“Hot water,” he said briefly, stepping out of the tub. “Dinna worry yourself, it won’t take long.”

“That,” I said, with delicate precision, “is what you think.”

His face flushed still more deeply, and his hands curled involuntarily into fists.

“No reasoning wi’ you, is there?” he demanded. “God, I spend the night torn between disgust and agony, bein’ tormented by my companions for being unmanly, then come home to be tormented for being unchaste! Mallaichte bas!”

Looking wildly about, he spotted his discarded clothing on the floor near the bed and lunged for it.

“Here, then!” he said, scrabbling for his belt. “Here! If lusting is adultery and you’ll kill me for adultery, then ye’d best do it, hadn’t ye!” He came up with his dirk, a ten-inch piece of dark steel, and thrust it at me, haft first. He squared his shoulders, presenting the broad expanse of his chest to me, and glared belligerently.

“Go ahead,” he insisted. “Ye dinna mean to be forsworn, I hope? Being so sensitive to your honor as a wife and all?”

It was a real temptation. My clenched hands quivered at my sides with the longing to take the dagger and plant it firmly between his ribs. Only the knowledge that, all his dramatizing aside, he certainly wouldn’t allow me to stab him, stopped me from trying. I felt sufficiently ridiculous, without humiliating myself further. I whirled away from him in a flurry of silk.

After a moment, I heard the clank of the dirk on the floorboards. I stood without moving, staring out of the window at the back courtyard below. I heard faint rustling sounds behind me, and glanced into the faint reflections of the window. My face showed in the windowpane as a smudged oval in a nimbus of sleep-snarled brown hair. Jamie’s naked figure moved dimly in the glass like someone seen underwater, searching for a towel.

“The towel is on the bottom shelf of the ewer-stand,” I said, turning around.

“Thank you.” He dropped the dirty shirt with which he had begun gingerly dabbing himself and reached for the towel, not looking at me.

He wiped his face, then seemed to make some decision. He lowered the towel and looked directly at me. I could see the emotions struggling for mastery on his face, and felt as though I were still looking into the mirror of the window. Sense triumphed in both of us at once.

“I’m sorry,” we said, in unison. And laughed.

The damp of his skin soaked through the thin silk, but I didn’t care.

Minutes later, he mumbled something into my hair.

“What?”

“Too close,” he repeated, moving back a bit. “It was too damn close, Sassenach, and it scared me.”

I glanced down at the dirk, lying forgotten on the floor.

“Scared? I’ve never seen anyone less scared in my life. You knew damned well I wouldn’t do it.”

“Oh, that.” He grinned. “No, I didna think you’d kill me, much as ye might like to.” He sobered quickly. “No, it was… well, those women. What I felt like with them. I didna want them, truly not…”

“Yes, I know,” I said, reaching for him, but he wasn’t stopping there. He held back from me, looking troubled.

“But the… the lusting, I suppose ye’d call it… that was… too close to what I feel sometimes for you, and it… well, it doesna seem right to me.”

He turned away, rubbing at his hair with the linen towel, so his voice came half-muffled.

“I always thought it would be a simple matter to lie wi’ a woman,” he said softly. “And yet… I want to fall on my face at your feet and worship you” – he dropped the towel and reached out, taking me by the shoulders – “and still I want to force ye to your knees before me, and hold ye there wi’ my hands tangled in your hair, and your mouth at my service… and I want both things at the same time, Sassenach.” He ran his hands up under my hair and gripped my face between them, hard.

“I dinna understand myself at all, Sassenach! Or maybe I do.” He released me and turned away. His face had long since dried, but he picked up the fallen towel and wiped the skin of his jaw with it, over and over. The stubble made a faint rasping sound against the fine linen. His voice was still quiet, barely audible from a few feet away.

“Such things – the knowledge of them, I mean – it came to me soon after… after Wentworth.” Wentworth. Where he had given his soul to save my life, and suffered the tortures of the damned in retrieving it.

“I thought at the first that Jack Randall had stolen a bit of my soul, and then I knew it was worse than that. All of it was my own, and had been all along; it was only he’d shown it to me, and made me know it for myself. That’s what he did that I canna forgive, and may his own soul rot for it!”

He lowered the towel and looked at me, face worn with the strains of the night, but eyes bright with urgency.

“Claire. To feel the small bones of your neck beneath my hands, and that fine, thin skin on your breasts and your arms… Lord, you are my wife, whom I cherish and I love wi’ all my life, and still I want to kiss ye hard enough to bruise your tender lips, and see the marks of my fingers on your skin.”

He dropped the towel. He raised his hands and held them trembling in the air before his face, then very slowly brought them down to rest on my head as though in benediction.

“I want to hold you like a kitten in my shirt, mo duinne, and still I want to spread your thighs and plow ye like a rutting bull.” His fingers tightened in my hair. “I dinna understand myself!”

I pulled my head back, freeing myself, and took a half-step backward. The blood seemed all to be on the surface of my skin, and a chill ran down my body at the brief separation.

“Do you think it’s different for me? Do you think I don’t feel the same?” I demanded. “That I don’t sometimes want to bite you hard enough to taste blood, or claw you ’til you cry out?”

I reached out slowly to touch him. The skin of his breast was damp and warm. Only the nail of my forefinger touched him, just below the nipple. Lightly, barely touching, I drew the nail upward, downward, circling round, watching the tiny nub rise hard amid the curling ruddy hairs.

The nail pressed slightly harder, sliding down, leaving a faint red streak on the fair skin of his chest. I was trembling all over by this time, but did not turn away.

“Sometimes I want to ride you like a wild horse, and bring you to the taming – did you know that? I can do it, you know I can. Drag you over the edge and drain you to a gasping husk. I can drive you to the edge of collapse and sometimes I delight in it, Jamie, I do! And yet so often I want” – my voice broke suddenly and I had to swallow hard before continuing – “I want… to hold your head against my breast and cradle you like a child and comfort you to sleep.”

My eyes were so full of tears that I couldn’t see his face clearly; couldn’t see if he wept as well. His arms went tight around me and the damp heat of him engulfed me like the breath of a monsoon.

“Claire, ye do kill me, knife or no,” he whispered, face buried in my hair. He bent and picked me up, carrying me to the bed. He sank to his knees, laying me amid the rumpled quilts.

“You’ll lie wi’ me now,” he said quietly. “And I shall use ye as I must. And if you’ll have your revenge for it, then take it and welcome, for my soul is yours, in all the black corners of it.”

The skin of his shoulders was warm with the heat of the bath, but he shivered as with cold as my hands traveled up to his neck, and I pulled him down to me.

And when I had at length taken my last revenge of him, I did cradle him, stroking back the roughened, half-dry locks.

“And sometimes,” I whispered to him, “I wish it could be you inside me. That I could take you into me and keep you safe always.”

His hand, large and warm, lifted slowly from the bed and cupped the small round swell of my belly, sheltering and caressing.