The girl was naked, too. She lay curled on her side, back to him, smooth and pale as a smelt on a fishmonger’s slab. He crawled cautiously onto the bed and eased himself down beside her. She shifted and murmured, but didn’t wake.

The air was much cooler now, with dawn coming on and the shutters ajar. He would have covered himself, but the girl was lying on the rumpled sheet. She shifted again, and he saw the gooseflesh prickling over her skin. She was thinner even than she had seemed the night before, ribs shadowing her sides and the shoulder blades sharp as wings in her bony little back.

He turned on his side and drew her against him, fumbling with one hand to disentangle the damp sheet and draw it over them both—as much to cover her skinniness as for its dubious warmth.

Her loosened hair was thick and curly, soft against his face. The feel of it disturbed him, though it was a moment before he realized why. She’d had hair like that—the Woman. Fraser’s wife. Grey knew her name—Fraser had told him—and yet he stubbornly refused to think of her as anything but “the Woman.” As though it were her fault—and the fault of her sex alone, at that.

But that was in another country, he thought, pulling the scrawny whore closer to him, and besides, the wench is dead. Fraser had said so.

He’d seen the look in Jamie Fraser’s eyes, though. Fraser had not ceased to love his wife merely because she was dead—no more than Grey could or would cease to love Hector. Memory was one thing, though, and flesh another; the body had no conscience.

He wrapped one arm over the girl’s fine-boned form, holding her tight against him. Nearly breastless, and narrow-arsed as a boy, he thought, and felt a tiny flame of desire, wine-fueled, lick up the insides of his thighs. Why not? he thought. He was paying for it, after all.

But, I’m a person, no? she’d said. And she was neither of the persons he longed for.

He closed his eyes, and kissed the shoulder near his face, very gently. Then he slept again, drifting on the troubled clouds of her hair.

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Green Velvet

He woke to broad daylight and a rumbling stir in the brothel below. The girl was gone—no, not gone. He rolled over and saw her by the window, dressed in her shift, her lips pressed tight in concentration as she plaited her hair, using the reflection in the chamber pot as her looking glass.

“Awake at last, are ye?” she asked, squinting at her reflection. “Thought I might need to poke a darning needle under your toenail to rouse ye.” Tying a red ribbon at the end of her plait, she turned and grinned at him.

“Ready for a bit o’ breakfast, then, chuck?”