“Mmphm.” The three remaining fingers of his right hand drummed soundlessly on his knee, and I could feel his struggle to put what he felt into words.
“Did something … happen?” I asked cautiously, thinking of that hasty midnight coupling. That seemed the only mildly unusual event I could recall, but I failed entirely to see any connection.
Jamie sighed.
“Aye. Maybe. I dinna ken for sure. It’s just … I was dreaming.” He saw me react to that and made a slight calming gesture. “Not one of the bad ones. Just bits of nonsense. I dreamed I was reading a book—well, I had been reading it, just before I came to bed.”
“Frank’s book, you mean.”
“Aye. What I was reading in the dream didna make any sense, but—it went in and out, ken, like dreams do? And it began to seem that the book was talkin’ to me, and then it was the man himself—just wee bits of conversation and then I’d be reading again, or … I was somewhere else.”
He rubbed a hand hard over his face; I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to erase the dream or bring it to the surface.
“I was looking into his face—seeing his eyes behind the spectacles. Kind. Decent. Tellin’ me things about history. And then I saw Jack Randall, sitting back behind his desk, lookin’ at me, mild and civil, like he might have been askin’ did I want sugar in my tea, but what he was asking was whether I’d rather be buggered or flogged to death.”
I leaned forward and took his hand; his fingers curled round mine at once and squeezed lightly in reassurance. It hadn’t been “one of the bad ones,” the dreams that left him sweating and unable to be touched.
“You knew it was a dream, then?” I ventured. “You weren’t … er … living in it, I mean?”
He shook his head, his eyes on the floor.
“No, but it was then I suddenly realized how much they looked alike, and I woke up wondering why ye’d never mentioned that.”
“Frankly, I—” I smiled, despite myself, and started over. “I mean, at first, I didn’t see any need, and later, I thought you might be … upset. Or worried. To know that the man I’d been married to looked so much like Jack Randall.”
He nodded a little, considering that.
“I might have been. And as ye say—nay point, after all. Ye were mine.”
He lifted his head as he said this, and while there was warmth in his eyes, his mouth had firmed in a very determined way.
“Oh!” I said, suddenly face-to-face with exactly what I’d blindly experienced in the musky depths of the night before. He’d wakened with Frank in his mind and had promptly laid claim to me. “So that’s why you kept saying you were sorry!”
He gave me a look in which sheepishness was mingled with a certain defiance.
“Well, I felt bad for wakin’ ye, but … I had to—to—” He made a brief but very explicit gesture with his thumb in the palm of my hand, which brought warm blood flooding to my face.
“Oh,” I said again. I noticed that he wasn’t asking if I’d minded. A moot point, since I hadn’t. I folded my fingers around his large, warm thumb. “Well.”
He smiled at me, leaned forward, and kissed my forehead.
“Claire,” he said softly. “You are my life. Fuil m ‘fhuil, cnàmh mo chnàimh.” You are Blood of my Blood, and Bone of my Bone. “If Frank felt as much for ye and kent I’d taken ye from him—and he did know I had—then he had good cause to try to damage or kill me.”
Sheer astonishment silenced me for a moment.
“You think—I mean … no.” I shook my head, hard. “No. Even if you’re right about that book—and I don’t think you are—how could he possibly know that Brianna would bring it to the past and that you’d see it? Beyond that … how could anything in a book kill you?
“And besides,” I added firmly, sitting up straight and folding my hands on my knee, “whatever resemblance your dream showed you, Frank was nothing like Jack Randall. He was a very good man. More important, he was an historian. He couldn’t—he really couldn’t—write something that he knew was false.”
Jamie was regarding me with a slight smile.
“I notice ye’re not saying that he didna value ye as much as I do.”
I would have given a lot to be able to make an appropriate Scottish noise in response to this, but some things were beyond my capabilities. Instead, I reached out and took his maimed hand between mine, lightly tracing the thick white scar where his fourth finger had been. I cleared my throat.