Outlander aka Cross Stitch

“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.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank:

Jackie Cantor, Editor par excellence, whose consistent enthusiasm had so much to do with getting this story between covers; Perry Knowlton, Agent of impeccable judgment, who said, “Go ahead and tell the story the way it should be told; we’ll worry about cutting it later;” my husband, Doug Watkins, who, despite occasionally standing behind my chair, saying, “If it’s set in Scotland, why doesn’t anybody say ‘Hoot, mon?’ ” also spent a good deal of time chasing children and saying “Mommy is writing! Leave her alone!”; my daughter Laura, for loftily informing a friend, “My mother writes books!”; my son Samuel, who, when asked what Mommy does for a living, replied cautiously, “Well, she watches her computer a lot;” my daughter Je