby.
We were very quiet for a long time then, half-floating, half-dreaming, brushing now and then against each other as we drifted in the unseen currents of the cave.
When I spoke at last, my voice seemed slow and drugged.
“I’ve decided.”
“Ah. Will it be Rome, then?” Jamie’s voice seemed to come from a long way away.
“Yes. I don’t know, once there—”
“It doesna matter. We shall do what we can.” His hand reached for me, moving so slowly I thought it would never touch me.
He drew me close, until the sensitive tips of my breasts rubbed across his chest. The water was not only warm but heavy, almost oily to the touch, and his hands floated down my back to cup my buttocks and lift me.
The intrusion was startling. Hot and slippery as our skins were, we drifted over each other with barely a sensation of touching or pressure, but his presence within me was solid and intimate, a fixed point in a watery world, like an umbilical cord in the random driftings of the womb. I made a brief sound of surprise at the small inrush of hot water that accompanied his entrance, then settled firmly onto my fixed point of reference with a little sigh of pleasure.
“Oh, I like that one,” he said appreciatively.
“Like what?” I asked.
“That sound that ye made. The little squeak.”
It wasn’t possible to blush; my skin was already as flushed as it could get. I let my hair swing forward to cover my face, the curls relaxing as they dragged the surface of the water.
“I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to be noisy.”
He laughed, the deep sound echoing softly in the columns of the roof.
“I said I like it. And I do. It’s one of the things I like the best about bedding ye, Sassenach, the small noises that ye make.”
He pulled me closer, so my forehead rested against his neck. Moisture sprang up at once between us, slick as the sulfur-laden water. He made a slight movement with his hips, and I drew in my breath in a half-stifled gasp.
“Yes, like that,” he said softly. “Or…like that?”
“Urk,” I said. He laughed again, but kept doing it.
“That’s what I thought most about,” he said, drawing his hands slowly up and down my back, cupping, curving, tracing the swell of my hips. “In prison at night, chained in a room with a dozen other men, listening to the snoring and farting and groaning. I thought of those small tender sounds that ye make when I love you, and I could feel ye there next to me in the dark, breathing soft and then faster, and the little grunt that ye give when I first take you, as though ye were settling yourself to your job.”
My breathing was definitely coming faster. Supported by the dense, mineral-saturated water, I was buoyant as an oiled feather, kept from floating away only by my grip on the curved muscles of his shoulders, and the snug, firm clasp I kept of him lower down.
“Even better,” his voice was a hot murmur in my ear, “when I come to ye fierce and wanting, and ye whimper under me, and struggle as though you wanted to get away, and I know it’s only that you’re struggling to come closer, and I’m fighting the same fight.”
His hands were exploring, gently, slowly as tickling a trout, sliding deep into the rift of my buttocks, gliding lower, groping, caressing the stretched and yearning point of our joining. I quivered and the breath went from me in an unwilled gasp.
“Or when I come to you needing, and ye take me into you with a sigh and that quiet hum like a hive of bees in the sun, and ye carry me wi’ you into peace with a little moaning sound.”
“Jamie,” I said hoarsely, my voice echoing off the water. “Jamie, please.”
“Not yet, mo duinne.” His hands came hard around my waist, settling and slowing me, pressing me down until I did groan.
“Not yet. We’ve time. And I mean to hear ye groan like that again. And to moan and sob, even though you dinna wish to, for ye canna help it. I mean to make you sigh as though your heart would break, and scream with the wanting, and at last to cry out in my arms, and I shall know that I’ve served ye well.”
The rush began between my thighs, shooting like a dart into the depths of my belly, loosening my joints so that my hands slipped limp and helpless off his shoulders. My back arched and the slippery firm roundness of my breasts pressed flat against his chest. I shuddered in hot darkness, Jamie’s steadying hands all that kept me from drowning.
Resting against him, I felt boneless as a jellyfish. I didn’t know—or care—what sort of sounds I had been making, but I felt incapable of coherent speech. Until he began to move again, strong as a shark under the dark water.
“No,” I said. “Jamie, no. I can’t bear it like that again.” The blood was still pounding in my fingertips and his movement within me was an exquisite torture.
