My Own True Love (21 page)

She didn't understand it; she'd been so hot and ready for him, but this felt like the first...

"Oh, dear," she choked out, grasping at his shoulders. "Lewis, I think I'm a virgin!"

"I—you
were
a virgin," he answered on a wild laugh. Despite the distraction of the moment she couldn't help but notice how inordinately pleased he sounded about this development.

"Men," she complained, then closed her eyes and gave herself up to the slow rhythm Lewis was setting up inside her. Her body rocked with him, the pain receding more with each smooth thrust. She felt inner muscles pulse tightly around his questing shaft as heat began to center once more on where they joined. It wasn't long before nothing but the building heat mattered.

She flowed into it, with it, like riding a lava flow back to its source until she fell into dark, delicious fire.

It was a phoenix fire, bringing her to life even as it consumed her. She soared for a long time on the flames. As the fire faded she was caught up briefly in a passionate dance as Lewis reached his own peak and his spirit seemed to swirl and fuse for a moment with her own.

The images faded as she fell back into herself, but the memory of the moment of fusion stayed with her as she found herself lying on her back, cradling Lewis's head on her breast.

She sighed sweetly and murmured very softly, "Again!"

When he came to, sated, all Lewis wanted to do was lay his ear over her heart. He wanted to hold her close and be lulled to sleep as his own pounding pulse settled to join her calming heartbeat. He just wanted to be with her forever and ever. She whispered something, but he was too tired to catch the word.

"Sleep," he said, moving to hold her close in the darkness. He groped for a blanket to cover them.

The lantern was long since out of oil. He kissed her hair. "Just go to sleep, sweetheart."

******************

Sara got up to use the chamber pot just before dawn. The sound of others in the camp stirring as she hurriedly washed and dressed in the cramped quarters had a comforting regularity about it. She'd gotten used to the routine of the traveling life in the last few weeks. Having Lewis in her bed was not part of the routine. She turned and watched him sleeping. He looked young, and rather sweet, as he lay on his side, his hands cradling his cheek, a wing of black hair covering his eyes.

She sat on the end of the bed and picked up the guitar. Oh, yes, very sweet, she thought, not quite sure of her own mood. But how had he gotten in her bed? Wasn't she supposed to have been invulnerable to his charm? She had been wronged. She'd held the moral high ground, which had not only been a lonely position, but had gotten damned shaky under her feet of late. She sighed. It was done. It had felt great. She'd been as responsible as he was. No use slinging recriminations when he woke up.

"Question is," she murmured, "is it going to happen again?"

Lewis opened his eyes when he heard Sara's voice. He had to swipe hair out of the way before he could actually see. "Very unfashionable," he grumbled, "long hair." He rolled out of bed and made quick work of cleaning himself up and getting dressed. Sara sat on the bed and played something sad on her guitar. When he was done he came back and half sprawled on a pile of pillows. He would have been happy to start the day off with bedding Sara again, then polishing off an enormous breakfast, but they had a lot to talk about first.

"What's that you're playing?" he asked, trying to get her attention.

Sara looked at him sideways, with one of her cryptic, superior smiles. "I call it 'The Good Woman Having a Bad Hair Day Blues.'" While he digested this latest bit of nonsense she put the instrument down and turned toward him. "So," she said. "How'd you know where I hid the knife? And you can apologize for ruining the dress, too."

"I thought using the knife was a rather fetching dramatic gesture."

"You weren't thinking at all."

"Perhaps not too clearly," he admitted. "You were driving me mad, vixen. As for the knife, I am a spy, Sara. It always pays to know where all the weapons are hidden."

She nodded. "I can see where it might come in handy." She looked away from him. "Last night was—"

"Magnificent," he supplied for her. He reached his hand out to her. "Let's repeat it, shall we?"

Sara shook her head, and groaned. "I hate ethical predicaments."

"I wish you'd stop saying things like that," he said. Lewis wished he hadn't decided they needed to talk. What was there to discuss? Very little, really, if they kept magic rings and the thousand questions he wanted to ask out of the conversation.

"How am I supposed to talk?" she asked. "Like an adoring Rom wife?"

