Gypsy Magic (The Little Matchmakers) (18 page)

“Look at me. Look and listen. I must say this.” He drew in a deep breath and let it rush out. “When I said I couldn’t ask you to be my wife, I was wrong. I want nothing more than I want that. I love you. Whatever went before isn’t important. I can see the love in your eyes when you look at me, feel it in your touch when your hands rest on my body.” His mouth moved closer.

“No! Lance, stop this. You don’t know what you’re doing! You’re in pain. You need to sleep.” She planted her hands on his chest.

“I’m not in pain now. I do know what I’m doing. Kiss me,” he whispered against her lips. “Let me show you how I feel. I love you with all my heart and soul.”

Instinctively she tried to turn her head, scrambled back until she was on her knees. With both hands on his shoulders, she shoved harder. He gave her a goofy, lop-sided smile and clasped her wrists. “Come here and kiss me,” he said.

“Not today,” she said, unable to hold back a laugh at his fumbling, loose-jointed attempts to recapture her when she broke loose. “Your pills have made you drunk, Lance. Let’s talk about this another time, okay?”

“Ah… come here,” he said. “I need you.”

This time, he got a hand around the back of her neck and tugged until she had to put her hands on his shoulders again to avoid falling face-first on his chest. His muscles quivered under her palms. She couldn’t help herself. His shoulders, broad, his skin, satin-smooth, his questing hands on her arms tempted her beyond measure. A kiss… What would one kiss hurt? She’d give him that—give herself that—and then she could quit wondering what it would be like. How long, she asked herself far back in her mind, had she been wondering about this? The answer came at once. Ever since the time he had lifted a knife from her hand, a badly over-baked loaf of bread, and said, “Let me…”

She tilted her head to one side and let him claim her lips. His were firm, warm, insistent. His tongue parted her mouth, slid inside with amazing ease because she made no effort to stop it. She welcomed it and when one of his hands found her breast through the thin fabric of her shirt, she gasped in wonder at its warmth, its size. Without thought, she arched into it, moaned and parted her lips under his. Then he kissed her the way, she suddenly realized, she had wanted him to almost from the first moment of meeting him. She clung to him, head spinning wildly as he rapidly undid buttons until there was nothing between them but the warmth of two bodies and she let her eager hands slide around his broad torso to caress his muscular back while her mouth met his demands and made demands of its own. She was aware only of the sensuous feel of him touching her, of his hands on her body, running through her hair, whispering across her face. “My love, my love… Tell me you won’t leave me again. I need you so much!”

“I won’t,” she said. “I won’t leave you, Lance,” and as she said it, she knew it was true. Am I that fickle? she wondered dimly, as the memory of Tony briefly crossed her mind. But never in all her twenty-three years, had she felt this way. She loved Lance Saunders. Loving him, needing him, knowing he felt that way about her made her more alive, more aware of herself than ever before. Her skin tingled wherever he touched her. Her body yearned toward his. Her arms clung to him.

“I love you,” she whispered against his mouth. “I don’t know why, or for how long I’ve felt this way, I only know I do. You’ve acted like the most unlovable man possible, but something in me saw through that in you and I fell in love you anyway, Lance Saunders. I know that now.”

His husky laughter thrilled her as it rumbled against her throat. “I am unlovable. I know it. But you… somehow, you’ve sneaked past that. For you, I will become lovable.”

“For me, you already have.”

“And you’ll love me forever?”

She had to dispel the doubt in his tone. “And ever… And ever,” she responded, laying her head against his warm chest until his hand forced her face up once more.

“I’m getting sleepy from the damn drug,” he said, “on the one night when I don’t want to sleep. I want to make love to you.”

She curved her hands around his face, giving them the full benefit of her smile. “Yes, Lance, I know. And I want that, too.”

“You wouldn’t care if it happened here and now?”

“No,” she said quietly sincerely. “I love you and I wouldn’t deny you anything.”

“I can’t believe my luck.” He held her tenderly, fiercely, rocking her. “Your sincerity shines through. Do you know what that means to me?”

“I know what we’re doing means to me. It means heaven, and joy, and peace.”

