“Are you coming?”
He paused in closing the door, his own rough tunic borrowed from Zeus rustling against the painted wood. “Ah . . . I’m just going to . . .” He pointed in the direction of a wheel.
Isra did raise her eyes to his then, and he realized at once how frightened she had been this night—not only by the man who had attacked her but by her own reaction to Fran, the news of van Groen and Fran’s relationship, their dead child. Roman himself could pretend Isra was as calm as she sounded until he looked into her eyes. Like a window into her very soul, the emotions she’d likely long ago learned to hide thrashed and wailed and relived their damnable memories. When faced with the truth in Isra’s eyes, Roman faltered.
She blinked. “You have no blanket, my lord. Everything in the cart—”
“It’s mild here,” he said, looking away from her as if he would observe the weather. He didn’t think he could be so close to her tonight.
“Then I shall sleep on the ground with you,” she announced, grasping the door ledge with both hands and beginning to reach her foot toward the dirt.
“No,” he said, reaching up to stay her. She looked at his fingers on her knee and then back into his face. He dropped his hand, his neck warming. “You’ve had a harrowing evening and—”
“As have you,” she interrupted.
“Isra, I can’t,” he said, looking up at her again. “It wouldn’t be wise.”
“Is it not time that you slept inside,” she asked levelly, but the wild emotion in her eyes were legion when she added, “with me?” She reached out with trembling fingers and touched his jaw.
His heart slowed nearly to a stop at her words, and he tried to construct an alternate meaning behind her query; some way she could have meant something besides what he wanted her to mean.
“I’m not certain you know what you’re asking me to do this night,” he pressed.
He saw the line of her throat move as she swallowed and then nodded. She backed inside once more, and Roman grasped the door frame and pulled himself inside Asa van Groen’s wagon after Isra and shut the door behind them.
He sat on his heels in the blackness until the scrape and spark of flint flashed in the dark and then the interior of the wagon was filled with a soft yellow glow and Isra was pulling a lantern up closer to the ceiling. Roman felt like a giant within the confines of the cart, as if he was looming over the small woman who mirrored his pose, her hands on her thighs.
“My costume is ruined,” she said matter-of-factly and then rose up on her knees. “I apologize for my appearance.” Her fingers began curling and uncurling against the flaxen material along her thighs until she grasped the hem of her gown in each fist. Then she pulled it up to her waist, and Roman realized the stains had penetrated all the way through her underdress, and that it was both thicknesses of material that were being peeled from the smooth, tan skin that was glowing in the lantern light. In an instant, Isra was completely nude, kneeling before him.
The crushed tunic fell from his grip as he struggled to breathe. Her body was so perfect, so marvelous in its natural state, she could have been the inspiration for sculpture.
“Is that more pleasing to you?” she asked with a bow of her head.
He forced himself to take a deep, hitching breath. “I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in all my life.”
She came toward him on her knees, her shadow self already reclining on the cot fitted into the front wall of van Groen’s cart. She reached out and placed her palms on his abdomen before leaning up and pressing her lips to his chest through the material of his shirt, hesitantly at first, but then she rolled her cheek into him and drew a deep breath through her nose.
Roman brought his hands up behind her and he looked at his palms as if seeing them in a dream. Isra was pressed to him, his hands just inches from her bare skin—and now touching her. The peaks and valleys of her shoulder blades, the pearl-strand fineness of her spine. Her skin was silk lain too long near the fire, smooth and searing and shining in the light. The smell of her like incense and bright blossoms, an offering for a flaming altar so hot that it surely must be an atonement for sin.
Was this sin?
Roman reached down and cupped the side of her jaw, turning her face toward him and then lowering his lips to hers. She answered his kiss readily, and the eagerness of her mouth made him groan in surprise. He pulled away from her.
“Isra,” he whispered. “I—”
“Shh, my lord,” she whispered against his skin, bringing one hand around the back of his neck and pulling his head toward hers once more. He could feel the trembling of her body against his. “Only tell me how you would have me first. I shall give you whatever pleasure you desire.”
