Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(87)
He leaped into the ankle-deep water and then, turning to lift her by the waist, swung her ashore.
“Babelsberg,” she said urgently, “the village, it is only a few miles down the river road. I know the highways and byways around here. We can –”
“Nope. In the open is not where we want to be right now, Sunshine. We want the dark to work in our favor.” He fished out the vaseline tube and, squeezing out some ointment into his fingertips, began smearing it on her cheeks.
“What are ye doing?” She twisted within his hold, unsuccessfully dodging his determined hand. “We need to be on our way, Duke!”
Ignoring her, he next knelt before her and ran his fingers beneath her skirt up her calf.
“Are ye daft?” she screeched, trying to thrust off his frisking hand.
“Dogs don’t track human scents as much as they do our skin cells.” With a modicum of motion, he finished lathering both her slender legs. “The vaseline’ll keep us from shedding those skin cells – for a while, at least – and it’ll, also, protect our skin against the brush.”
He began smudging his own exposed skin, and she asked dubiously, “Brush?”
Rapidly, he slipped the rope from his shoulder and looped one end around his waist. “You may know the highways and byways, but I know the backways of any woods.”
With eyes wide, she stared at his fingers as they quickly, efficiently, knotted the rope’s other end in a bowline around her waist before she could wriggle from him.
“This way we don’t lose each other in the dark. If you start to wear out, hang on and let me haul you along.” Which meant his taking the brunt of the whipping branches and bushes. “Try and watch where you plant your feet.”
With that, he plunged into the shoreline’s dark forest. He ran with a lengthy, striding gait, its pace punishing. Up a steep slope, across the narrow river road, and back into the forest on the other side. Through a clawing thicket, over a fallen tree. Once the rope jerked, and he turned and retraced his steps to find she had fallen.
“No time to be lollygagging,” he chided.
“Gobshite,” she muttered.
He heaved her upright, and set out again, not breaking his pace. The sound of dogs’ excited barking came now from behind. Far behind but drawing ever nearer.
He was dragging Romy, like it or not. At another jerk on the rope, indicating a probably stumble, came her yelped, “Fockin’ ballsch!”
Fortunately, after that the rope maintained its slack. Amazingly, she was making an as good as could be expected attempt at keeping up with his lengthy strides and sprinting pace.
While dogs were good sprinters and could travel for hours at a walking pace, they were not good long distance runners and would tire and overheat before he and Romy did.
He hoped.
Most fortuitously, his blue eyes gave him better night vision – which was why he hunted feral hogs best at night. Nonetheless, a straggling thicket clutched at his Levi’s, bringing him into a tumbling roll.
Seconds later, Romy was there, squatting over him with both concern and humor lighting her eyes. “Tis not the time to be a lazybones, me luv.”
He had to give it to her, that she could manage a sense of humor, when all the horrors of her past cohered now into demon dogs hunting her down. She was emotionally reckless. An out of control train barreling down upon some poor unsuspecting male
And she was a paradox – a free-spirited Gypsy seesawing with a mystic-martyr in a hair shirt. Therein was in his romantic delirium.
Throughout the night, he and Romy ran through forests reminiscent of Grimm’s awful fairy tales. But running in cowboy boots and club heels gave the advantage to the dogs and their handlers in flat-soled military boots.
The baying of the canines grew ever closer. Just as he was about to call a halt for shucking their foot gear, he burst out of the forest into a fading, starlit sky – and a river as formidable as China’s Great Wall.
Romy almost bumped into him, and he noted she had already lost one shoe. She leaned over, hands on her knees to catch her breath. Despite the cold, sweat sheened her face. “A tributary of the Havel,” she wheezed. “Brandenburg is not too far on the other side.”
Thirty feet wide at the most and probably no more than hip deep, but rampant with rapids, the river was banked on either side by three to four-foot rock bluffs – and tree-lined on its far side. He shoved his leaf-tangled hair from his forehead and stared at the impassable river. “Sunnufabitch.”
At that expletive, she straightened, hands on hips. Her hair was a rat’s nest, dirt was plastered to the vaseline coating her face, and his filthy jacket would better dress a scarecrow.
No woman had ever looked more beautiful.
One of her hands slipped beneath his rawhide jacket to the pocket of her blood-smeared lab coat and dragged forth his derringer. “I’ll shoot meself, Duke, afore I allow Klauffen to make me a Nazi guinea pig again.”
Breaking dawn showed the desperation in her pixie’s face, and his gut wrenched at her soul’s awful pain he was witnessing. “Put it away! He’s not taking you on my watch.”
Dangerous rapids offered a means of slowing down a dog team – but also meant the very real probability of his and Romy’s being swept away and drowning or being bashed against a boulder. But what other choice was there?