Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(57)

“When ye do the things ye do . . . I want that too,” she whispered. “I want everything ye do. All of yuirself.”

“And I don’t want to ever see you wear any damned kerchief again.”

She grinned. “Aye, aye, sire.”

With that, clothing was slowly slipped off with a reverence for revelation that made her feel special. Then, spurred on by his kisses and touches, she surrendered into synchronization with him . . . exploring, adoring, getting lost in rapture. Time slowed, and the rest of the world fell away.

His taking her into womanhood was accomplished with little pain, so ready was she for his touch, his loving. But she was not ready for the explosion ripping through her body much later. His mouth absorbed her outcry. His roaring groan followed, as he pulled from her to lathe the still-quivering muscles of her concave stomach. “Oh God, Romy!”

This time, the way he moaned her name, it was everything she could have ever wished to hear. Well, almost everything.

Drenched in sweat and slick with their juices, her replete body sought out the refuge his powerful torso and limbs afforded. She drifted, cocooned in the culmination of after-splendor.

His chin resting atop her head, he mumbled in that gravelly voice of his, “Why didn’t you warn me you had never been with a man?”

“Would it have made a difference, Duke?” she whispered, her nose buried in the damp, springy hair matting his chest.

“Damn straight it would have.”

Inside, she went still, like a doe sensing danger. “How? Why?”

“Because . . . ” she felt his shrug, “‘cause I would be just another man among many. No problem there.”

“That is what ye thought of me?” she asked in a small voice.

Challenged, he muttered, “For all I know, you might have been planning all along on my marrying you. After all, tonight was your idea.”

She bristled. “Ye think I seduced yuirself, do ye? Ye, a two-bit saddle tramp?”

Now, he was the one to bristle. “Hell, you could have been hoping I would legitimize any offspring tainted with wild Gypsy blood resulting from tonight.”

She recoiled. His contemptuous words shattered her. “I may be wounded in body, but ye are wounded in spirit, Duke McClellan.”

“This was a monumental mistake,” he muttered, rolling from her and rising from the mattress in all his naked magnificence, his body sun-browned to the low back of his waist, his muscled hips and long legs flesh pale in the lantern light but for the faint matting of hair. One hand swooped up his Levi’s, the other his shirt. “Horseplay and hired help should never be mixed.”

§ § §

Sleepy dawn sunlight poked through the kitchen’s poorly sewn curtain strips. An equally sleepy, or sleepless, Romy stood in front of the stove, flipping the boxties, the Irish potato pancake.

Young Bud peered over her shoulder. It seemed to her, he was coming of age with male rutting, dogging her every step when not out riding the range. Before, his attention had been that of adulation; now, it bespoke of an adolescent hankering.

Duke chose that moment to come into the kitchen. He took one look at her and Bud and glowered. “In case you can’t smell it, Romy, the toast is burning again, and, Bud, get your scrawny ass outside and finish up your morning chores.”

Abashed, Bud tugged on his newsboy cap and headed for the kitchen’s back door. “Sure ‘nough, Duke.”

For a long moment, she and Duke stared at one another, she turned three-quarters to his male aggressiveness. With a frown, he eyed her unbound hair, tumbling in abandoned corkscrews past her shoulder blades and lapping her tiny breasts.

She had the uneasy feeling he was thinking of firing her then and there. Oh, Jesus. Maybe, he had been right last night. The whole lust thing had been a mistake. Except she had never, not in her entire life, experienced anything so unbearably pleasurable, not merely her body, but her essence, her all – everything, that she was.

And that jeopardized her intrinsic core, because now that she understood one human’s unremitting need for another’s touch, she feared she could not trust herself, her own will power.

At last, he grabbed his hat from the wall peg. “The toast,” he reminded her curtly, and stalked from the kitchen.

By 7:00 a.m., the ranch hands were shoveling down the last of their eggs, bacon, and blackened toast in uneasy silence. The fiery strain could not be ignored. It arced between Duke at one end of the table and herself at its opposite.

Yet, peering at him from beneath her lashes, she would swear that not anger but heat as lustful as her own glazed his eyes.

And if Gypsies knew anything, it was lustful heat. She had sensed it coursing between her volatile parents. That same blaze that had driven them to extinguish each other in one of their jealous fits.

Within mere minutes the kitchen cleared out, and she stood there, hands on hips, surveying the table mess – and thinking of her own mess she and Duke had created. One of them obviously had to go, and it wouldn’t be Duke.

Well, begorra, if that was to be her fate, it behooved her to prepare to earn some kind of secure living – immediately.

While her Dessau Hall performance may have turned out to be a one-time wonder with the older crowd, two successive occurrences that morning pointed her future in another hopeful, or not so hopeful, direction.

First, as she was readying the breakfast clutter, Glen popped back into the kitchen. “Forgot my hat,” he said.