The Outlander Series 7-Book Bundle (986 page)

I was surprised to wake up. I hadn’t really expected to and lay for a bit trying to fit reality back into place around me. I had only a slight headache, which was almost more surprising than the fact that I was still alive.

Both those things paled in significance beside the fact of the man in bed beside me.

“How long has it been since you last slept with a woman, if you don’t mind my asking?”

He didn’t appear to mind. He frowned a little and scratched his chest thoughtfully.

“Oh … fifteen years? At least that.” He glanced at me, his expression altering to one of concern. “Oh. I do apologize.”

“You do? For what?” I arched one brow. I could think of a number of things he
might
apologize for, but probably none of those was what he had in mind.

“I am afraid I was perhaps not …” he hesitated. “Very gentlemanly.”

“Oh, you weren’t,” I said, rather tartly. “But I assure you that I wasn’t being at all ladylike myself.”

He looked at me, and his mouth worked a bit, as though trying to frame some response to that, but after a moment or two he shook his head and gave it up.

“Besides, it wasn’t me you were making love to,” I said, “and both of us know it.”

He looked up, startled, his eyes very blue. Then the shadow of a smile crossed his face, and he looked down at the quilted coverlet.

“No,” he said softly. “Nor were you, I think, making love to
me
. Were you?”

“No,” I said. The grief of the night before had softened, but the weight of it was still there. My voice was low and husky, because my throat was halfway closed, where the hand of sorrow clutched me unawares.

John sat up and reached to the table, where a carafe stood along with a bottle and a glass. He poured something out of the bottle and handed it to me.

“Thank you,” I said, and lifted it to my lips. “Good grief, is that
beer
?”

“Yes, and very good beer, too,” he said, tilting back the bottle. He took several hearty gulps, eyes half closed, then lowered it with a sigh of satisfaction. “Clears the palate, freshens the breath, and prepares the stomach for digestion.”

Despite myself, I was amused—and shocked.

“Do you mean to tell me that you are in the habit of drinking beer for breakfast every day?”

“Of course not. I have food with it.”

“I am amazed that you have a single tooth in your head,” I said severely—but risked a small sip. It
was
good beer: heavy-bodied and sweet, with just the right sour edge.

At this point, I noticed a certain tenseness in his posture, which the content of the conversation didn’t account for. Slow-witted as I was, it took a moment for me to realize what was amiss.

“Oh. If you need to fart,” I said, “don’t trouble on my account. Go ahead.”

He was sufficiently startled by my observation that he did.

“I do beg your pardon, madam!” he said, his fair skin flushing up to the hairline.

I tried not to laugh, but suppressed amusement jiggled the bed, and he went redder still.

“Would you have any hesitation about it were you in bed with a man?” I asked, out of idle curiosity.

He rubbed his knuckles against his mouth, the color fading a bit from his cheeks.

“Ah. Well, that would depend upon the man. By and large, though, no.”

The man
. I knew that Jamie was the man in his mind—just as he was in mine. At the moment, I wasn’t disposed to resent it.

He knew what I was thinking, too.

“He offered me his body once. You knew that?” His voice was dry.

“I take it you didn’t accept.” I knew he hadn’t but was more than curious to hear his side of that encounter.

“No. What I wanted from him was not that—or not entirely that,” he added, with honesty. “I wanted all of it—and was young and proud enough to think that if I could not have that, then I would accept no less. And that, of course, he couldn’t give me.”

I was silent for a time, thinking. The window was open, and the long muslin curtains moved in the breeze.

“Did you regret it?” I asked. “Not taking him up on his offer, I mean?”

“Ten thousand times, at the very least,” he assured me, breaking into a rueful grin. “At the same time … refusing him was one of the few acts of true nobility to which I would lay claim for myself. It’s true, you know,” he added, “selflessness does carry its own reward—for if I
had
taken him, that would have destroyed forever what did exist between us.

“To have given him instead the gift of my understanding, hard come by as it was,” he added ironically, “left me with his friendship. So I am left with momentary regret on the one hand, but satisfaction on the other. And in the end it was the friendship that I valued most.”

After a moment’s silence, he turned to me.