Before he could answer, the door of the
bardo
was thrown open. Beng stuck his head in. "The Frenchman's come looking for you, Sara."

"Custine?" Sara jumped to her feet. "What's he doing here?" She looked frantically at Lewis. "He must know about the brooch!"

"The devil with the brooch," Lewis said. "He wants you!"

Beng spoke up. "I haven't enough of his
gajo
language to make much sense of his words. I think he says you were in the fire. Has he come to arrest you for burning down the castle?"

"No," Sara told Beng. "That's not why he wants me. He wants me to be his mistress."

"He what?" Lewis shouted angrily.

Beng glared at Lewis. "You going to protect your woman, Calderash?"

"I'll protect her, all right," Lewis declared. "Stay here," he ordered Sara, and charged out of the wagon. Beng had to jump hastily aside to keep from being bowled over.

"Custine!" Lewis shouted, intent on murder as he spotted the red-haired Frenchman approaching the wagon. He was tackled from behind at the same time he noticed he hadn't put on his belt when he'd gotten dressed. His knife was back in the
bardo.
Never mind, he'd strangle the bastard with his bare hands!

As he struggled to rise he heard Beng explaining in his broken French, "My son-in-law jealous man."

It was Beng who was holding him down! What was the matter with the man? Did he want him to defend Sara or not?

"I'm sorry," Custine said brokenly. "I'm truly sorry."

What was the matter with the Frenchman? Sandor appeared, then Andrei and Hadari. The men hauled him to his feet and held him back when he struggled to get at Custine.

"What's the matter with you?" Sandor whispered fiercely in his ear. "You attack the French captain, you'll get us all killed."

Sandor's words splashed over him like a bucket of icy water. He slumped in the men's tight grasp.

Lord, what had he been thinking? A moment ago he'd been willing to risk his entire mission for the honor of a bit of skirt. Honor? He blinked and shook his head as if to clear it. Beng had said he was jealous, but it hadn't been just jealousy. He'd rushed off to defend a gypsy girl's problematic honor. Ridiculous.

When Custine stepped up to him he was almost able to speak rationally to the man. "What do you want?" he demanded.

Custine's eyes and face were red and swollen. He looked as if he had been crying. The expression in his eyes was a little wild. "I'm sorry," he said again. "I don't know if your kind is capable of love, but she was your wife. I can see you felt something for her."

"Felt?" Lewis repeated. Felt? The light suddenly dawned. The Frenchman thought Sara was dead.

"Killed in the fire?"

The question had been more to himself than to the Frenchman, but Custine answered. "She was the only one trapped inside. I was hoping that perhaps she got out and made her way back here. I can see from your face that she didn't." He wiped his sleeve across his eyes. His wide chest heaved in a sigh. "I'm so sorry."

Lewis found himself looking up at the clear blue autumn sky. A faint haze drifted above the trees in the direction of the chateau. He looked away from Custine to keep from laughing in the man's face. He also looked away to keep from seeing the genuine caring the man felt for Sara. He wanted to sneer at the romantic fool. At the same time he felt a deep stab of shame and envy at the man's simple, uncomplicated attachment to the girl.

Lewis didn't have the luxury of being uncomplicated. "My wife!" He let out a dramatic howl toward heaven. "He thinks Sara's dead," he explained in Romany to the others in between ragged sobs while Custine looked on in anguished embarrassment.

"So that's his problem," Beng said. "I thought maybe he wanted to buy her."

Sandor spat. "Filthy
gajo."
He patted Lewis's shoulder as if comforting him. "Too bad we can't let you kill him."

"Better to skin him," Beng said. "That's the way to take care of your wife, Calderash. This one's ripe for the
bujo,
I think."

Beng turned to Custine and switched back to pidgin French. "What you give us for the loss of my daughter?" He pointed at Lewis. "Toma lost a good wife. Now we have to go all the way back to Bororavia to get him another one. Gypsy law," he added at Custine's confused expression. "Now he must marry her sister. Sister is in Bororavia. We must go to Bororavia to mourn our dead properly too."

Beng's gesture took in the whole camp. "You cause us much trouble."

Custine's gaze followed Beng's hand. Lewis began crying louder for emphasis. Sandor and Andrei joined in, but not so loudly as to disrupt negotiations. "You have all my sympathy," Custine told them. He shuffled his feet nervously.

