with a calico shirt so faded that the red flowers on it were nearly the same color as the brown background. Neither water nor sun would make any difference, and he would look just the same wet or dry—while she would look like a drowned rat all day, and an immodest drowned rat at that, shift and dress half transparent with water and sticking to her.
The casual thought coincided with Ian’s buckling of his belt, and the movement drew her eye to the flap of his linen breechclout—or, rather, to where it had been before he raised it to pull it over his belt.
She drew in her breath audibly and he looked up at her, surprised.
“Eh?”
“Never mind,” she said, her face going hot despite the cool water. But he looked down, following the direction of her gaze, and then looked back, right into her eyes, and she had a strong impulse to jump straight into the water, damage to her wardrobe notwithstanding.
“Are ye bothered?” he said, eyebrows raised, as he plucked at the wet cloth of his breechclout, then dropped the flap.
“No,” she said with dignity. “I’ve seen one before, thee knows. Many of them. Just not . . .” Not one with which I am soon to be intimately acquainted. “Just not . . . yours.”
“I dinna think it’s anything out o’ the ordinary,” he assured her gravely. “But ye can look, if ye like. Just in case. I wouldna want ye to be startled, I mean.”
“Startled,” she repeated, giving him a look. “If thee thinks I am under any illusions about either the object or the process, after living for months in a military camp . . . I doubt I shall be shocked, when the occasion a—” She broke off, a moment too late.
“Rises,” he finished for her, grinning. “I think I’ll be verra disappointed if ye’re not, ken?”
IN SPITE OF the hot blush, which seemed to run from her scalp straight down into her nether regions, she didn’t begrudge him fun at her expense. Anything that made him smile like that was balm to her own spirit.
He’d been deeply oppressed, ever since the dreadful news of the ship’s sinking had come, and while he’d borne up with a stoicism she thought natural to both Highlanders and Indians, saying little about it, he hadn’t tried to hide his desolation from her, either. She was glad of that, despite her own sadness for Mr. Fraser, for whom she had a deep respect and affection.
She did wonder about Ian’s mother and how she might have got on with that lady. At the best, she might have had a mother again herself—and that would have been a great blessing. She hadn’t been expecting the best, though; she doubted that Jenny Murray would have been any more pleased at the notion of her son marrying a Friend than a Quaker meeting might be to hear of Rachel’s intention of marrying a man of blood—and a Catholic, to boot. She wasn’t sure which of those would be more cause for consternation but was sure that Ian’s tattoos would pale in contrast to his affiliation with the Pope.
“How shall we be wed, d’ye think?” Ian, who had been walking in front of her to push branches out of her way, paused and turned to let her come alongside, the path here being wide enough to walk abreast for a little.
“I don’t know,” she told him frankly. “I think I cannot in good conscience be baptized Catholic, no more than you in good conscience could live as a Friend.”
“Do Friends marry only other Friends, then?” One side of his mouth curled. “I’d think the choice might be a bit sparse. Or d’ye all end up marrying your cousins?”
“They marry other Friends or they get put out of meeting,” she told him, ignoring the gibe about cousins. “With rare exceptions. A marriage between a Friend and a non-Friend might be allowed in case of dire circumstance—after a committee on clearness had conferred with both bride and groom—but it’s rare. I fear that even Dorothea may have difficulty, in spite of her very evident sincerity of conversion.”
Ian laughed at thought of Denny’s fiancée. Lady Dorothea Jacqueline Benedicta Grey was no one’s notion of a demure Quaker—though, for that matter, Rachel thought that anyone who supposed female Friends to be demure had never met one.
“Have ye asked Denny what they mean to do?”
“I haven’t,” she admitted. “To tell the truth, I am somewhat afraid to ask.”
Ian’s feathery