“May I … You will think me odd.”

“Well, you
are
a bit odd, aren’t you?” I said tolerantly. “I don’t really mind, though. What is it?”

He gave me a look, strongly suggesting that if one of us was indeed odd, he didn’t think it was himself. Gentlemanly instincts suppressed any remark he might have made to this effect, though.

“Will you allow me to see you? Ah … naked?”

I closed one eye and looked at him.

“This certainly isn’t the first time you’ve slept—I do mean
slept
with—a woman, is it?” I asked. He
had
been married, though I seemed to recall that he had spent much of his married life living separately from his wife.

He pursed his lips thoughtfully, as though trying to recall.

“Well, no. I do think it may be the first time I’ve done it entirely voluntarily, though.”

“Oh, I
am
flattered!”

He glanced at me, smiling slightly.

“So you should be,” he said quietly.

I was of an age, after all, where … Well, on the other hand, he presumably didn’t have the same instinctive reactions that the majority of men did, in terms of feminine attractions. Which rather left open the question …

“Why?”

A shy smile touched the corner of his mouth, and he hitched himself up against the pillow.

“I … am not quite sure, to tell you the truth. Perhaps it is only an effort to reconcile my memories of last night with the … er … actuality of the experience?”

I felt a sharp jolt, as though he had punched me in the chest. He couldn’t have known my first thoughts on waking and seeing him—that sharp, disorienting flash when I had thought he was Jamie, remembering so acutely Jamie’s flesh and weight and ardor, and so urgently wanted him to be Jamie that I had succeeded for an instant in thinking that he was, only to be crushed like a grape at the realization that he wasn’t, all my soft insides spurting out.

Had he felt or thought the same things, waking to find me there beside him?

“Or perhaps it is curiosity,” he said, smiling a little more broadly. “I have not seen a naked woman in some time, bar Negro slaves at the docks in Charleston.”

“How long is some time? Fifteen years, you said?”

“Oh, a good deal longer than that. Isobel—” He stopped abruptly, the smile vanishing. He hadn’t mentioned his dead wife before.

“You never saw her naked?” I asked, with more than idle curiosity. He turned his face away a little, eyes cast down.

“Ah … no. It wasn’t … She did not … No.” He cleared his throat, then raised his eyes, looking into mine with an honesty raw enough to make me want to look away.

“I am naked to you,” he said simply, and drew back the sheet.

Thus invited, I could hardly not look at him. And in all truth, I wanted to, out of simple curiosity. He was trim and lightly built, but muscular and solid. A little softness at the waist, but no fat—and softly furred with vigorous blond hair, darkening to brown at his crutch. It was a warrior’s body; I was well acquainted with those. One side of his chest was heavily marked with crisscrossing scars, and there were others—a deep one across the top of one thigh, a jagged thing like a lightning bolt down his left forearm.

At least my own scars weren’t visible, I thought, and before I could hesitate further, I pulled the sheet away from my own body. He looked at it with deep curiosity, smiling a little.

“You are very lovely,” he said politely.

“For a woman of my age?”

His gaze passed over me dispassionately, not with any sense of judgment but rather with the air of a man of educated tastes evaluating what he saw in the light of years of seeing.

“No,” he said finally. “Not for a woman of your age; not for a woman at all, I think.”

“As what, then?” I asked, fascinated. “An object? A sculpture?” In a way, I could see that. Something like museum sculptures, perhaps: weathered statues, fragments of vanished culture, holding within them some remnant of the original inspiration, this remnant in some odd way magnified by the lens of age, sanctified by antiquity. I had never regarded myself in such a light, but I couldn’t think what else he might mean.

“As my friend,” he said simply.

“Oh,” I said, very touched. “Thank you.”

I waited, then drew the sheet up over both of us.

“Since we’re friends …” I said, somewhat emboldened.

“Yes?”

“I only wondered … have you … been quite alone all this time? Since your wife died?”

He sighed, but smiled to let me know he didn’t mind the question.

“If you really must know, I have for many years enjoyed a physical relationship with my cook.”

“With … your cook?”

