She smiled shyly, or at least that was the impression the rip-off artist meant her smile to impart She waited until the applause ebbed, then launched into several more songs, none of which he recognized – but he did recognize Goldman, stein in hand, making his way toward Duke’s table.
Pulling out a wooden chair, Goldman doffed his felt hat onto the table. “Who knew? She is a guitar virtuoso.”
Duke was well aware the German attorney was slick and smart and self-serving – and naturally mistrusted him while grudgingly liking him. Somewhat. The question was, how much did Romy like him? “How did you get here, being without wheels?”
Goldman glanced from the stage to him. “You are looking at the right honorable Gideon Goldman, newly hired Assistant Press Secretary to Congressman Johnson.”
He swigged some beer. “Moving up in the world, are you?”
Goldman nodded his golden head at the stage. “So is she.”
The ‘she’ to whom Goldman referred peered out from under the brim of Sally’s sombrero, seemingly staring right at their table. Coming to her feet, Romy began to strum another song, a tempo largo, one limed with longing. Singing softly, so that patrons quieted and strained to listen, she slowly descended the stage’s five steps and meandered among the tables.
“I’m lost in your smile, think I’ll stay here a while,
A vacation from a lonely life.
My heart’s beating wild, I feel like a child.
I’m happy here, lost in your smile.”
This was the Gypsy girl? Romy Sonnenschein? S&S’s cook? Duke downed the remainder of his beer and signaled for another.
“I’m feeling free, floating down the stream.
Memories and unfulfilled dreams.
No frustration, no strife, they are not part of my life.
I’m happy here lost in your smile.”
She directed a meaningful glance at his and Gideon’s table.
“Some people, they need a hand to hold,
Some people, they need a kiss,
Some people need to make love for a while.
But me? I’m happy here, lost in your smile.”
At last, she strolled to stand before him and Goldman.
“Don’t look away, share the rest of my stay.
You need not a word to say.
Won’t look around, keep my feet on the ground.
I’m happy here, lost in your smile.”
For which of them was her song intended? Duke swallowed hard. He had not bargained for this. Hells bells, it was not he who was lost in a smile but his good sense that was lost. Period. And yet, watching her, he was transfixed, unable to remove his gaze from her.
Finished with her performance, she settled her wealth of spangled skirts into a chair across from him and Goldman, who said with apparent sincerity, “I haven’t heard anything quite as comparable in artistic quality since Django Reinhardt.”
Laying aside the guitar, she flashed her ready grin. “Aye, another Gypsy. Me grandfather and meself saw him perform at a Paris dance hall musette. I tried to memorize some of his techniques, but, alas, all too soon the management caught up with us and threw us out.”
Duke sat uncomfortably, while, with the kiss of her Irish brogue, she and Goldman exchanged fond reminiscences about Weimar Berlin street life, its cabarets, its artists and intellectuals.
For someone who could barely write her name, her knowledge on a wide range of subjects was eye-blinking astonishing. “Aye, I saw both The Three Penny Opera and Blue Angel. And do ye know now Albert Einstein himself visited the Europahaus, when some of me people were performing a juggling act there?”
Her people. He sighed. And his people? A close-knit family was definitely not what he would have called his own family.
As talkative as Romy had been at the Dessau Hall table with Goldman, she was as conversely silent on the drive back to S&S. Which was just fine by him. One thing that drove him to distraction was a yappy woman.
But somehow her silence made him feel shut out.
§ § §
Hands clasped behind his neck and barefoot, Duke sat back on the porch steps and stared up at the stars burning holes into black velvet. He supposed that was why he never considered the years at sea a complete loss. Because at night, they burned as hotly as they did over the West Texas Hill Country.
As his body was burning. Burning up with wanting.
He thought of all those lost years when he would yearn for home. He had left home a wild, undisciplined, rebellious, no-good fourteen-year-old, if his gin-stupored old man’s damning charges were anything to go by, and they probably were.
But for almost three years, between ten and thirteen, while his pa was away fighting the Jerries, he had been the man of the house to his ailing mother. He had not been ready for his pa to return home and try to tell him what he was doing wrong.
After his ma’s death, it had seemed a good time to strike out on his own. With the advent of the Great War, the value of livestock had more than doubled, and afterwards cowhands had been in great demand in Texas.