He pulled her even closer before the ugly subtlety of her words penetrated his passion-absorbed mind. He tried to ignore it, wave it away as if it was no more than a passing odor on the breeze. He might have been able to disregard the elusive bit of trouble her words alluded to had she spoken no more.
“It is the least I can do for you, after all you have done for me.”
If he had jumped into the cold sea beyond the wall so close to van Groen’s wagon, his desire could not have cooled more quickly. Roman grasped Isra’s shoulders and moved her away from him, pulling her lips from his chest once more so that he could look into her wide, dark eyes, glistening with—passion? Fear? Resentment?
“Do you mean to sleep with me as . . . as payment for coming to your aid tonight?”
Her smooth forehead wrinkled with what perhaps might have been confusion. “Not only tonight, my lord. I owe you my life, many times over. I have nothing else to give you.”
Roman felt the first stirrings of anger in his gut, a new experience for him when holding a nude, willing woman.
“You’ve made a fair amount of coin with Kahn by now, have you not?” he challenged.
Now it was true confusion he saw on her face. “Yes. I . . . would you rather I give you silver? I apologize.” She crossed one arm over her bosom and sat back down on her heels, dropping her eyes as her cheeks bloomed and reaching her other arm around for Helena’s gown. “I thought it was me you wanted.”
He seized her again by her shoulders, and this time it did not matter to him whether she was clothed or not. The import of his words trumped any desire of the flesh he felt for her.
“I do want you,” he insisted, “but I don’t want to be . . . paid with your body. How could you think that of me? Of yourself?”
She turned from him as she pulled the gown up to her chest and then flipped it around her hip. “I misunderstood.”
“You misunderstood?” he pressed.
“Yes,” she said, rising up to her feet and turning toward the cot. She exchanged the gown for the coverlet, wrapping it about her in a one-shouldered manner, causing her to look even more like the work of some ancient artist come to warm life.
“I don’t believe that,” he said. “If I deserve anything this night, it’s the truth, Isra. What have I done to make you think so little of me?”
“I do not think so little of you!” she insisted and turned to face him. “It is simply what I do, Roman! You do not understand! It is what I am!”
“What?” he demanded, also gaining his feet but finding he had to bend his neck in the shallow conveyance. And so he pressed between her and the cot and sat down. “What exactly are you?”
“You know,” she said. “Everyone knows.”
“I know the living you were forced into in order to give your sister some sort of life,” he challenged. “That was what you did, not who you are.”
“There is little difference,” she said bitterly.
“I think there is a bloody lot of difference,” he said, his voice growing louder. “And it’s insulting that you liken me to a man no better than any of those you knew before.”
“No!” she said, her eyes wide as she turned to him. “You are nothing like them.”
“There was lit
tle difference between us a moment ago, was there not?” he challenged.
She stared at him for several heartbeats. “I do not know how to be with you in any other way.”
“We seemed to be doing just fine before tonight,” he said, and when she had no reply for him, he rose from the cot and shuffled to the door.
“Where are you going?” she asked, her voice tight, and Roman didn’t want to think it was with panic. Even as angry as he was, he could not cause her any further anxiety.
“Beneath the cart, as was my original intention,” he said and opened the door. But then he paused and looked back at her. “And if you still don’t mind,” he said, and reached out to seize a fold of the coverlet she had wrapped about her body and yanked. She was nude again in the next instant, but Roman averted his eyes before the magnificent sight of her flesh could warp his mind.
He hopped to the ground and slammed the wagon door behind him.
It was only after he’d situated himself with the thin blanket and settled down on his side to face the fire that he noticed old Mother still about, tending the flames. She was looking toward him and shaking her head, something of an exasperated expression on her face.
Roman shut her out by closing his eyes, but the sight that awaited him there was no better, as Isra Tak’Ahn’s bare skin glowed as brightly in his mind as the sun.
