by Sharon Ihle
Tracking a trail of that fringe and thinking it might have to do with Maria’s death, he asked, “What’s that all about?”
Following his gaze, Rayna explained, “If you’re referring to the fringe, it’s there for good luck.”
More Gypsy charms and spells. “How can a row of strings bring you good luck?”
Rayna didn’t miss the sarcasm in his tone, but she wasn’t feeling well enough to do battle with him. She sighed as she said, “I don’t know exactly how it works. Gypsies always have a little fringe on their scarves or hats, and around their trailers and rooms. Even Sweetpea has a little good luck fringe on his hat to keep gaje’s like you from turning him into Sunday supper.”
Gant laughed. “If that pigs growls at me one more time, he’s going to need a hell of a lot more than fringe to save his miserable bacon.”
Rayna glanced up at him, her expression stricken, her demeanor beaten, downtrodden. Gant suddenly felt lower than Sweetpea’s bacon-leaden belly.
Back to the safer subject, he asked, “Why do you have to believe in all these curses and talismans? Has it ever occurred to you that you might be happier if you try believing in something real instead?”
Feeling very tired, in no state of mind to continue sparring with Gant, Rayna said, “I can’t think right now. I just want to rest.” She gestured toward the door. “Please go now.”
A part of Gant thought he ought to do just as she asked, that now probably wasn’t the best time to try and confront her. The biggest part of him, his heart, convinced him that if he didn’t try to square things with her now, that he would be out of her life forever.
“We’ve been through a lot and meant a lot to one another,” he began gently. “I just want to talk to you, to try and understand what’s going on.”
Rayna’s chin rose defensively. “I don’t have to answer any more of your questions, and I don’t have to listen to any more of your remarks about Gypsies. I think you should leave.”
He shook his head. “Not like this, Princess. Not today.”
Not giving her a chance to respond, Gant slid his arms around Rayna’s waist and pulled her up tight against his body. Waves of silken ebony hair spilled over his hands, molding to them.
“I’m done with staying out of striking distance of you,” he said. “And I’m done with waiting for you to come to your senses. I’m not leaving until I know why you’re so cold to me.”
She tried to tear free of Gant’s embrace, but the more she fought, the tighter he held her, so tightly, in fact, she could barely breathe.
Hoping to dissuade him, she said, “I’m done with you, that’s why.”
Those words hit him like a blow in the gut, but Gant stayed his course. “I don’t believe you. What do you think of that?” A rhetorical question, he continued. “Do you know what I think? I think you want me here with you, that you miss me, and that you wish you could find a way to let me back into your life again.”
To remind her of what they’d been together, Gant came down on Rayna’s mouth, the kiss demanding, not bruising or punishing, firm and probing, yet gentle, too, a seductive aid to help her remember how good they’d been together. Surprising him, she met his embrace with bared teeth and a stiff spine. Gant pulled back, thinking of softening his approach, of caressing and coaxing her back to the woman she’d been. Before he got the chance, Rayna tore out of his arms.
“I want you to get out,” she said, her voice a hoarse, guttural rasp. “Or have you forgotten what happened the last time you came to my cabin uninvited and tried something like this?”
Gant flinched at the memory and then glanced at her Cleopatra costume. When he realized that she couldn’t be carrying her dagger, he gave off a quiet chuckle.
“I’ll never forget that day,” he admitted. “Or the fact that you were wearing your little red apron. That is where you keep your dagger, isn’t it?”
Rayna’s lip twitched, so desperately did a part of her want to laugh. If not for the circumstances, she might have let herself go, maybe even thrown herself into Gant’s arms, but how could she let herself weaken now? How could she possibly expose either of them to more heartache than they’d already had? She bit that twitching lip, and lowered her head.
“Talk to me, Rayna.” Gant took a small step toward her, his voice, a soft caress. “Tell me that you’ve missed me and that you want me back.”
She couldn’t face him, not and do what she must. Rayna turned her back to Gant as she said, “I think you know that won’t happen, and I think you already know why.”
“But I don’t know why. Tell me.”
She whispered softly, “My mother.”
He’d known all along that it would boil down to this. It wasn’t a good enough reason. “I realize how much you cared about your mother, I really do, but I don’t see why you and I can’t get on with our lives. Maria’s gone and you can’t bring her back whether we’re together or not.”
In spite of her resolve to keep her back to him, Rayna whirled around at this, turning on Gant, filling her queasy belly with the anger she’d been denying for the last five weeks.
“Can’t you understand how I feel about my mother?”
“I’m not a heartless ogre, Rayna. Of course I understand that part.” Gant took a step toward her. “Don’t you think Maria would want you to go on with your life and try to be happy in spite of the loss?”
“Happy?” The word stuck in her throat. “How can I be happy when I’ve lost the only person who ever truly cared about me, not my body or a few hot minutes under the blanket, but me, about who I am and what I am.”
