Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(55)

Her people. He sighed. And his people? A close-knit family was definitely not what he would have called his own family.

As talkative as Romy had been at the Dessau Hall table with Goldman, she was as conversely silent on the drive back to S&S. Which was just fine by him. One thing that drove him to distraction was a yappy woman.

But somehow her silence made him feel shut out.

§ § §

Hands clasped behind his neck and barefoot, Duke sat back on the porch steps and stared up at the stars burning holes into black velvet. He supposed that was why he never considered the years at sea a complete loss. Because at night, they burned as hotly as they did over the West Texas Hill Country.

As his body was burning. Burning up with wanting.

He thought of all those lost years when he would yearn for home. He had left home a wild, undisciplined, rebellious, no-good fourteen-year-old, if his gin-stupored old man’s damning charges were anything to go by, and they probably were.

But for almost three years, between ten and thirteen, while his pa was away fighting the Jerries, he had been the man of the house to his ailing mother. He had not been ready for his pa to return home and try to tell him what he was doing wrong.

After his ma’s death, it had seemed a good time to strike out on his own. With the advent of the Great War, the value of livestock had more than doubled, and afterwards cowhands had been in great demand in Texas.

Riding the range for a short period and the waves for far too long, he had, finally, come home to start over. Perhaps all those years of wandering had made him a magnet for others like himself. All his hands were drifters, some of them rail riders, most likely here today and gone tomorrow.

Except for Romy. She was like a tick, attaching itself to his life’s blood. Here he was, just now getting on his feet, only to have that Gypsy waif turn everything topsy-turvy.

That evening, the wind was still gusty, and if he listened hard enough, he could hear the old house groaning. And at the banging of the screen door, he wanted to groan, too. He knew without looking around it was the thorn in his side.

A moment later, Romy’s wraith-like body slipped down to sit next to him on the step, but not touching him. A plaid enwrapped her bony shoulders. “Tis bloody cold out here,” she said softly.

“I hadn’t noticed.” His clasped fingers knotted even tighter behind his nape. His gaze was not so easily reined in. Peripherally. he eyed her delicate profile . . . the fistful of buttermilk-yellow curls that poked from beneath her head kerchief and trailed like wisteria vines down the slope of her pale neck, her upper teeth that worried her lower lip, as plump as the down cover he had snuggled beneath as a boy.

She reached out a small hand, tentatively touched where his Levi’s had ripped out at the knee. Reflexively, his knee jerked the way it did when docs did their examinations with their silly little rubber hammers. “Come to bed, Duke.”

His heart skipped a beat, and he broke out in an immediate sweat. So, there it was. Caesar’s Rubicon. The point-of-no-return. That moment of truth.

His large hand engulfed hers, now intentionally capping his knee. No electrifying bolts from heaven. But something even more disturbing. A warming flash of need that suffused his body through and through. A need that went deeper, that was more pervading, than even nature’s overpowering sexual impetus.

He pulled her up by her hand from the step and, bending, hooked one arm beneath her knees to cradle her slight, compliant body up against his chest.

As his old man would warn, he was hell bent for leather.





§ CHAPTER FOURTEEN §




Candles, crystal balls, cards – they were all tricks of the Gypsy trade. But it was neither candle nor glaring light bulb but a kerosene lantern’s amber glow that Romy counted on to ease the crossing of this bridge – and, as adventures went, she knew not what awaited on the other side.

A risky crossing it was, but she had to get beyond her mind’s incoherent jabbering, her lower stomach’s stupid seizures, her betraying palsied hands as she turned the lantern’s wick low.

She had to get to that side of the bridge where the Order of Womanhood was not a novelty to her. Once inducted, she would, as usual, adjust; she would regain her Gypsy’s natural sense of direction, and move on with life, wherever its road took her.

She turned back to Duke, where he sat, waiting and watching, on her mattress – well, his mattress, if proprietorship was a factor. What did she do now?

“Okay, Romy,” he breathed, holding out his hand – and she crossed the few steps to lay her damp one in his palm, but approached no closer. “I am tired of your Gypsy wiles.”

He drew her to stand between his legs. His huge hand cupped her quavering chin and forced her to look at him, on eye level with her, sitting though he was. “I want the real deal.”

Cripes! “Err, Duke, I . . .uhh . . . what ye see is what ye – “

“I know, you’re going to tell me you’ve never been kissed.”

“Well, there was Giorgio, that once. But he and I were betrothed,” she rattled on. “We were only fourteen, and that isna the same as . . . as what you and I are –”

He frowned impatiently. “And don’t forget that brotherly kiss Gideon gave you in Galveston.”

From out of nowhere, something new burgeoned, that primitive instinct in her femininity that had somehow, someway, been delayed. A small but knowing smile tipped her lips. “Why dunna ye do what ye’re wanting, Duke.”