Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(56)

“Hell,” he muttered. He pulled her onto his lap. His mouth covered hers as though driven to shut off, not only her prattle, but all her thoughts of any but himself. And mayhap his own misgivings.

And its ferociousness did just that, with his mustache abrading her mouth. Why . . . why, this was more invasive and more stomach-dropping than any mere lip kiss. And, crikey, if her tongue didn’t go and betray her good senses to couple and mate with his.

But then his kiss softened, explored, as if searching for something invaluably necessary to him. She sank into the lulling sensations of that transmuting kiss. His hands cradling her face, his thumbs lapped so close at the corners of her lips that they constrained his questioning and questing mouth.

His kiss was something different, different from that of Gideon’s bluffing one and Giorgio’s boyish one. Something that scoured the barnacles of grief and rage lining her heart’s cavity. Now, she understood the justification behind foolish, romantic songs and moving pictures.

Needing more, she slipped her arms up his chest to entwine behind his neck. Like a hatchling, she tilted her face up to be sustained by his life-nourishing mouth. Without ceasing dispensing his possessive kisses over her lids, her cheeks, her temples, he shifted her body, lowering her onto the mattress beneath him.

Its springs squeaked intrusively; still, she gave herself over to this splendid sensation of his mouth, his weight, his hands. There was nothing impersonal about this as had been the Nazi examination, and exposing herself to this pleasuring was almost more than her untried body could tolerate.

As his lips scoured kisses from her heated cheeks, along her jawbone, and down the column of her neck, which arched to welcome his touch as a sunflower arched to sunshine, she lost all sense of time and place and coherent thought.

Until, those fingers found her headscarf’s knot at her nape. She shrank from him, trying to twist aside. “Nay, please!”

“Yes,” he growled, his arm underneath her shoulders snatching her back, directly beneath his heavy weight. She could hear his frustration, turned on himself, as if disgusted with his lack of constraint. “No handkerchief with its surprise rabbit beneath, Romy, or ace card up your sleeve this time. Just you. Show me what you do.”

At that, he stripped off her shield’s negligent fabric. Her freed locks tumbled into his hands. They grasped her mass of curls like they were a life buoy. His face buried in the hollow of her neck, his lips scalded her skin, and his fingers tunneled through the riotous ringlets at her temples – and, alas, stopped short at encountering that shriveled appendage.

On one elbow, he raised above her, his head cocked, with the lantern light reflecting a disturbing yellow in his puzzled, midnight blue eyes.

Mortified, her lids lowered, her eyes staring sightlessly at the fine black hair that whorled at his throat where his soft cambric shirt fell open. In merciless slow motion, his fingers slid aside her swath of concealing hair.

She, whose agile body was so animate, so freely moving, lay there as stiff as a three-hour-old corpse beset with rigor mortis.

“What . . . how did this happen?”

How not to sound mawkish? “Well, ye see,” she exposited, “in some parts of Czechoslovakia tis permissible to cut off the right ear of a Gypsy woman. In other parts, tis the left ear. Our vardo took a wrong turn and just happened to land me and me grandfather in the wrong part of Czechoslovakia at the wrong time.”

At his silence, she risked peering up, dreading seeing either revulsion or pity. His face was filled with fury, but his voice marveled low, “What a little scrapper you are, Romy Sonnenschein.”

She would have been all right if he had just left it at that; but, no, he had to dip his head and brush the mutilated place with lips that lingered. Suddenly, she could not breathe, as his tongue traced her ear’s damaged contours.

Her chest, her throat, her mouth flooded with salt water too long dammed. It geysered upward, stinging her nostrils, and gushed over her lids in a raging and raucous torrent.

His hands with their long fingers cupping her bony shoulders, spanned the entirety of her narrow back. He gathered her spasm-wracked body against his. Her wet face was muffled against his blue shirt’s wash-worn fabric. Her seismic slobbering and sniffling and blubbering nigh washed it again.

As if gentling her, he stroked her spine, from her nape, beneath her unbound hair, down to the small of her waist. “Go ahead. Sob your heart out, Sunshine.”

She did just that. Cried until, surely, she was empty, drained of shame and pain and suffering.

And then he began the sacrament of refilling her. Rolling her beneath him, his large body covered hers and shut out the insanity of her world. He kissed moist lids and lashes, smoothed back damp hair from her forehead and temples, and this time nuzzled both ears.

Deeply, she inhaled. He smelled fresh and life renewing, so vastly different from that of a charnel house. Her starving lips trailed from below his beard-stubbled and scruffy jawline to nestle at the conjuncture of his broad collarbones.

“I think I found me power again,” she mumbled, her head tilted, her lips pressed against the thick, ropy cords of his neck.

“Power, magic, illusions,” his shallow breath caught at her tongue wandering tongue, “whatever it is you wield, Sunshine, keep right at it.”

“Stay with me, Duke. Hold me. I need you to keep yuir arms around me. Now.”

His callused hands framed her face. “All night, if you want, Sunshine.”