“Not with Mrs. Figg, no,” he said hastily, hearing the horror in my voice. “I meant with my cook at Mount Josiah, in Virginia. His name is Manoke.”

“Ma—oh!” I recalled Bobby Higgins telling me that Lord John retained an Indian named Manoke to cook for him.

“It is not merely the relief of necessary urges,” he added pointedly, turning his head to meet my eyes. “There is true liking between us.”

“I’m pleased to hear that,” I murmured. “He, er, he’s …”

“I have no idea whether his preference is solely for men. I rather doubt it—I was somewhat surprised when he made his desires known in re myself—but I am in no position to complain, whatever his tastes may be.”

I rubbed a knuckle over my lips, not wanting to seem vulgarly curious—but vulgarly curious, all the same.

“You don’t mind, if he … takes other lovers? Or he you, come to that?” I had a sudden uneasy apprehension. I did not intend that what had happened the night before should
ever
happen again. In fact, I was still trying to convince myself that it hadn’t happened this time. Nor did I mean to go to Virginia with him. But what if I should and Lord John’s household then assumed … I had visions of a jealous Indian cook poisoning my soup or lying in wait behind the necessary house with a tomahawk.

John himself seemed to be considering the matter, lips pursed. He had a heavy beard, I saw; the blond stubble softened his features and at the same time gave me an odd feeling of strangeness—I had so seldom seen him less than perfectly shaved and groomed.

“No. There is … no sense of possession in it,” he said finally.

I gave him a look of patent disbelief.

“I assure you,” he said, smiling a little. “It—well. Perhaps I can describe it best by analogy. At my plantation—it belongs to William, of course; I refer to it as mine only in the sense of habitation—”

I made a small polite sound in my throat, indicating that he might curtail his inclinations toward complete accuracy in the interests of getting on with it.

“At the plantation,” he said, ignoring me, “there is a large open space at the rear of the house. It was a small clearing at first, and over the years I have enlarged it and finally made a lawn of it, but the edge of the clearing runs up to the trees. In the evenings, quite often, deer come out of the forest to feed at the edges of the lawn. Now and then, though, I see a particular deer. It’s white, I suppose, but it looks as though it’s made of silver. I don’t know
whether it comes only in the moonlight or whether it’s only that I cannot see it save by moonlight—but it is a sight of rare beauty.”

His eyes had softened, and I could see that he wasn’t looking at the plaster ceiling overhead but at the white deer, coat shining in the moonlight.

“It comes for two nights, three—rarely, four—and then it’s gone, and I don’t see it again for weeks, sometimes months. And then it comes again, and I am enchanted once more.”

He rolled onto his side in a rustle of bedclothes, regarding me.

“Do you see? I do not own this creature—would not, if I could. Its coming is a gift, which I accept with gratitude, but when it’s gone, there is no sense of abandonment or deprivation. I’m only glad to have had it for so long as it chose to remain.”

“And you’re saying that your relationship with Manoke is the same. Does he feel that way about you, do you think?” I asked, fascinated. He glanced at me, clearly startled.

“I have no idea.”

“You, um, don’t … talk in bed?” I said, striving for delicacy.

His mouth twitched, and he looked away.

“No.”

We lay in silence for a few moments, examining the ceiling.

“Have you ever?” I blurted.

“Have I what?”

“Had a lover that you talked to.”

He cut his eyes at me.

“Yes. Perhaps not quite so frankly as I find myself talking to
you
, but, yes.” He opened his mouth as though to say or ask something further, but instead breathed in, shut his mouth firmly, and let the air out slowly through his nose.

I knew—I couldn’t not know—that he wanted very much to know what Jamie was like in bed, beyond what I had inadvertently shown him the night before. And I was obliged to admit to myself that I was very tempted to tell him, only in order to bring Jamie back to life for the brief moments while we talked. But I knew that such revelations would have a price: not only a later sense of betrayal of Jamie but a sense of shame at using John—whether he wished such usage or not. But if the memories of what had passed between Jamie and myself in our intimacy were no longer shared—still, they belonged only to that intimacy and were not mine to give away.

It occurred to me—belatedly, as so many things did these days—that John’s intimate memories belonged to him, as well.