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 shoulder, 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

Chapter 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.