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“Are the lasses abed then?”
Claire put a finger to her lips as she crept down the last two steps of the staircase. “In bed,” she agreed with a grimace, “But hardly asleep.” She sighed, stepping into my open arms and dropping her forehead to my shoulder. “Eliza is fighting it with everything in her.”
I gave a soft, throaty sound of acknowledgment. Our four year old had barely been able to keep her bum in her seat at the dinner table; she kept scrambling to her knees and bouncing excitedly at her older siblings’ antics. All of the bairns only seemed to egg one another on the further the meal progressed, offering ever more outlandish ideas for what they would find under the tree come sunrise.
“Think we have Willie to thank for that. Did ye hear his wee plot to capture Father Christmas wi’ his rabbit snare?”
My wife lifted her head in mild alarm, glancing about the parlor. “No. Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, where did he put it? It would be just my luck to break my ankle.”
“I already took care of it,” I assured her, smoothing a milk-spittle-crusted curl back from her temple. “Put one of my boots in it. Thought he’d get a good laugh from the thought of the auld coot hobblin’ back to his sleigh wi’ one stocking foot.”
It got a laugh out of Claire too; she hummed with amusement, turning her smiling lips into my neck. “Very clever.”
“Aye, one of my better ideas, I thought.”
“And did you remember to take a few bites out of the apples and carrots?”
“Mmphm.” Apparently they were the favored treats for hungry reindeer, but the wee delicacies my children had left out for this ‘Father Christmas’ fellow were far more enticing to their actual father. “The biscuits and milk too.”
A sound smack landed on my shoulder, and my wife jerked back to level me with a glare. “Jamie!”
“Only two, dinna fash!” I grinned, raising my palms defensively. “I left the rest for you.”
She smacked me again for good measure, but then cuddled back into my arms, smirking. “Well, you’d better. The only way I managed to wrestle them away from the children was by telling them they were for Santa.”
“We could go make ourselves a batch now, ye ken,” I suggested, craning my neck to look back toward the empty kitchen. Mrs. Crook had long since retired for the night, but the recipe had come from Claire’s time, after all; it was one of the few legacies she had from her mother, carefully handwritten from memory with quill and parchment to preserve for our own children. If our housekeeper had been bemused at the concept of cutting wee buttery biscuits into the shape of evergreen trees, she had wisely kept her thoughts about strange sassenach traditions to herself.
“Well…” A look I knew all too well passed over my wife’s face — promise glittering in the inky black of her pupils. She trailed a fingertip languidly up the length of my sternum, her bottom lip disappearing between her teeth as she circled the topmost button of my shirt. “I had a few other ideas about what we might do with our Christmas Eve…”
“Oh, aye?” I murmured, taking hold of her hips and beginning to sway her from side to side.
“Aye,” she whispered, her breath warm on my lips.
I obliged her with a delicate kiss, but barely grazed her mouth before pulling back. “Weel, before we get too involved in these… wee ideas of yers…” I nudged her nose affectionately with mine, my smile blooming wider. “I have a present for ye.”
Claire’s eyes went round. “Jamie! I thought we’d agreed no presents this year. I don’t… I didn’t get anything for you!”
Christ, she truly had no idea. After all this time, I would have thought that perhaps she was keeping her suspicions from me — but then, my wife was utterly incapable of lying. She simply didn’t know.
It never failed to confound me.
Shaking my head faintly at her, I smiled until I felt my eyes crinkle, pecked her lips one last time, and went to open the small, ornately carved wooden box sitting on the mantle.
Claire went pale as I turned back to her, her throat constricting with a visible swallow.
“I… I’m still nursing,” she hedged. “That’s why I haven’t…”
“Mmphm, that’s what ye said wi’ Alex.”
“No I didn’t—”
“And Ellen.”
She opened and closed her mouth, looking up at me with rapidly filling eyes as I came to stand in front of her again. “I’m forty-five, Jamie. You… you really think…?”
We’d lost one, just over a year ago. Early, unlike Faith — but wanted, loved just the same. Claire had sobbed in my arms, insisting that she must be too old for any more babies, even as she cradled our healthy, bonnie five-month-old to her breast.
“I’m certain,” I assured her, brushing the pad of my thumb over her cheek. “I was certain two months ago, Sassenach.” At her incredulous look, I chuckled softly. “Have I been wrong yet?”
“No,” she admitted, her eyes slowly dragging down to her hands as they settled low over her belly.
A beat of stunned silence passed before a breath of a laugh caught in her throat. “So I…” She looked up at me with a wavering smile, and tears glittering in her eyes. “I suppose I do have a gift for you after all.”
“Aye,” I agreed softly, laying my right hand over hers, and holding up the delicate silver figurine of Saint Bartholomew with the left.
The last in the box.
Beaming into a kiss, I whispered, “One for each spoon.”