Dragonfly In Amber

You'll lie wi' me now," he said quietly. "And I shall use ye as I must. And if you'll have your revenge for it, then take it and welcome, for my soul is yours, in all the black corners of it."

and the damp heat of him engulfed me like the breath of a monsoon.

Drag you over the edge and drain you to a gasping husk. I can drive you to the edge of collapse and sometimes I delight in it, Jamie, I do! And yet so often I want"—my voice broke suddenly and I had to swallow hard before continuing—"I want… to hold your head against my breast and cradle you like a child and comfort you to sleep.'

Despite the good offices of the Earl of Mar and the other Paris Jacobites, Louis was stubbornly refusing to receive Charles at Court. And a penniless exile who was not in the King's favor was not going to find himself invited out in society to make the acquaintance of wealthy bankers.

There was no coat of arms or other decoration on the equipage's door; Monsieur Forez was not of the nobility—must be a rich bourgeois, I thought.

Jamie Fraser had spent two years in the army of France, fought and stolen with a gang of Scottish "broken men," and been hunted as an outlaw through the moors and mountains of his native land. All of which had left him with an extreme sensitivity to the sensation of being followed.

"But I talk to you as I talk to my own soul,"

And what's wrong wi' the way ye smell?" he said heatedly. "At least ye smelt like a woman, not a damn flower garden. What d'ye think I am, a man or a bumblebee? Would ye wash yourself, Sassenach, so I can get within less than ten feet of ye?"

That tea is so high, we won't need to eat for weeks," she said. "It looks wonderful!"

"My whisky-eyed lass, my love. Let me take ye to bed."