“It’s so good,” I said dreamily. “So good to have a man’s body to touch.”
“D’ye like it still, then?” He sounded half-shy, half-pleased, as I fondled him. His own arm came around my shoulder, stroking my hair.
“Mm-hm.” It wasn’t a thing I had consciously missed, but having it now reminded me of the joy of it; that drowsy intimacy in which a man’s body is as accessible to you as your own, the strange shapes and textures of it like a sudden extension of your own limbs.
I ran my hand down the flat slope of his belly, over the smooth jut of hipbone and the swell of muscled thigh. The remnants of firelight caught the red-gold fuzz on arms and legs, and glowed in the auburn thicket nested between his thighs.
“God, you are a wonderful hairy creature,” I said. “Even there.” I slid my hand down the smooth crease of his thigh and he spread his legs obligingly, letting me touch the thick, springy curls in the crease of his buttocks.
“Aye, well, no one’s hunted me yet for my pelt,” he said comfortably. His hand cupped my own rear firmly, and a large thumb passed gently over the rounded surface. He propped one arm behind his head, and looked lazily down the length of my body.
“You’re even less worth the skinning than I am, Sassenach.”
“I should hope so.” I moved slightly to accommodate his touch as he extended his explorations, enjoying the warmth of his hand on my naked back.
“Ever seen a smooth branch that’s been in still water a long time?” he asked. A finger passed lightly up my spine, raising a ripple of gooseflesh in its wake. “There are tiny wee bubbles on it, hundreds and thousands and millions of them, so it looks as though it’s furred all about wi’ a silver frost.” His fingers brushed my ribs, my arms, my back, and the tiny down-hairs rose everywhere in the wake of his touch, tingling.
“That’s what ye look like, my Sassenach,” he said, almost whispering. “All smooth and naked, dipped in silver.”
Then we lay quiet for a time, listening to the drip of rain outside. A cold autumn air drifted through the room, mingling with the fire’s smoky warmth. He rolled onto his side, facing away from me, and drew the quilts up to cover us.
I curled up behind him, knees fitting neatly behind his own. The firelight shone dully from behind me now, gleaming over the smooth round of his shoulder and dimly illuminating his back. I could see the faint lines of the scars that webbed his shoulders, thin streaks of silver on his flesh. At one time, I had known those scars so intimately, I could have traced them with my fingers, blindfolded. Now there was a thin half-moon curve I didn’t know; a diagonal slash that hadn’t been there before, the remnants of a violent past I hadn’t shared.
I touched the half-moon, tracing its length.
“No one’s hunted you for your pelt,” I said softly, “but they’ve hunted you, haven’t they?”
His shoulder moved slightly, not quite a shrug. “Now and then,” he said.
“Now?” I asked.
He breathed slowly for a moment or two before answering.
“Aye,” he said. “I think so.”
My fingers moved down to the diagonal slash. It had been a deep cut; old and well-healed as the damage was, the line was sharp and clear beneath my fingertips.
“Do you know who?”
“No.” He was quiet for a moment; then his hand closed over my own, where it lay across his stomach. “But I maybe ken why.”
The house was very quiet. With most of the children and grandchildren gone, there were only the far-off servants in their quarters behind the kitchen, Ian and Jenny in their room at the far end of the hall, and Young Ian somewhere upstairs—all asleep. We could have been alone at the end of the world; both Edinburgh and the smugglers’ cove seemed very far away.
“Do ye recall, after the fall of Stirling, not so long before Culloden, when all of a sudden there was gossip from everywhere, about gold being sent from France?”
“From Louis? Yes—but he never sent it.” Jamie’s words summoned up those brief frantic days of Charles Stuart’s reckless rise and precipitous fall, when rumor had been the common currency of conversation. “There was always gossip—about gold from France, ships from Spain, weapons from Holland—but nothing came of most of it.”
“Oh, something came—though not from Louis—but no one kent it, then.”
He told me then of his meeting with the dying Duncan Kerr, and the wanderer’s whispered words, heard in the inn’s attic under the watchful eye of an English officer.
“He was fevered, Duncan, but not crazed wi’ it. He kent he was dying, and he kent me, too. It was his only chance to tell someone he thought he could trust—so he told me.”
“White witches and seals?” I repeated. “I must say, it sounds like gibberish. But you understood it?”
“Well, not all of it,” Jamie admitted. He rolled over to face me, frowning slightly. “I’ve no notion who the white witch might be. At the first, I thought he meant you, Sassenach, and my heart nearly stopped when he said it.” He smiled ruefully, and his hand tightened on mine, clasped between us.
“I thought all at once that perhaps something had gone wrong—maybe ye’d not been able to go back to Frank and the place ye came from—maybe ye’d somehow ended in France, maybe ye were there right then—all kinds o’ fancies went through my head.”
“I wish it had been true,” I whispered.
He gave me a lopsided smile, but shook his head.
“And me in prison? And Brianna would be what—just ten or so? No, dinna waste your time in regretting, Sassenach. You’re here now, and ye’ll never leave me again.” He kissed me gently on the forehead, then resumed his tale.
“I didna have any idea where the gold had come from, but I kent his telling me where it was, and why it was there. It was Prince Tearlach’s, sent for him. And the bit about the silkies—” He raised his head a little and nodded toward the window, where the rose brier cast its shadows on the glass.
“Folk said when my mother ran away from Leoch that she’d gone to live wi’ the silkies; only because the maid that saw my father when he took her said as he looked like a great silkie who’d shed his skin and come to walk on the land like a man. And he did.” Jamie smiled and passed a hand through his own thick hair, remembering. “He had hair thick as mine, but a black like jet. It would shine in some lights, as though it was wet, and he moved quick and sleekit, like a seal through the water.” He shrugged suddenly, shaking off the recollection of his father.
“Well, so. When Duncan Kerr said the name Ellen, I kent it was my mother he meant—as a sign that he knew my name and my family, kent who I was; that he wasna raving, no matter how it sounded. And knowin’ that—” He shrugged again. “The Englishman had told me where they found Duncan, near the coast. There are hundreds of bittie isles and rocks all down that coast, but only one place where the silkies live, at the ends of the MacKenzie lands, off Coigach.”
“So you went there?”
“Aye, I did.” He sighed deeply, his free hand drifting to the hollow of my waist. “I wouldna have done it—left the prison, I mean—had I not still thought it maybe had something to do wi’ you, Sassenach.”