“Off with ye, then,” he told Fergus. “Come and find me when you’re safe back, so I’ll know ye havena been taken up by the police or the landlord of the tavern.”

Fergus wrinkled his nose scornfully at such an idea, but nodded, tucking the letter carefully inside his smock before disappearing down the back stair toward the night that was both natural element and protection for him.

Jamie looked after him for a long minute, then turned to me. He truly looked at me for the first time, and his brows flew up.

“Christ, Sassenach!” he said. “You’re pale as my sark! Are ye all right?”

“Just hungry,” I said.

He rang at once for supper, and we ate it before the fire, while I told him about Louise. Rather to my surprise, while he knit his brows over the situation and muttered uncomplimentary things under his breath in Gaelic about both Louise and Charles Stuart, he agreed with my solution to the problem.

“I thought you’d be upset,” I said, scooping up a mouthful of succulent cassoulet with a bit of bread. The warm, bacon-spiced beans soothed me, filling me with a sense of peaceful well-being. It was cold and dark outside, and loud with the rushing of the wind, but it was warm and quiet here by the fire together.

“Oh, about Louise de La Tour foisting a bastard on her husband?” Jamie frowned at his own dish, running a finger around the edge to pick up the last of the juice.

“Well, I’m no verra much in favor of it, I’ll tell ye, Sassenach. It’s a filthy trick to play on a man, but what’s the poor bloody woman to do otherwise?” He shook his head, then glanced at the desk across the room and smiled wryly.

“Besides, it doesna become me to be takin’ a high moral stand about other people’s behavior. Stealing letters and spying and trying generally to subvert a man my family holds as King? I shouldna like to have someone judging me on the grounds of the things I’m doing, Sassenach.”

“You have a damn good reason for what you’re doing!” I objected.

He shrugged. The firelight flickering on his face hollowed his cheeks and threw shadows into the orbits of his eyes. It made him look older than he was; I tended to forget that he was not quite twenty-four.

“Aye, well. And Louise de La Tour has a reason, too,” he said. “She wants to save one life, I want ten thousand. Does that excuse my risking wee Fergus – and Jared’s business – and you?” He turned his head and smiled at me, the light gleaming from the long, straight bridge of his nose, glowing like sapphire in the one eye turned toward the fire.

“Nay, I think I wilna lose my sleep over the need for opening another man’s letters,” he said. “It may come to much worse than that before we’ve done, Claire, and I canna say ahead of time what my conscience will stand; it’s best not to test it too soon.”

There was nothing to be said to that; it was all true. I reached out and laid my hand against his cheek. He laid his own hand over mine, cradling it for a moment, then turned his head and gently kissed my palm.

“Well,” he said, drawing a deep breath and returning to business. “Now that we’ve eaten, shall we have a look at this letter?”

The letter was coded; that much was obvious. To foil possible interceptors, Jamie explained.

“Who would want to intercept His Highness’s mail?” I asked. “Besides us, I mean.”

Jamie snorted with amusement at my naiveté.

“Almost anyone, Sassenach. Louis’s spies, Duverney’s spies, Philip of Spain’s spies. The Jacobite lords and the ones who think they might turn Jacobite if the wind sets right. Dealers in information, who dinna care a fart in a breeze who lives or dies by it. The Pope himself; the Holy See’s been supporting the Stuarts in exile for fifty years – I imagine he keeps an eye on what they’re doing.” He tapped a finger on the copy I’d made of James’s letter to his son.

“The seal on this letter had been removed maybe three times before I took it off myself,” he said.

“I see,” I said. “No wonder James codes his letters. Do you think you can make out what he says?”

Jamie picked up the sheets, frowning.

“I don’t know; some, yes. Some other things, I’ve no idea. I think perhaps I can work it out, though, if I can see some other letters King James has sent. I’ll see what Fergus can do for me there.” He folded the copy and put it carefully away in a drawer, which he locked.

“Ye canna trust anyone, Sassenach,” he explained, seeing my eyes widen. “We might easily have spies among the servants.” He dropped the small key in the pocket of his coat, and held out his arm to me.

I took the candle in one hand and his arm in the other, and we turned toward the stairs. The rest of the house was dark, the servants – all but Fergus – virtuously asleep. I felt a trifle creepy, with the realization that one or more of the silent sleepers below or above might not be what they seemed.

“Doesn’t it make you feel a bit nervous?” I asked as we went up the stairs. “Never being able to trust anyone?”

He laughed softly. “Well, I wouldna say anyone, Sassenach. There’s you – and Murtagh, and my sister Jenny and her husband Ian. I’d trust the four of you wi’ my life – I have, for that matter, more than once.”

I shivered as he pulled back the drapes of the big bed. The fire had been banked for the night, and the room was growing cold.

“Four people you can trust doesn’t seem like all that many,” I said, unlacing my gown.

He pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it on the chair. The scars on his back shone silver in the faint light from the night sky outside.

“Aye, well,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s four more than Charles Stuart has.”

There was a bird singing outside, though it was long before first light. A mockingbird, practicing his trills and runs over and over, perched on a rain gutter somewhere in the dark nearby.

Moving sleepily, Jamie rubbed his cheek against the smooth skin of my freshly waxed underarm, then turned his head and planted a soft kiss in the warm hollow that sent a small, delicious shudder down my side.

“Mm,” he murmured, running a light hand over my ribs. “I like it when ye come out all gooseflesh like that, Sassenach.”

“Like this?” I answered, running the nails of my right hand gently over the skin of his back, which obligingly rippled into goose bumps under the teasing of the touch.

“Ah.”

“Ah, yourself, then,” I answered softly, doing it some more.

“Mmmm.” With a luxurious groan, he rolled to the side, wrapping his arms around me as I followed, enjoying the sudden contact of every inch of our naked skins, all down the front from head to toe. He was warm as a smothered fire, the heat of him safely banked for the night, to kindle again to a blaze in the black cold of dawn.

His lips fastened gently on one nipple, and I groaned myself, arching slightly to encourage him to take it deeper into the warmth of his mouth. My breasts were growing fuller, and more sensitive by the day; my nipples ached and tingled sometimes under the tight binding of my gowns, wanting to be suckled.

“Will ye let me do this later?” he murmured, with a soft bite. “When the child’s come, and your breasts fill wi’ milk? Will ye feed me, too, then, next to your heart?”

I clasped his head and cradled it, fingers deep in the baby-soft hair that grew thick at the base of his skull.

“Always,” I whispered.