Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone
- Автор: Гэблдон Диана
- Серия: Outlander #9
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Delacorte Press
- ISBN: 978-1-473-51900-8
- Жанр: Исторические приключения
Электронная книга - «Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone». Краткое содержание книги:
The past may seem the safest place to be . . . but it is the most dangerous time to be alive. . . .
Jamie Fraser and Claire Randall were torn apart by the Jacobite Rising in 1746, and it took them twenty years to find each other again. Now the American Revolution threatens to do the same. It is 1779 and Claire and Jamie are at last reunited with their daughter, Brianna, her husband, Roger, and their children on Fraser’s Ridge. Having the family together is a dream the Frasers had thought impossible. Yet even in the North Carolina backcountry, the effects of war are being felt. Tensions in the Colonies are great and local feelings run hot enough to boil Hell’s teakettle. Jamie knows loyalties among his tenants are split and it won’t be long until the war is on his doorstep. Brianna and Roger have their own worry: that the dangers that provoked their escape from the twentieth century might catch up to them. Sometimes they question whether risking the perils of the 1700s—among them disease, starvation, and an impending war—was indeed the safer choice for their family. Not so far away, young William Ransom is still coming to terms with the discovery of his true father’s identity—and thus his own—and Lord John Grey has reconciliations to make, and dangers to meet . . . on his son’s behalf, and his own. Meanwhile, the Revolutionary War creeps ever closer to Fraser’s Ridge. And with the family finally together, Jamie and Claire have more at stake than ever before.
“If I canna stand the notion that you and he were fucking me behind my back, how do ye think I can stand to think that you and I are sharing a bed wi’ him in it?”
I would have hammered the fence myself, save for knowing it would hurt. Instead, I rubbed my hands hard over my face and dug my fingers into my scalp, scattering hairpins. I stood there, huffing.
“We’re not,” I said, in a tone of complete certainty. “We’re not, because I’m not. I have never, not for one second, thought of anyone but you when I’ve been in your bed. And I ought to be really offended at the notion that you do, but—”
“I don’t.” He gulped air, and took me by the arms. “I don’t, Claire. It’s only that I’m afraid I might.”
I felt dizzy from hyperventilation and put my own hands flat on his chest to steady myself, and smelled the sudden pungent musk of his body, the waves of it an acrid hot ghost surrounding us. I did rouse him.
“I tell you what,” I said at last, and lifted my head to look at him. It was full dark now, but my eyes were well-enough adapted as to see his face, his eyes searching mine. “I tell you what,” I said again, and swallowed. “You—leave that to me.”
He trembled slightly; it might have been a buried laugh.
“Ye think highly of yourself, Sassenach,” he said, his voice husky. “Ye think a warm place to stick my cock’s enough to make me forget?”
I stared at him.
“What on earth do you mean by that, you—” Words failed me, and I jerked loose, flapping my arms in bewildered frustration. “Why would you say something like that? You know it isn’t true!”
He scratched his jaw; I could hear the whiskers rasp.
“No, it isn’t,” he agreed. “I was just tryin’ to think of something offensive enough to say as to make ye strike me.”
I actually did laugh, though more from surprise than real humor.
“Don’t tempt me. Why do you want me to hit you?”
He rocked back on his heels and looked me over, slowly, from undone hair to battered moccasins. And back.
“Well, in about ten seconds, I mean to lay ye on your back in the grass, lift your skirts, and address ye wi’ a certain amount of forcefulness. I thought I’d feel better about doing that if ye provoked me first.”
“Me … provoke you?”
I stood stock-still for three of those seconds, blood thundering in my ears and pulsing through my fingers. Then I walked toward him.
“Seven,” I said.
“Six,” and I reached for the neck of his shirt.
“Five … Four …” I yanked it down, said, “Three,” rather loudly, leaned forward, and bit his nipple. Not a teasing love-bite, either.
