“Who else?”
“You have a looking glass in your room, do you not?” His mouth curved, and after a reluctant moment, so did hers.
“It’s her bloody will. I told her I don’t want River Run, I can’t own slaves—but she won’t change it! She just smiles as though I were a six-year-old having a tantrum and says by the time it happens, I’ll be glad of it. Glad of it!” She snorted and flounced into a more comfortable position. “What am I going to do?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” She turned the force of her displeasure on him. “How can I do nothing?”
“To begin with, I should be extremely surprised if your aunt were not immortal, several of that particular race of Scots seem to be. However”—he waved a hand in dismissal—“should this prove untrue, and should she persist in her delusions that you would prove a good mistress to River Run—”
“What makes you think I wouldn’t?” she said, pride stung.
“You cannot run a plantation of this size without slaves, and you decline to own them for reasons of conscience, or so I was given to understand. Though a less likely Quaker I have never seen.” He narrowed his open eye, indicating the immense tent of purple-striped muslin in which she was swathed. “Returning to the point at issue—or one of them—should you find yourself the unwilling recipient of a number of slaves, arrangements can undoubtedly be made to free them.”
“Not in North Carolina. The Assembly—”
“No, not in North Carolina,” he agreed patiently. “If the occasion should arise, and you find yourself in possession of slaves, you will simply sell them to me.”
“But that’s—”
“And I will take them to Virginia, where manumission is much less stringently controlled. Once they are freed, you will return my money. At this point, you will be totally destitute and lacking in property, which appears to be your chief desire, second only to preventing any possibility of personal happiness by ensuring that you cannot marry the man you love.”
She pleated a handful of muslin between her fingers, frowning at the big sapphire that shone on her hand.
“I promised I’d listen to him first.” She cast a narrow eye at Lord John. “Though I still say it’s emotional blackmail.”
“So much more effective than any other kind,” he agreed. “Almost worth a cracked pate, to finally hold the whip hand on a Fraser.”
She ignored this.
“And I only said I’d listen. I still think when he knows everything, he’ll—he can’t.” She put a hand on her enormous belly. “You couldn’t, could you? Care—really care, I mean—for a child that wasn’t yours?”
He moved higher on the pillow, grimacing slightly.
“For the sake of its parent? I expect I could.” He opened both eyes and looked at her, smiling. “Indeed, I was under the impression that I had been doing so for some time.”
She looked momentarily blank, before a tide of pink flowed up from the scooped neck of her bodice. She was charming when she blushed.
“You mean me? Well, yes, but—I mean—I’m not a baby, and you’re not having to claim me as your own.” She gave him a direct blue look, at odds with the lingering pinkness of her cheeks. “And I did hope it wasn’t all for my father’s sake.”
He was quiet for a moment, then reached out and squeezed her hand.
“No, it wasn’t,” he said gruffly. He let go, and lay back with a small groan.
“Are you feeling worse?” she asked anxiously. “Shall I get you something? Some tea? A poultice?”
“No, it’s only the blasted headache,” he said. “The light makes it throb.” He shut his eyes again.
“Tell me,” he said without opening them, “why is it that you seem so convinced that a man could not care for a child unless it were the fruit of his loins? As it is, my dear, I did not mean to refer to you when I said I had been doing such a thing myself. My son—my stepson—is in fact the son of my late wife’s sister. By tragic accident, both of his parents died within a day of each other, and my wife Isobel and her parents raised him from babyhood. I married Isobel when Willie was six or so. So you see, there is no blood between us at all—and yet were any man to impugn my affection for him, or to say he is not my son, I would call him out on the instant for it.”
“I see,” she said, after a moment. “I didn’t know that.” He cracked an eyelid; she was still twisting her ring, looking pensive.
“I think…” she began, and glanced at him. “I think I’m not so worried about Roger and the baby. If I’m honest—”
“Heaven forfend you should be otherwise,” he murmured.
“If I’m honest,” she went on, glowering at him, “I think I’m worried more about how it would be between us—between Roger and me.” She hesitated, then took the plunge.
“I didn’t know Jamie Fraser was my father,” she said. “Not all the time I was growing up. After the Rising, my parents were separated; they each thought the other was dead. And so my mother married again. I thought Frank Randall was my father. I didn’t find out otherwise until after he died.”
“Ah.” He viewed her with increased interest. “And was this Randall cruel to you?”
“No! He was…wonderful.” Her voice broke slightly, and she cleared her throat, embarrassed. “No. He was the best father I could have had. It’s just that I thought my parents had a good marriage. They cared for each other, they respected each other, they—well, I thought everything was fine.”
Lord John scratched at his bandages. The doctor had shaved his head, a condition which, in addition to affronting his vanity, itched abominably.
“I fail to see the difficulty, as applied to your present situation.”
She heaved a huge sigh.
“Then my father died, and…we found out that Jamie Fraser was still alive. My mother went to join him, and then I came. And—it was different. I saw how they looked at each other. I never saw her look at Frank Randall that way—or him at her.”
“Ah, yes.” A small gust of bleakness swept through him. He’d seen that look once or twice; the first time, he had wanted desperately to put a knife through Claire Randall’s heart.
“Do you know how rare such a thing is?” he asked quietly. “That peculiar sort of mutual passion?” The one-sided kind was common enough.
“Yes.” She had half turned, her arm along the back of the love seat, and was looking out through the French doors, over the burgeoning spread of the spring flower beds below.
“The thing is—I think I had it,” she said, even more quietly. “For a little while. A very little while.” She turned her head and looked at him, with eyes that let him see clear through her.
“If I’ve lost it—then I have. I can live with that—or without it. But I won’t live with an imitation of it. I couldn’t stand that.”
* * *
“It looks like you may get me by default.” Brianna put the breakfast tray over his lap and collapsed heavily into the love seat, making the joints groan.