“You can, for I love ye.” His voice was half-muffled in my soaking hair. “And you will, for I want ye. But this time, I go wi’ you.”
He held my hips firm against him, carrying me beyond myself with the force of an undertow. I crashed formless against him, like breakers on a rock, and he met me with the brutal force of granite, my anchor in the pounding chaos.
Boneless and liquid as the water around us, contained only by the frame of his hands, I cried out, the soft, bubbling half-choked cry of a sailor sucked beneath the waves. And heard his own cry, helpless in return, and knew I had served him well.
* * *
We struggled upward, out of the womb of the world, damp and steaming, rubber-limbed with wine and heat. I fell to my knees at the first landing, and Jamie, trying to help me, fell down next to me in an untidy heap of robes and bare legs. Giggling helplessly, drunk more with love than with wine, we made our way side by side, on hands and knees up the second flight of steps, hindering each other more than helping, jostling and caroming softly off each other in the narrow space, until we collapsed at last in each other’s arms on the second landing.
Here an ancient oriel window opened glassless to the sky, and the light of the hunter’s moon washed us in silver. We lay clasped together, damp skins cooling in the winter air, waiting for our racing hearts to slow and breath to return to our heaving bodies.
The moon above was a Christmas moon, so large as almost to fill the empty window. It seemed no wonder that the tides of sea and woman should be subject to the pull of that stately orb, so close and so commanding.
But my own tides moved no longer to that chaste and sterile summons, and the knowledge of my freedom raced like danger through my blood.
“I have a gift for you too,” I said suddenly to Jamie. He turned toward me and his hand slid, large and sure, over the plane of my still-flat stomach.
“Have you, now?” he said.
And the world was all around us, new with possibility.
Read on for a special preview of
The second novel in the Outlander series
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DELACORTE PRESS
THE PRETENDERS LE HAVRE, FRANCE, 1744
Bread,” I muttered feebly, keeping my eyes tightly closed. There was no response from the large, warm object next to me, other than the faint sigh of his breathing.
“Bread!” I said, a little louder. There was a sudden startled heave of the bedclothes, and I grasped the edge of the mattress and tightened all my muscles, hoping to stabilize the pitch and yaw of my internal organs.
Fumbling noises came from the far side of the bed, followed by the sliding of a drawer, a muffled exclamation in Gaelic, the soft thud of a bare foot stamping planks, and then the sinking of the mattress under the weight of a heavy body.
“Here, Sassenach,” said an anxious voice, and I felt the touch of a dry bread crust against my lower lip. Groping blindly without opening my eyes, I grasped it and began to chew gingerly, forcing each choking bite down a parched throat. I knew better than to ask for water.
The dessicated wads of bread crumbs gradually made their way down my throat and took up residence in my stomach, where they lay like small heaps of ballast. The nauseating roll of my inner waves slowly calmed, and at last my innards lay at anchor. I opened my eyes, to see the anxious face of Jamie Fraser hovering a few inches above me.
“Ak!” I said, startled.
“All right, then?” he asked. When I nodded and feebly began to sit up, he put an arm around my back to help me. Sitting down beside me on the rough inn bed, he pulled me gently against him and stroked my sleep-tousled hair.
“Poor love,” he said. “Would a bit of wine help? There’s a flask of hock in my saddlebag.”
“No. No, thank you.” I shuddered briefly at the thought of drinking hock—I seemed to smell the dark, fruity fumes, just at the mention of it—and pushed myself upright.
“I’ll be fine in a moment,” I said, with forced cheerfulness. “Don’t worry, it’s quite normal for pregnant women to feel sick in the morning.”
With a dubious look at me, Jamie rose and went to retrieve his clothes from the stool near the window. France in February is cold as hell frozen over, and the bubbled-glass panes of the window were coated thick with frost.
He was naked, and a ripple of gooseflesh brushed his shoulders and raised the red-gold hairs on his arms and legs. Accustomed to cold, though, he neither shivered nor hurried as he pulled on stockings and shirt. Pausing in his dressing, he came back to the bed and hugged me briefly.
