Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(85)
“Ye’re angry,” lilted that soft brogue from behind him.
His hunkered body swiveled on its boot heels. She was propped on a forearm, her expression beseeching. What did she want from him? “Hell, yes, I’m angry. I am angrier than I have ever been.” And sadder. And elated and deflated. “Hell’s bells, Romy, you’ve busted me every which way but loose of you.”
She held up an arm, slender as a flower stem where the lab coat sleeve had slipped down, and his jacket slid off onto the deck. “Warm meself, Duke.”
He knew they were both in a very dangerous state, not only physically but emotionally. They were both inclined to recklessness and could easily tune out the rest of life and everything that had been important to them.
And, of course, Ireland was important to her. As were her own people. These damned gypsy tinkers and Traveller horse traders.
For him, well, hadn’t he always wanted, desperately wanted it seemed to him, a family . . . wife and children. And, at last, he had found all that in Charlotte.
In sight was a respectability that had not been accorded his battered mom and psycho pops.
Romy fit nowhere in that scheme.
And yet he had thrown away all sound planning based on his hopes and wishes and dreams in trade for this one burning desire that transcended everything. With every pore of his body, with every aspect of his soul, blemished as it was, he was afire and yet at peace, all because of this ridiculous morsel of humanity hovering ever nearby.
He rose, carefully stooping once more, and moved the few steps to the bench and her open arms. Her lab coat joined his suede jacket on the floor. His boots mingled with her matronly heels.
A sweet delirious hunger conquered his caution and mind’s lecturing. A ravenous hunger it was becoming.
He hauled her beneath him. All he wanted to do was hold her forever, but both knew that would never happen. He let himself sink into her, between her slender, welcoming thighs, so there was nothing but her sweet mouth, her warming body. When she reached below for his denim’s placket, he stared down at her. “This is what you want?”
“Aye. Today, I ask for no more for meself but this. And yuirself? Am I enough?”
He silenced her fearful question with his ravaging mouth. Her arms slipped up over his shoulders and around his neck, holding him tightly to her. At that moment, despite the howling of the storm outside, barreling down on the barge, and the danger of discovery by the SS, he wanted her above all else, all other consideration.
“But what about later?” he asked himself – and realized he had voiced aloud that nagging doubt.
The green pools of her eyes pleaded with him. “There is no later for the likes of me, Duke.”
Her hands released his neck and gripped his hips to mold with hers. His hands easily aligned her face, searching it for what he knew not, then plowed into her wealth of hair, holding her his captive in that tiny cell.
While the wind buffeted the barge, she trembled beneath him, her rapture fusing with his. Rain roared on the deckhouse’s tin roof. The storm’s fury only served to reinforce their intimacy. Preliminaries were needless. They made love as if it were the first time – and would be the last.
Life rushed through his veins, finally. After years of dormancy. And she answered that questing life, kiss for desperate kiss, thrust for life-giving thrust.
With wonder in her eyes, she first shattered with their lovemaking. He followed all too quickly with a groaning outpour that seemed to vibrate that small cabin.
In spite of the cold seeping inside it, they lay nude, with their sweating limbs meshed. Cradling her against him, he leaned partially over her.
As if his hand could heal, it cupped the left side of her head, his palm mounding the maimed shell of her ear. His other palmed her concave stomach. “Did the lab doctor, the man you killed . . . was he responsible . . . for sterilizing you.?” He was surprised to find his voice raw with another kind of passion. Rage.
“Aye,” she verified softly. “The Angel of Death. He and Klauffen, the two haunt me down in me dreams . . . ye know, the kind of stuff nightmares are made of.”
“Klauffen?”
“Colonel Klauffen.” She shuddered, and her small, trembling hand alit on the back of his, splayed across the narrow span of her belly. “He was a captain then. Set his German Shepherds loose on Luca and meself. We ran like the Hounds of Hell were after us. And they were – they picked up our scents twenty minutes later and several miles away. Trapped us in a Prague alleyway, Klauffen did.”
So, that was the reason for her fear of dogs, she who feared nothing else. “Then it was he who delivered you over to the Angel of Death,” he concluded.
A small grin curved that mouth he took such delight in. “Not afore I blinded one of Klauffen’s eyes with me bare two fingers.”
Imagining her gutsy spirit, he had to smile.
Her grin faded. “Klauffen, he is commandant now at Sachsenhausen. The bastard never goes anywhere without his beasts – and he never gives up till he has ye groveling. Me prayers are that one day those bloody dogs of his will turn on him and rip off his bollocks.”
He chuckled. “You are, without a doubt, the young woman with the fiery spirt you predicted for me in the card layout.”
She peered up at him from beneath lashes that carefully guarded the expression in her eyes, then she ducked her head. “Do ye ever get over yuir first time with someone?” she whispered against the heated skin cresting his collarbones. Her fingertips rubbed the damp hair haloing one of his nipples.