Either way, he thought it would be a very long, uncomfortable night.
* * *
Isra lay in the plush cot belonging to Asa van Groen for what seemed like hours, staring at the golden arc of light cast from the lantern she hadn’t bothered to put out. Or, rather, she hadn’t wished to be locked alone in the dark with the memories that were sure to plague her after she’d humiliated herself before Roman. The same old horrors, fertilized by fresh pain, were only just bearable in the light; she knew all too well that they were strangling in the lonely dark, where memories of colors and sounds and smells could explode in bright relief against the blackness of her mind.
At least with the lantern lit, she could keep her eyes open.
She had wanted so much for Roman to see her when he looked at her—to somehow be able to forget about her past and perhaps believe that she might be of value to him as a woman. Perhaps as his woman. But her actions had only reinforced her insignificance. Reminded him of the other men she had been forced to know.
He was right; she had treated him no differently.
Roman hadn’t understood that he was intrinsically different, though; she’d never wished to give herself to any man before him. She’d wanted to share her body with him, to give him ease, to be close to him, to show him how much he meant to her. Wasn’t that what a woman did for her man? But now she understood that even though her instinct to love him had been correct, the way she’d offered herself to him had been all wrong.
Should she have played coy? Or lain back and pretended disinterest? Those were the tales she’d heard of some wives’ behaviors. But neither one of those would have been the truth; Isra wanted to know what being had by a man you loved was like. Now she might have only the memory of the way Roman’s lips had felt on hers to try to fill the aching chasm in her heart.
Isra turned over on her side to face the door, pulling the borrowed gown down over her legs as she drew her knees up on the pallet. She had disappointed him, and he would never look at her differently now. Isra found that she wasn’t so very surprised; she didn’t think she’d ever look at herself differently.
She must have dozed, for the image she held in her mind was not a memory—small Huda, only the top of her dark head visible as she crouched in the dirt of the alley behind their apartment, playing with stones in a circle she’d drawn with her finger. Yes, that image Isra had seen many happy times, but it was the tiger pacing in circles around the little girl that made the memory a nightmare. Kahn, perhaps, saliva running from his yellowed beard, his glowing eyes watching the oblivious child hungrily.
Isra wanted to call out to the Huda in the dream, to warn her to be still, be very quiet, and perhaps the tiger wouldn’t see her. And then she remembered that that advice had failed so miserably in the waking world, and little Huda was dead. Brutally, and forever.
The child in the dream suddenly lifted her face and Isra saw the swollen eye, the bruised and bloodied mouth, the torn ear missing its jewel, as if Huda was immediately before her.
“Isra!” she cried in alarm.
Isra’s eyes snapped open as the door to the wagon was pulled wide with a whoosh of cold air.
Roman stood in the square of night, the lantern light causing him to squint.
“Hurry,” was all he said.
She didn’t question him, only pushed her legs from inside the gown and stumbled toward the door, half in, half out of her nightmare, the reality returning to her like the blast of chilly December air outside the wagon: Huda only came to her in her dreams when there was impending disaster.
Isra all but fell into his arms and he set her on her bare feet in the dirt, the tiny pieces of crushed shell and sand that comprised the soil biting into her softened instep. Roman pulled her into a run as they crossed the fire circle and dashed toward the tall wagon that was lit up by torches now.
Kahn’s cage, Zeus and the other strongmen struggling to pull the wooden walls away from the bars, quickly, frantically; Asa van Groen pacing near the rear door.
“What is it?” Isra called out to Roman in the cold, humid air. “Is he ill?”
“No,” Roman said.
And then they were before Asa and he turned to them and reached out to grasp Isra’s other hand, clearly intending to pull her away from Roman.
“Come, hurry, hurry,” the dark-haired man urged, and there was something of a sob in his normally suave voice.