He slumped down on the bunk, carrying her with him, still wrapped in his arms, her head pillowed on his shoulder while he stroked her hair. “I adore you,” he whispered sleepily, thickly, almost as one drunk… With passion? Or from his medication? She felt his body relax heavily onto the arm he held pinned beneath him. “You are mine, and you won’t leave me ever? You promised. And you meant your promise this time didn’t you?”

This time? She wondered, but nodded against him, affirmatively, emphatically, knowing that the drug was making him confused. “I’ll always keep my promise to you.”

“And what’s his name… He’s nothing?”

With a tiny flash of guilt, she whispered, “Tony. No, what I feel—felt—for him is nothing compared to this.”

“Not… him.” Lance’s voice was fading, his head lolled loosely, heavy against her and she moved to make it more comfortable, managing to sneak her arm out from under him, all filled with pins and needles. His hold on her tightened convulsively, bringing her back to touch his long length. “Not him, he repeated. “The other one… Greg…”

“Greg?” Gypsy raised her head, startled.

He pulled her back down. “Stay still, my love, my dearest, my beauty. You said you wouldn’t leave again. Let me hold you, Catherine, my Catherine with a difference.”

Chapter Seven

Catherine?
As the name penetrated her benumbed brain Gypsy felt herself stiffen into a tense bow, straining away from Lance’s warm body. Catherine?
Catherine!
she screamed mentally sliding off the bunk to stand looking down at his sleeping form with dawning horror. The flashlight, still standing on its tail on the floor, cast its beam against the ceiling, reflecting down onto the sweet, contented smile on his face, a face Gypsy now knew she loved more than she had ever loved before.

But he did not love her. The kisses, the intimate caresses she had accepted so gladly from him had not been meant for her, but for someone named Catherine. Who is Catherine? Why did he want to make love to me when it isn’t me he loves? Why did he say so solemnly, I love you with all my heart and soul? Was he talking to me… or to Catherine? Whose body did he think he held? Whose lips did he demand? Mine, or Catherine’s?

In the very beginning, when I gave him the tablets and began to bathe his head he surely knew it was me, so when did the transition take place? Before, or after, he said he loved me? How badly she wanted to believe it had been before. She backed away from Lance, turned off the light and huddled on her own bunk, pulling the covers around her icy limbs. Thinking back, she realized not once while he was speaking of love to her, had Lance used her name.

No, it had all been for Catherine, who had left him for someone named Greg.

Hot tears sprang to her eyes, sobs shook her for a brief moment before she gulped and forced herself to stop. It was the drug. It was the drug, she kept reminding herself. He didn’t know what he was doing, what he was saying. He was reliving some ancient memory. Of course he loves me. He must. He must. How could he have held me, kissed me the way he did, with such desperation if he didn’t know who I was, if he doesn’t feel the same way I do?

But what if he doesn’t? Oh, God, when he remembers what I said, the way I welcomed his touch? I couldn’t bear his scorn, his pity. He told me in the very beginning not to become attracted to him, and what did I do? I fell in love with him, several long, huge strides beyond mere attraction. He didn’t mean the things he said to me tonight, so please, don’t let him remember any of it. There are only nine days to go through before someone comes for him—for us. Nine days until I can escape.

Her chest burned and ached inside and she pressed her hands to her breastbone, wishing she could ease the terrible, physical pain. Is this what a broken heart feels like? Is this pain what all the songs and stories are about? I didn’t know it could be like this. I didn’t know it could hurt so much. The tears flowed again, hot and stinging, sliding down her face to drip onto the pillow she clutched to herself, seeking warmth, when the only warmth her body would have felt would have needed to come from Lance. Lance, to whom she had offered her total love, total commitment, total surrender, which he would’ve accepted had he not been drugged by his medication.

She fought to force herself to sit still when what she longed to do was get out of the confines of the cabin, walk and walk and walk in the night despite the dark, to run, to flee, somewhere, anywhere to escape the pain, to escape the sound of his breathing. Knowing his warmth was there, waiting for her to creep next to it, to lie in peace beside him, to cling to him. Why couldn’t she just pretend, just for tonight, that he’d never said the name Catherine? Why couldn’t she just believe that his lovemaking had been meant for herself? She almost went back to him, her need was so great, almost convinced herself that it had been only at the last he’d grown incoherent, not knowing what he was saying or to whom.