He yelped, jerked back, grabbed me, and with a big hand gripping the back of my head pushed my face into his. Our mouths collided messily, and stayed that way, open, voracious, amorous, seeking as much as kissing, lips, ears, noses, tongues, and teeth, hands groping and snatching and pulling and rubbing. I found his cock and rubbed it hard through his breeches and he made a deep growling sound and grasped my buttocks and then we were in the grass in a tangle of knees and limbs and rumpled clothes and hot flesh bared to the starry sky.
It seemed to last a long time, though it couldn’t have. I came back to myself slowly, reverberations passing through me in a slow, pleasant throb. Provocation. Forsooth.
He was lying on his back next to me, face turned to the moon, eyes closed, and breathing like one rescued from the sea. His right hand was still between my thighs and I was curled beside him, the whorls of his ear, beautiful as a seashell, a few inches from my mouth.
“Have we got that out of our system, do you think?” I said drowsily.
“Our?” His right hand twitched, but he didn’t pull it away.
“Our.”
He sighed deeply and turned his head toward me, opening his eyes.
“We have.” He smiled a little and closed his eyes again, his chest rising and falling under my hand. I could feel his nipple through his shirt, small and still hard against my palm.
“Did I break the skin?”
“Ye do that every time ye touch me, Sassenach. I’m no bleeding, though.”
We lay in silence for some time, and the sounds of crickets and the rustle of leaves flowed over us like water.
He spoke, quietly, and I turned my head, thinking I hadn’t heard him aright, but I had. I just didn’t know what language he was speaking.
“That isn’t Gàidhlig, is it?” I asked dubiously, and he shook his head slowly, eyes still closed.
“Gaeilge,” he said. “Irish. I heard it from Stephen O’Farrell, during the Rising. It just came back to me now.
“My body is out from my control,” he said softly. “She was the half of my body—the very half of my soul.”
38
Grim Reaper
I WAS DIGGING UP a number of four-leaved milkweeds, with the intent of transplanting them to my garden, when I heard the unmistakable bray of an annoyed mule. I’d had enough experience with Clarence and a few of his fellows to tell the difference between a call of greeting and a declaration of hostility. Both earsplitting, but different.
A couple of male voices and another mule now joined the argument. Hastily tucking the uprooted milkweeds into the wet moss in my basket, I picked up said basket and went to see what was happening.
Neither of the voices sounded familiar, and I stopped short of the racket, peering through a screen of silver firs and tall, skinny aspens. Two men, two mules, all right—but one of the mules, a light bay, had turned aside and was browsing on the flowering grass by the trail, while the other, darker mule was fiercely resisting the efforts of the two men to force him—I checked; yes, it was a him—to continue up the narrow, rocky defile.
Frankly, I didn’t blame the mule in the slightest. He and his fellow were both heavily laden, each with a long wooden crate slung on each side and large canvas-covered bundles tied messily to a pack frame on top.
I could guess what had happened. There was a good, wide trail that led up this side of the cove, but it branched at a spot called Wounded Lady, which was a small, brilliantly blue spring with a single aspen on its edge, white-barked and solid, but with trails of blood-red sap trickling slowly from the wounds inflicted by burrowing insects and the woodpeckers hunting them. The main trail made a sharp turn and went on to the east, while a narrower deer path, much obstructed by growth and rolling stones, went straight up the right side of the aspen.
The lead mule had either stumbled on rocks or been caught by the branches of the trees that edged the path. Whatever had caused it, the bindings of his baggage had broken or slipped, and half the load was hanging down over his tail, scattering small boxes and leather bags, with one of the long boxes resting with one end on the ground, the other pointing at the sky, and a fragile strand of rope still anchoring it to the mule.
I had seen the sort of cases used to ship firearms, many times. In France, in Scotland, in America—it didn’t matter what the time period, a bang-stick is a bang-stick, and you need a long, narrow box if you want to carry a large number of them.
I didn’t recognize either of the men, and I didn’t wait about to introduce myself. I took myself and my milkweeds off as fast as I could go.
Luckily, I found Jamie within half an hour, passing the time of day with Tom MacLeod, the coffin maker.
“Who’s dead?” I gasped, out of breath from scrambling down the mountain.