Outlander 03 - Voyager

between her legs.

“Oh!” she said. “Oh, please! You can’t! I don’t want you to!”

[Fine time to start making protests, I thought.]

“Don’t worry, mi amor. Trust me.”

Gradually, little by little, she relaxed under the touch of his hypnotic caresses, feeling the warmth in her stomach grow and spread. His lips brushed her breast, and his hot breath, murmuring reassurances, took away all her resistance. As she relaxed, her thighs opened without her willing it. Moving with infinite slowness, his engorged shaft teased aside the membrane of her innocence…

I let out a whoop and lost my grasp on the book, which slid off my lap and fell on the floor with a plop near Dr. Abernathy’s feet.

“Excuse me,” I murmured, and bent to retrieve it, my face flaming. As I came up with The Impetuous Pirate in my sweaty grasp, though, I saw that far from preserving his usual austere mien, Dr. Abernathy was grinning widely.

“Let me guess,” he said. “Valdez just teased aside the membrane of her innocence?”

“Yes,” I said, breaking out into helpless giggling again. “How did you know?”

“Well, you weren’t too far into it,” he said, taking the book from my hand. His short, blunt fingers flicked the pages expertly. “It had to be that one, or maybe the one on page 73, where he laves her pink mounds with his hungry tongue.”

“He what?”

“See for yourself.” He thrust the book back into my hands, pointing to a spot halfway down the page.

Sure enough, “…lifting aside the coverlet, he bent his coal-black head and laved her pink mounds with his hungry tongue. Tessa moaned and…” I gave an unhinged shriek.

“You’ve actually read this?” I demanded, tearing my eyes away from Tessa and Valdez.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, the grin widening. He had a gold tooth, far back on the right side. “Two or three times. It’s not the best one, but it isn’t bad.”

“The best one? There are more like this?”

“Sure. Let’s see…” He rose and began digging through the pile of tattered paperbacks on the table. “You want to look for the ones with no covers,” he explained. “Those are the best.”

“And here I thought you never read anything but Lancet and the Journal of the AMA,”I said.

“What, I spend thirty-six hours up to my elbows in people’s guts, and I want to come up here and read ‘Advances in Gallbladder Resection?’ Hell, no—I’d rather sail the Spanish Main with Valdez.” He eyed me with some interest, the grin still not quite gone. “I didn’t think you read anything but The New England Journal of Medicine, either, Lady Jane,” he said. “Appearances are deceiving, huh?”

“Must be,” I said dryly. “What’s this ‘Lady Jane’?”

“Oh, Hoechstein started that one,” he said, leaning back with his fingers linked around one knee. “It’s the voice, that accent that sounds like you just drank tea with the Queen. That’s what you’ve got, keeps the guys from bein’ worse than they are. See, you sound like Winston Churchill—if Winston Churchill was a lady, that is—and that scares them a little. You’ve got somethin’ else, though”—he viewed me thoughtfully, rocking back in his chair. “You have a way of talking like you expect to get your way, and if you don’t, you’ll know the reason why. Where’d you learn that?”

“In the war,” I said, smiling at his description.

His eyebrows went up. “Korea?”

“No, I was a combat nurse during the Second World War; in France. I saw a lot of Head Matrons who could turn interns and orderlies to jelly with a glance.” And later, I had had a good deal of practice, where that air of inviolate authority—assumed though it might be—had stood me in good stead against people with a great deal more power than the nursing staff and interns of Boston General Hospital.

He nodded, absorbed in my explanation. “Yeah, that makes sense. I used Walter Cronkite, myself.”

“Walter Cronkite?” I goggled at him.

He grinned again, showing his gold tooth. “You can think of somebody better? Besides, I got to hear him for free on the radio or the TV every night. I used to entertain my mama—she wanted me to be a preacher.” He smiled, half ruefully. “If I talked like Walter Cronkite where we lived in those days, I wouldn’t have lived to go to med school.”

I was liking Joe Abernathy more by the second. “I hope your mother wasn’t disappointed that you became a doctor intstead of a preacher.”

“Tell you the truth, I’m not sure,” he said, still grinning. “When I told her, she stared at me for a minute, then heaved a big sigh and said, ‘Well, at least you can get my rheumatism medicine for me cheap.’”

I laughed wryly. “I didn’t get that much enthusiasm when I told my husband I was going to be a doctor. He stared at me, and finally said if I was bored, why didn’t I volunteer to write letters for the inmates of the nursing home.”

Joe’s eyes were a soft golden brown, like toffee drops. There was a glint of humor in them as they fixed on me.

“Yeah, folks still think it’s fine to say to your face that you can’t be doing what you’re doing. ‘Why are you here, little lady, and not home minding your man and child?’” he mimicked.

He grinned wryly, and patted my hand. “Don’t worry, they’ll give it up sooner or later. They mostly don’t ask me to my face anymore why I ain’t cleanin’ the toilets, like God made me to.”