Riding the range for a short period and the waves for far too long, he had, finally, come home to start over. Perhaps all those years of wandering had made him a magnet for others like himself. All his hands were drifters, some of them rail riders, most likely here today and gone tomorrow.
Except for Romy. She was like a tick, attaching itself to his life’s blood. Here he was, just now getting on his feet, only to have that Gypsy waif turn everything topsy-turvy.
That evening, the wind was still gusty, and if he listened hard enough, he could hear the old house groaning. And at the banging of the screen door, he wanted to groan, too. He knew without looking around it was the thorn in his side.
A moment later, Romy’s wraith-like body slipped down to sit next to him on the step, but not touching him. A plaid enwrapped her bony shoulders. “Tis bloody cold out here,” she said softly.
“I hadn’t noticed.” His clasped fingers knotted even tighter behind his nape. His gaze was not so easily reined in. Peripherally. he eyed her delicate profile . . . the fistful of buttermilk-yellow curls that poked from beneath her head kerchief and trailed like wisteria vines down the slope of her pale neck, her upper teeth that worried her lower lip, as plump as the down cover he had snuggled beneath as a boy.
She reached out a small hand, tentatively touched where his Levi’s had ripped out at the knee. Reflexively, his knee jerked the way it did when docs did their examinations with their silly little rubber hammers. “Come to bed, Duke.”
His heart skipped a beat, and he broke out in an immediate sweat. So, there it was. Caesar’s Rubicon. The point-of-no-return. That moment of truth.
His large hand engulfed hers, now intentionally capping his knee. No electrifying bolts from heaven. But something even more disturbing. A warming flash of need that suffused his body through and through. A need that went deeper, that was more pervading, than even nature’s overpowering sexual impetus.
He pulled her up by her hand from the step and, bending, hooked one arm beneath her knees to cradle her slight, compliant body up against his chest.
As his old man would warn, he was hell bent for leather.
§ CHAPTER FOURTEEN §
Candles, crystal balls, cards – they were all tricks of the Gypsy trade. But it was neither candle nor glaring light bulb but a kerosene lantern’s amber glow that Romy counted on to ease the crossing of this bridge – and, as adventures went, she knew not what awaited on the other side.
A risky crossing it was, but she had to get beyond her mind’s incoherent jabbering, her lower stomach’s stupid seizures, her betraying palsied hands as she turned the lantern’s wick low.
She had to get to that side of the bridge where the Order of Womanhood was not a novelty to her. Once inducted, she would, as usual, adjust; she would regain her Gypsy’s natural sense of direction, and move on with life, wherever its road took her.
She turned back to Duke
, where he sat, waiting and watching, on her mattress – well, his mattress, if proprietorship was a factor. What did she do now?
“Okay, Romy,” he breathed, holding out his hand – and she crossed the few steps to lay her damp one in his palm, but approached no closer. “I am tired of your Gypsy wiles.”
He drew her to stand between his legs. His huge hand cupped her quavering chin and forced her to look at him, on eye level with her, sitting though he was. “I want the real deal.”
Cripes! “Err, Duke, I . . .uhh . . . what ye see is what ye – “
“I know, you’re going to tell me you’ve never been kissed.”
“Well, there was Giorgio, that once. But he and I were betrothed,” she rattled on. “We were only fourteen, and that isna the same as . . . as what you and I are –”
He frowned impatiently. “And don’t forget that brotherly kiss Gideon gave you in Galveston.”
From out of nowhere, something new burgeoned, that primitive instinct in her femininity that had somehow, someway, been delayed. A small but knowing smile tipped her lips. “Why dunna ye do what ye’re wanting, Duke.”
“Hell,” he muttered. He pulled her onto his lap. His mouth covered hers as though driven to shut off, not only her prattle, but all her thoughts of any but himself. And mayhap his own misgivings.
And its ferociousness did just that, with his mustache abrading her mouth. Why . . . why, this was more invasive and more stomach-dropping than any mere lip kiss. And, crikey, if her tongue didn’t go and betray her good senses to couple and mate with his.
But then his kiss softened, explored, as if searching for something invaluably necessary to him. She sank into the lulling sensations of that transmuting kiss. His hands cradling her face, his thumbs lapped so close at the corners of her lips that they constrained his questioning and questing mouth.