Lance rolled over in his sleep, talking, and the words he spoke came clearly to Gypsy’s acutely attuned hearing. “Needs… mother…”

Lance, calling out for his mother? No. He’d have said “need” not “needs.” Who? Kevin, of course. Kevin needs his mother. And what triggered this entire sequence of events? Kevin’s calling Gypsy “Mother.” Lance, unable to bear hearing her called that, had become furiously angry and, as she had been told, when Lance becomes furious, he develops a migraine. And why had it made him so angry? Because Gypsy was not Kevin’s mother. But Catherine was.

Anguish washed over her, leaving her feeling sick and weak, as more and more pieces of the puzzle fell into place, as some of Lance’s is more cryptic comments began to make sense, as some of Kevin’s childish babblings began to take on a new, and disastrous meaning.

“How much are they paying you?” Lance had asked. “A lot, I’d imagine, considering your looks.” Her looks! And she had thought he was saying that, because she, like most professional models, was more than normally attractive, she might have been hired to lure him away from his vacation. Could that be the explanation for his seemingly inexplicable animosity toward her? Had she not known, without false modesty, that she was a beautiful woman, naturally attractive to men, she might’ve accepted his dislike of her as just one of those things. But this way, it made far more sense.

And Kevin had said, “I saw a picture of you in a book” not, as she had thought and wondered at, a magazine in which Gypsy had appeared as a model, but a photo album in which Catherine was pictured. Of course! She rocked back and forth with pain, clenching her jaws until they ached along with her heart. And that, too, was why Kevin Saunders so closely resembled Kevin Gaynor.

Kevin Gaynor and his sister had looked very much alike. Kevin Saunders resembled them both, so did not follow that Gypsy, too, might well be the image of Catherine, mother of Lance’s son?

Shivering with cold and reaction, Gypsy slipped under the covers and buried her face in the thin pillow, knowing she was going to weep, and trying not to. No matter what it cost her she must put a stop to all the tears until she was completely alone and far from Lance. That thought brought added pain and she bit her knuckles until the blood ran warm and salty into her mouth.

Oh, lord! I have to sleep! I have to stop all this thinking and wondering and aching.
Gypsy slipped from her bed and took one of Lance’s pills, washing it down with the remains of the water she had pumped for him.

But it took time for the drug to release its sedation into her system and in that time the tears she had been unable to control took their toll and when at last she slept, it was with a puffy face pressed into a damp pillow and a soggy blanket pulled up around her shoulders, which ached from weeping.

~ * ~

Lance emerged slowly from his drugged sleep and inched his eyes open to the gray light of dawn. He lay quietly thinking for some time as, now and then an incredibly happy smile crossed his face until, at length, he climbed silently from his bunk and lit the fire to boil the kettle, working stealthily. Kevin, who’d had an unaccustomed late night, lay curled in a small, tight ball, his back to the room, and all was still and silent behind Gypsy’s curtain. Somewhere nearby a bird trilled, to be joined by others until the dawn chorus was at full swing.

When the coffee was ready, with a smile, Lance carried a cup toward the curtain and then, with a quick, flashing grin, set it on the floor and went out into the damp morning, paused for a moment to look at the dismal gray fog which hung like dirty sheets round the treetops. So much for the squall having blown in better weather. He bent and picked a handful of delicate, pinky purple wild geraniums, added a few sprigs of wild grasses and returned to the cabin.

Pushing the curtain aside, he bent, and would’ve dropped a kiss on the sleeping face half obscured by the pillow, but was stopped by the sight of swollen eye-lids, a tear-stained, puffy cheek, the scar more prominent than it should be, and the shuddering sobs which even yet disturbed Gypsy’s breathing. Drawing in a breath over suddenly bared teeth, a frown creasing his brow, Lance backed away, letting the curtain fall. He poured the mug of coffee back into the pot and walked outside to sit on the steps under the watery sun which was just breaking through the shrouds of fog. He covered his face with his hands.

What went wrong? he asked himself. What made his Gypsy spend the night weeping? Was it all a mistake on her part? Did she did she weep from guilt, from remorse? Was it simply a case of getting carried away by passion? If that was all it was for her… And the thought cut through him sharply, if that’s all it was and she doesn’t know how to tell me… But I was so sure! So sure!