Feeling a momentary exhaustion, Rayna folded her hands and brought them to her chest. Then she went on. “Maria didn’t even give birth to me, and yet she was the only person in my whole life who ever really loved me. I lost her because I couldn’t stay away from you. I can’t go back to the way things were between us without doing my mother a grave disservice. Understand?”
“No.”
This was it, his final chance to prove to her that curses and her mother’s death didn’t have a damn thing to do with them or any future they might have together. A searing tide rose up in Gant, a swell as headstrong and impossible to harness as the Mississippi itself. Somehow he managed to say a few more words through the rush.
“You’re wrong, Princess, and in many, many ways. If it takes me the rest of the night or the rest of my life, I intend to show you just how wrong you are.”
Then he spun around to the door and turned the key in the lock.
Seventeen
Gant stood with his hands pressed flat against the door, his back to Rayna. He had one thought; what the hell have you gotten yourself into now, Gantry?
The last time he’d tried something like this, he’d turned to find the blade of a dagger at his throat. Now he thought he could pick up the faint sound of Rayna’s soft sobs. A far more formidable weapon.
Gant turned to her and said, “It doesn’t have to be this hard.”
“It is hard,” she persisted. “My mother is dead because of us. Because of us.”
“No, no,” he murmured softly as he crossed the room. “You can’t blame either of us because your mother fell overboard. It was an accident. A terrible accident.”
“No, it wasn’t. She was weak from starving herself and probably fell because she hadn’t the strength to catch hold of the railing.” Tears tumbled down Rayna’s cheeks. “Don’t you see? She was trying to work some kind of magic spell to keep us apart. If only we’d listened to her when she warned us away from each other.”
Rayna began pacing then, weeping harder than before. Because Gant couldn’t think of any other way to comfort her, he caught her in his arms.
“I don’t know why she thought she had to keep us apart, but I believe Maria did those things because she thought she was ensuring your happiness. Isn’t that all she ever wanted?”
Miserable in her sorrow, Rayna nodded. “Me and my happiness was all Maria lived
for.”
Although he still had trouble understanding the fascination with curses and spells, in those words, Gant finally saw the tremendous burden Rayna had been living with.
He swung her in his arms, rocking her as he said, “In that case, I don’t think Maria would like the way you’ve been treating yourself these past few weeks.”
Rayna trembled against him, her tears a sudden storm. Gant kissed the top of her head.
“Don’t you see?” he said. “She just wanted you to be happy, and happy is what I think I can make you again if you’ll just give me a chance.”
“But what about the curse?”
It took a lot, but Gant held his temper in check. “I told you what I think curses. They’re just words, and words are only as powerful as you think they are.”
When Rayna didn’t respond, Gant lifted her chin until she had to look him in the eye. “Can you just try to see things my way for a change?”
She wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to, but all Rayna could do at that moment was feel. Gant’s touch was electric, his embrace and warmth the very things she’d been needing, wanting, and even fearing since the accident. She’d struggled to ignore him, to pretend that he didn’t exist these past few weeks, but during her long nights alone as she lay on her mattress one sleepless night after another, all she could think of was Gant, of needing him, of wanting him.
Now that Gant was holding her in his arms at last, Rayna couldn’t make herself find a reason to tear out of them. She clung to him, burying her face against the side of his neck, and indulged the sensations as Gant caressed her back and shoulders. She didn’t deserve this man, Rayna thought, still intent on punishing herself, and she shouldn’t be feeling this unholy desire after what her attraction for him had done to her mother. And yet even those thoughts couldn’t stop her from wanting him. Even now as she berated herself, desire raged in her body, convincing her that, yes, she could believe everything he’d said. That yes, she could believe in them.
“Rayna,” Gant whispered, wondering when or if her tears would ever stop falling. “What can I do to help? I don’t know what to do.”
“Hold me,” she said, stifling her sobs. “Just hold me.”
Needing no further encouragement, Gant drove his hands into Rayna’s thick hair, tearing the headband and serpent from her forehead in the process. As he kissed her, sprinkling those endearments along her hairline and the shell of her ear, he fought the urge to hush her, understanding that her tears were the overflow from a reservoir she’d been holding in for much too long. They had to be shed or forever lurk within.
After a while, when her crying was reduced to an occasional sob, Gant brushed the final teardrop from Rayna’s check. Then, his voice husky with emotion, he said, “God I’ve missed you, Princess. I never really knew how much I cared until you weren’t there any longer.”
“Don’t,” she whispered back, raising a finger to his lips. “Please don’t say any more.”
Gant stared into her dew-kissed eyes, his heart swelling and aching in a most peculiar way. “But I have to say more. I have to say the words as badly as you had to cry. They’re stuck here inside of me, straining to get out.”
Through the mist her mind had become, Rayna recalled a few of the things Gant had murmured to her on the day of her mother’s death. Words of love.