“Wait,” Roman said, and pulled Isra back to him. “What do you expect her to do, van Groen? Go in there now? That’s madness! Shall we lose them both?”
“He’ll kill her!” van Groen gritted between his teeth. “She wants him to kill her!”
“What is going on?” Isra demanded.
Then the final wooden wall was lowered from the cage, and as the torchlight fell upon the occupants within the tiger’s wagon, Isra understood the urgency.
Fran was standing in the cage staring at Kahn, who lay in his corner with only his head raised, as if he’d been woken from his slumber, which surely he had. His tufted mane, now fuller and whiter as his health improved, swung toward Isra as the edge of the wooden wall bit into the dirt, and she would have sworn before God that the animal was blaming her for this bizarre turn of events in his already confusing existence.
Wasn’t it her fault, though? Wasn’t everything?
Asa dropped Isra’s hand and stepped toward the cage. “Fran? Franny?” he cajoled. “It’s all right; we’re all here now. Only back toward the door and Gunar will—”
“We’re all here?” Fran interrupted in a disinterested tone, her gaze never leaving the tiger still lying across the wooden floor from her. Too close to her. “Are we now, Asa? I would disagree with you. Max isn’t here, is he?”
“Franny, please,” Asa pleaded in a cracking voice. “This is . . . this is madness!”
“Oh, and well I know it,” she mused on a breath of laughter. “How I do! It was I who released Kahn the day we were joined by my fellow Norseman and your special new pet. Had you guessed it was I?”
Asa stared at the blond woman through the bars, his face slack.
“Had you?” Fran demanded in a sudden shout.
“No,” Asa replied. “Fran, why . . . ?”
“Because.” She paused to swallow, and one might be tempted to think she was working up courage for what she was about to say—or do. “Because even though your plan was to move south, I never know when you will suddenly change your mind, Asa. The next big surprise. And I could not risk you deciding to lead the troupe farther east. Not with . . . with winter. The cold. I thought if the tiger escaped and had to be killed . . . that with no
grand show, we would find somewhere to winter. We could stay in one place for a bit so that I could . . .” She broke off again and drew a deep, jagged breath. “So that I could mourn.”
Isra looked to van Groen’s face and was surprised at the silvery threads of wetness glowing against the man’s pale cheeks.
“The troupe moved on after Max died, as did you,” Fran said more calmly now. “But I can’t move on, Asa. I can’t move another step, now that I am without you both.”
“Franny, I love you,” van Groen insisted. “I’ve never stopped loving you. But you pushed me aw—”
“So since we are all here!” the blonde cried out and then raised her arms from her sides, and Isra saw Asa’s whip in Fran’s right hand. “Let’s have a show, shall we? Rouse the city! Why do you lie about in slothful slumber when there is still a shilling to be had? Hie, Kahn! Hie!” The whip cracked, and the tiger flinched and showed his long fangs to the blonde.
Isra yanked herself free from Roman. She marched toward the cage, clapping her hands over her head. “Kahn! Kahn!” Her heart snapped against her breastbone like the whip in Fran’s hand when the tiger swung his head toward her voice.
“And still you challenge me?” Fran asked in a bemused if weary voice. “Is it not enough that you have my man? My people? Go away, troublesome woman, and let me have my bloody end.”
“I do not want Asa, Fran,” Isra said in a stern voice, all the while holding her hands in the air and keeping her eyes fixed on Kahn’s as she walked backward toward the rear of the wagon. “And he does not want me. Whatever end you think to be had is a fanciful wish. Kahn is full. He will only maul you should you continue to intrude upon his den.”
“Go away.”
“I cannot let you do this to the people you love,” Isra said, glancing at Gunar, who stood with his hand on the door latch. “Come out now or I am coming in to get you.”
“No!” Fran shouted, and Kahn flinched again, this time with a quiet hiss. “I’ve already told the rest and I will tell you: If the door behind me opens, I will throw myself upon him, I swear it.”
Roman Page 21