His kiss was something different, different from that of Gideon’s bluffing one and Giorgio’s boyish one. Something that scoured the barnacles of grief and rage lining her heart’s cavity. Now, she understood the justification behind foolish, romantic songs and moving pictures.
Needing more, she slipped her arms up his chest to entwine behind his neck. Like a hatchling, she tilted her face up to be sustained by his life-nourishing mouth. Without ceasing dispensing his possessive kisses over her lids, her cheeks, her temples, he shifted her body, lowering her onto the mattress beneath him.
Its springs squeaked intrusively; still, she gave herself over to this splendid sensation of his mouth, his weight, his hands. There was nothing impersonal about this as had been the Nazi examination, and exposing herself to this pleasuring was almost more than her untried body could tolerate.
As his lips scoured kisses from her heated cheeks, along her jawbone, and down the column of her neck, which arched to welcome his touch as a sunflower arched to sunshine, she lost all sense of time and place and coherent thought.
Until, those fingers found her headscarf’s knot at her nape. She shrank from him, trying to twist aside. “Nay, please!”
“Yes,” he growled, his arm underneath her shoulders snatching her back, directly beneath his heavy weight. She could hear his frustration, turned on himself, as if disgusted with his lack of constraint. “No handkerchief with its surprise rabbit beneath, Romy, or ace card up your sleeve this time. Just you. Show me what you do.”
At that, he stripped off her shield’s negligent fabric. Her freed locks tumbled into his hands. They grasped her mass of curls like they were a life buoy. His face buried in the hollow of her neck, his lips scalded her skin, and his fingers tunneled through the riotous ringlets at her temples – and, alas, stopped short at encountering that shriveled appendage.
On one elbow, he raised above her, his head cocked, with the lantern light reflecting a disturbing yellow in his puzzled, midnight blue eyes.
Mortified, her lids lowered, her eyes staring sightlessly at the fine black hair that whorled at his throat where his soft cambric shirt fell open. In merciless slow motion, his fingers slid aside her swath of concealing hair.
She, whose agile body was so animate, so freely moving, lay there as stiff as a three-hour-old corpse beset with rigor mortis.
“What . . . how did this happen?”
How not to sound mawkish? “Well, ye see,” she exposited, “in some parts of Czechoslovakia tis permissible to cut off the right ear of a Gypsy woman. In other parts, tis the left ear. Our vardo took a wrong turn and just happened to land me and me grandfather in the wrong part of Czechoslovakia at the wrong time.”
At his silence, she risked peering up, dreading seeing either revulsion or pity. His face was filled with fury, but his voice marveled low, “What a little scrapper you are, Romy Sonnenschein.”
She would have been all right if he had just left it at that; but, no, he had to dip his head and brush the mutilated place with lips that lingered. Suddenly, she could not breathe, as his tongue traced her ear’s damaged contours.
Her chest, her throat, her mouth flooded with salt water too long dammed. It geysered upward, stinging her nostrils, and gushed over her lids in a raging and raucous torrent.
His hands with their long fingers cupping her bony shoulders, spanned the entirety of her narrow back. He gathered her spasm-wracked body against his. Her wet face was muffled against his blue shirt’s wash-worn fabric. Her seismic slobbering and sniffling and blubbering nigh washed it again.
As if gentling her, he stroked her spine, from her nape, beneath her unbound hair, down to the small of her waist. “Go ahead. Sob your heart out, Sunshine.”
She did just that. Cried until, surely, she was empty, drained of shame and pain and suffering.
And then he began the sacrament of refilling her. Rolling her beneath him, his large body covered hers and shut out the insanity of her world. He kissed moist lids and lashes, smoothed back damp hair from her forehead and temples, and this time nuzzled both ears.
Deeply, she inhaled. He smelled fresh and life renewing, so vastly different from that of a charnel house. Her starving lips trailed from below his beard-stubbled and scruffy jawline to nestle at the conjuncture of his broad collarbones.
“I think I found me power again,” she mumbled, her head tilted, her lips pressed against the thick, ropy cords of his neck.
“Power, magic, illusions,” his shallow breath caught at her tongue wandering tongue, “whatever it is you wield, Sunshine, keep right at it.”
“Stay with me, Duke. Hold me. I need you to keep yuir arms around me. Now.”
His callused hands framed her face. “All night, if you want, Sunshine.”
“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.”
GYPSIES, TRAMPS, AND THIEVES Page 17