Beng pounded his chest with his fist. "I don't have my daughter. You can't give me my daughter."

"I would if I could, believe me."

"We go to Bororavia now." Beng pointed at Custine. "You help us get to Bororavia, maybe the old women not curse you and all your generations for this."

"Help you get..." Custine stared at them blankly for long seconds. Lewis might have held his breath in anticipation if he hadn't been busy setting up a mournful racket. He prayed that Sara didn't take it into her head to come see what the noise was all about. He could practically see the watchworks of Custine's brain turning as the Frenchman churned through the possibilities of what Beng wanted from him.

Finally Custine spoke. "I could, perhaps, be of some help. I could arrange travel papers for you. That might make it easier for you to cross the empire."

"Many borders between here and Bororavia," Beng pointed out. "Papers. Yes." He nodded emphatically. "Papers help us return home swiftly. Mourn Sara at home. Get new wife for wronged son.

Women not curse you." He put his hand on Custine's slumped shoulder. "You good man, Captain.

Come." Beng turned him and headed him out of the camp. "I come with you to get papers." He threw a look at Lewis over his shoulder. He spoke in Romany. "Have the caravan ready to leave when I get back."

Lewis nodded. The other men released him and ran to hurry their women's packing as Beng and the French officer disappeared from sight. Lewis stood alone for a few moments after they'd gone. He looked up at the sky again and laughed. The sound was full of triumph as much as amusement as both Toma and Lewis reveled in having gotten the best of the foolish French
gajo.

Chapter 14

The fingertips brushing across
the tip of Sara's breast were cold; that alone was enough to bring an instant response, never mind what they were doing. Which was so stimulating that she had to grit her teeth to keep from waking up the whole camp with her reaction.

"You're awake, I see," she said from behind her gritted teeth. Lewis grunted in response, while his cold hand stroked down across her waist and stomach. “You slept with your hand outside the cover, didn't you?"

"Umm," he responded as his lips found and began nuzzling her ear.

"Ah," she whispered as his fingers reached the top of her thighs. She opened her legs without any urging. At the same time she reached for his head and brought his mouth to hers. She kissed him, with her lands tightly fisted in his silky hair while his fingers made magic with delicate little swirling strokes. One thing led quickly to another then, and the next thing she knew she was lying cradled beside him, warm and sated and slightly embarrassed by the ease of the entire process.

It kept happening. For days now, one thing had kept leading to another. Every time she told him to go away he ended up sharing the bed. They didn't talk about it; they hadn't talked much about anything since the night they stole the brooch. In fact, she spent most of her time with Molly and Beth and he was either with the other men, or entertaining the caravan's adoring children. The kids followed him as if he were the Pied Piper. She played the guitar and sometimes caught herself sulking if he wasn't looking at her over the width of the campfire. Then he would look at her and the outcome would be inevitable. Deliriously inevitable, despite her mild protests that they shouldn't. They always seemed to end up sleeping together, though.

She had to admit it felt nice, not just the sex, but the sleeping in the comfort of shared warmth as the days grew cooler. She'd lost track of the time. She wasn't sure what month it was. In fact everything that had happened before stealing the brooch was wrapped in a sort of haze, and every day since had been gone through in a daze.

The brooch, she thought, then lifted her head to look at Lewis. "The brooch," she said. "What are you going to do with the brooch?" Of course the question should more properly be asked of the ring, but Lewis hadn't known about the ring when he set out to steal the brooch. "And why'd you want it in the first place?"

Lewis had drifted into a light doze after making love. He didn't particularly want to wake up just yet.

He didn't want to talk; talking brought the world too close. He liked the world distant and all fuzzy around the edges, the way it had been the last several weeks. He didn't want to talk, but Sara's tone told him she wasn't going to be put off.

He sighed. "I don't want it for anything," he answered.

"Yeah, right," she replied skeptically. She shifted in the narrow confines of the bed, propping herself up on one arm. Lewis opened one eye to look at her. "So," she said, glad she had his attention, even if it was her bare breasts he was looking at. "What's it got to do with the defeat of one Napoleon Bonaparte?