“No, please don’t,” she said. “Don’t say anymore than you already have.”
He shook his head. “I’m done playing by your rules. We’re going to do things my way for a change.”
“But if you let yourself love me, you won’t be safe from the curse.”
“That damned curse again?” He’d tried to understand, he really had, but Gant’s frustrations took over. “Even if that curse has some power, I don’t see what the hell it can do to me now. Living without you these past weeks has been a living hell. What could possibly be worse?”
“Don’t say such things,” Rayna implored. “I realize you don’t believe as I do, but a Gypsy curse is dangerous.”
“Maybe to a Gypsy, not to me.” He slipped his arms around her waist and pulled her close again. “I believe in you. I believe in us. And nothing on this earth, certainly no curse is going to stop us. Let me love you, Rayna Sebastiani. Give me a chance to love you, because I do you know.
Gant’s voice deepened and smoothed out, black velvet. “I do.”
Rayna’s breath caught in her throat, and then stalled there as his words sank in. She’d waited a lifetime to hear that phrase from the right man, an eternity dreading the consequences should that special moment ever belong to her. Now that it did, Rayna was too stunned, too overwhelmed to do anything but stand there, open-mouthed and mute.
Thinking that he understood, that Rayna was still trying to object, Gant cut her off before she could begin. “Don’t try to stop me now. You can’t.”
Gant fit his mouth to hers for the briefest, most tender kiss imaginable. Then he grinned and said, “If that curse was going to get me, it would have flattened me a long time ago.”
Could it be true? Rayna dared to wonder, her heart pumping furiously. Had the curse somehow been unable to reach out and destroy what she and Gant had shared?
Watching the confusion building in her eyes, determined to keep one step ahead of her this night, Gant slid his hands up and down Rayna’s spine, lightly massaging her back as he spoke.
“I can see that you’re trying to find a good reason to send me packing, but you’d better know that nothing will keep me away from you tonight.”
Gant’s words, the tender silken way he said them, were enough to render her senseless. That coil of desire slowly unraveled, spreading fingers of fire, heating Rayna in a way she’d never been warmed before. She opened her mouth to speak, to cry out for him, but words wouldn’t form. As if sensing her need, Gant filled his palms with her bottom and squeezed, caressing her as he pulled her up tight against his hips.
Urged on by the soft moan Rayna uttered, Gant’s voice became a primal growl, a darkly seductive summons meant for only this one woman. “We have a lot more than simple pleasure between us, a few common bonds that make us even more right for each other.”
As Gant said this, his fingers deftly untied the gold braiding that held Rayna’s costume together. “If I heard you right,” he went on. “Maria adopted you as a motherless child. I have to assume that at least part of your early life was miserable.”
Rayna dragged in a shaky breath. “Yes,” slithered out of her throat, as silky and erotic as Gant’s caresses.
“I also spent most of my life as a motherless child,” he admitted, as he worked at freeing Rayna from her garments. “So we’ve both tasted the kind of pain that comes from that, as well as the pleasures we bring to each other. We belong together, you and me.”
“Yes,” she said again in the barest of whispers.
The braiding caught between Gant’s fingers for a frustrating moment, and then finally fell away. Keeping one hand firmly cupped against her bottom, he drew the other to the front of her gown and inched the bodice apart. Hesitating for only one brief moment, he loosened the satin ribbons securing her camisole, and brushed it aside as well.
Impatient to feel her softness, the thrust of her taut nipples against his chest, Gant tugged his shirt out of his Levis, and then ripped it opened. Buttons flew everywhere, popping like corn, but he’d accomplished the one thing; he and Rayna were together, flesh to flesh, man to woman. When she strained against his hips, trying it seemed, to mold herself to him, Gant picked up where he left off, full of purpose.
“Well,” he murmured. “Are you convinced yet, or do I have to threaten your physical safety?” He grinned wickedly, not giving her a chance to answer. “My brother is za lion tamer, ma’am. He can make you very sorry if you turn me away now.”
Laughing inside, crying too, Rayna moistened her lips and closed her eyes, hoping, wishing that it could be this easy. Maybe, she thought for one crazy, passion-riddled moment, just maybe i
f she could keep from loving Gant back, they’d have a small chance at a few more stolen moments, a few more days or weeks together.
As if answering the question himself, Gant slowly lowered his head and kissed her, barely brushing her lips at first, and then languidly parting them with his tongue. Rayna’s head fell back and she arched her spine, instinctively preparing herself to receive him, driving them both mad with desire and almost beyond the brink of control.
Gant was determined not to relinquish that control so easily this night. That determination renewed as the kiss deepened in intensity, Gant slipped the Cleopatra dress and camisole from Rayna’s shoulders, and flung them aside. He drew back from her mouth, keeping the distance between them to a minimum, and smiled down at her, his breathing shallow, irregular.