“Go back to bed,” he suggested. “I’ll send up the chambermaid to light the fire. Perhaps ye can rest a bit, now you’ve eaten. You won’t be sick now?” I wasn’t entirely sure, but nodded reassuringly.
“I don’t think so.” I cast an eye back at the bed; the quilts, like most coverings supplied by public inns, were none too clean. Still, the silver in Jamie’s purse had procured us the best room in the inn, and the narrow bed was stuffed with goose feathers rather than with chaff or wool.
“Um, perhaps I will just lie down a moment,” I murmured, pulling my feet off the freezing floor and thrusting them under the quilts, in search of the last remnants of warmth. My stomach seemed to have settled sufficiently to risk a sip of water, and I poured a cupful from the cracked bedroom ewer.
“What were you stamping on?” I asked, sipping carefully. “There aren’t spiders up here, are there?”
Fastening his kilt about his waist, Jamie shook his head.
“Och, no,” he said. Hands busy, he tilted his head toward the table. “Just a rat. After the bread, I expect.”
Glancing down, I saw the limp gray form on the floor, a small pearl of blood glistening on the snout. I made it out of bed just in time.
“It’s all right,” I said faintly, a bit later. “There isn’t anything left to throw up.”
“Rinse your mouth, Sassenach, but don’t swallow, for God’s sake.” Jamie held the cup for me, wiped my mouth with a cloth as though I were a small and messy child, then lifted me and laid me carefully back in the bed. He frowned worriedly down at me.
“Perhaps I’d better stay here,” he said. “I could send word.”
“No, no, I’m all right,” I said. And I was. Fight as I would to keep from vomiting in the mornings, I could hold nothing down for long. Yet once the bout was over, I felt entirely restored. Aside from a sour taste in my mouth, and a slight soreness in the abdominal muscles, I felt quite my normal self. I threw back the covers and stood up, to demonstrate.
“See? I’ll be fine. And you have to go; it wouldn’t do to keep your cousin waiting, after all.”
I was beginning to feel cheerful again, despite the chilly air rushing under the door and beneath the folds of my nightgown. Jamie was still hesitating, reluctant to leave me, and I went to him and hugged him tightly, both in reassurance and because he was delightfully warm.
“Brrr,” I said. “How on earth can you be warm as toast, dressed in nothing but a kilt?”
“I’ve a shirt on as well,” he protested, smiling down at me.
We clung together for a bit, enjoying each other’s warmth in the quiet cold of the early French morning. In the corridor, the clash and shuffle of the chambermaid with her scuttle of kindling grew nearer.
Jamie shifted a bit, pressing against me. Because of the difficulties of traveling in the winter, we had been nearly a week on the road from Ste. Anne to Le Havre. And between the late arrivals at dismal inns, wet, filthy, and shivering with fatigue and cold, and the increasingly unsettled wakenings as my morning sickness got worse, we had scarcely touched each other since our last night at the Abbey.
“Come to bed with me?” I invited, softly. He hesitated. The strength of his desire was obvious through the fabric of his kilt, and his hands were warm on the cool flesh of my own, but he didn’t move to take me in his arms.
“Well …” he said doubtfully.
“You want to, don’t you?” I said, sliding a chilly hand under his kilt to make sure.
“Oh! er … aye. Aye, I do.” The evidence at hand bore out this statement. He groaned faintly as I cupped my hand between his legs. “Oh, Lord. Don’t do that, Sassenach; I canna keep my hands from ye.”
He did hug me then, wrapping long arms about me and pulling my face into the snowy tucks of his shirt, smelling faintly of the laundry starch Brother Alfonse used at the Abbey.
“Why should you?” I said, muffled in his linen. “You’ve a bit of time to spare, surely? It’s only a short ride to the docks.”
“It isna that,” he said, smoothing my riotous hair.
“Oh, I’m too fat?” In fact, my stomach was still nearly flat, and I was thinner than usual because of the sickness. “Or is it …?”
“No,” he said, smiling. “Ye talk too much.” He bent and kissed me, then scooped me up and sat down on the bed, holding me on his lap. I lay down and pulled him determinedly down on top of me.
