“I’m sorry,” he whispered into her hair, moving in her, unable to think, to talk …. “I have to …” She wasn’t quite awake, he could tell, but her body was compliant, yielding to his importunity. He quit talking and buried his face in her hair, holding her tight and rocking hard, her back hot against his chest and his cold skin rippling with gooseflesh as he felt the surge come and yielded to it, shuddering and gasping as it pulsed through him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered again, a few moments later. She reached back, groping blindly, found his leg, and patted him briefly. She yawned, stretched a little, and curled back into sleep, her bare bottom snug and warm in the damp curve of his thighs.
He fell asleep as though he’d been pitched headfirst down a well and slept without dreaming until he woke just before dawn—before the roosters.
He lay quiet, watching the faint light begin to glow between the shutters and enjoying the momentary sense of deep peace. Claire was still asleep, her breathing slow and even and her hair pouring over the pillow like smoke. The sight of her shoulder, bare where her night rail had slipped off, brought back the sense of that midnight urgency, and he felt a mingled sense of shame and exultation.
He hadn’t bothered looking for his shirt in the night, and his own shoulders were cold, the smoored fire not yet stirred. Moving carefully, so as to let her sleep while she could, he drew the quilt up over both of them, and lay still, eyes half closed.
His mind felt as lazy as his body, not forming real thoughts, but letting idle bits of fancy and memory drift through like leaves borne along on the current of a Highland burn. And among the remembered bits of dreams recalled, he saw a face. Black-rimmed spectacles, an open, searching face from the back of a book …
A face that rose above his own, without spectacles, searching, trying to fix his gaze, to make him look, look at what—
His eyes sprang open in shock. Outside, the first rooster began to crow.
“WHY DID YE never tell me that Frank Randall looked like Black Jack?” Jamie asked abruptly.
“What?” I’d wondered what was bothering him; he’d gone out before I was dressed and without his breakfast. Now it was past noon, he hadn’t been fed lunch, and he’d walked into my surgery without hesitance or greeting to ask me this?
“Well …” I tried to gather my thoughts enough to frame a coherent answer; plainly he needed as much truth as I could give him. “Well, to begin with—he didn’t, really. I mean—the first time I met Jack Randall, I was startled by the resemblance”—and a few times thereafter—“but that seemed to wear off. It’s—it was,” I corrected myself, “only a superficial physical resemblance, and once I was acquainted with Jack Randall …” A surprisingly cold sensation centered itself on the back of my neck, as though the gentleman in question were standing behind me, eyes fixed on me. “He didn’t remind me of Frank at all.”
I looked him over carefully. He’d been quite as usual the night before—or more so; he’d made love to me in my sleep, silently, quickly, and vigorously, and then had clasped me to his bosom and gone instantly to sleep with a murmured “Taing, mo ghràidh. I’m sorry.”
I’d fallen back asleep myself, almost at once, feeling a pleasant fricative glow in my inward parts and the slow, steady thump of his heart against my back. It wasn’t that he’d never done anything like that before, but it had been some time since he had.
“Besides,” I said slowly, “you’ve seen that photo of Frank on his book. Didn’t you see the resemblance for yourself then?”
“No.” He seemed to realize that he was looming over me, and with an impatient gesture, he pulled out one of my stools and sat down.
“No,” he repeated. “And now I’m wondering why not. It’s maybe what ye say—that what … Frank is—what he was,” he corrected himself, “shows in his face. Jack Randall hid himself, but once ye’d seen him look at ye like … what he was … ye’d never see him otherwise, no matter how fine his clothes or how civil his manner.”
“Yes.” I shivered involuntarily and reached for my green shawl, wrapping it round my shoulders as though it might be some protection from the memory of evil. “But—why did the family resemblance strike you now?”
“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.