"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.
* * *