by Lisa Kleypas
"It was the best thing I ever did," Amelia said.
"Since he's paying for my trip to France, I suppose I can't disagree." Leo reached out to shake Cam 's hand. After a rocky beginning, the two men had come to like each other in a short time. "Good-bye, phral," Leo said, using the Romany word that Cam had taught him for "brother." "I have no doubt you'll do an excellent job taking care of the family. You've already gotten rid of me, which is a promising beginning."
"You'll return to a rebuilt home and a thriving estate, my lord."
Leo gave a low laugh. "I can't wait to see what you will accomplish. You know, not just any peer would entrust all his affairs to a pair of Gypsies."
"I would say with certainty," Cam replied, "that you're the only one."
After Win had bid farewell to her sisters, Leo settled her into the carriage and sat beside her. There was a soft lurch as the team pulled forward, and they headed to the London docks.
Leo studied Win's profile. As usual, she showed little emotion, her fine-boned face serene and composed. But he saw the flags of color burning on the pale crests of her cheeks, and the way her fingers clenched and tugged at the embroidered handkerchief in her lap. It had not escaped him that Merripen hadn't been there to say good-bye. Leo wondered if he and Win had exchanged harsh words.
Sighing, Leo reached out and put his arm around his sister's thin, breakable frame. She stiffened but did not pull away. After a moment, the handkerchief came up, and he saw that she was blotting her eyes. She was afraid, and ill, and miserable.
And he was all she had.
God help her.
He made an attempt at humor. "You didn't let Beatrix give you one of her pets, did you? I'm warning you, if you're carrying a hedgehog or a rat, it goes overboard as soon as we're on the ship."
Win shook her head and blew her nose.
"You know," Leo said conversationally, still holding her, "you're the least amusing of all the sisters. I can't think how I ended up going to France with you."
"Believe me," came her watery reply, "I wouldn't be this boring if I had any say in the matter. When I get well I intend to behave very badly indeed."
"Well, that's something to look forward to." He rested his cheek on her soft blond hair.
"Leo," she asked after a moment, "why did you volunteer to go to the clinic with me? Is it because you want to get well, too?"
Leo was both touched and annoyed by the innocent question. Win, like everyone else in the family, considered his excessive drinking an illness that might be cured by a period of abstinence and healthful surroundings. But his drinking was merely a symptom of the real illness-a grief so persistent that at times it threatened to stop his heart from beating.
There was no cure for losing Laura.
"No," he said to Win. "I have no aspirations to get well. I merely want to continue my debauchery with new scenery." He was rewarded by a small chuckle. "Win… did you and Merripen quarrel? Is that why he wasn't there to see you off?" At her prolonged silence, Leo rolled his eyes. "If you insist on being closemouthed, Sis, it's going to be a long journey indeed."
"Yes, we quarreled."
"About what? Harrow 's clinic?"
"Not really. That was part of it, but…" Win shrugged uncomfortably. "It's too complicated. It would take forever to explain."
"We're about to cross an ocean and half of France. Believe me, we have time."
After the carriage had departed, Cam went to the mews behind the hotel, a tidy building with horse stalls and a carriage house on the ground floor, and servants' accommodations above. As he had expected, Merripen was grooming the horses. The hotel mews were run on a part-livery system, which meant some of the stabling chores had to be assumed by the horse owners. At the moment Merripen was taking care of Cam 's black gelding, a three-year-old named Pooka.
Merripen's movements were light, quick, and methodical as he ran a brush over the horse's shining flanks.
Cam watched him for a moment, appreciating the Rom's deftness. The story that Gypsies were exceptionally good with horses was no myth. A Rom considered the horse to be a comrade, an animal of poetry and heroic instincts. And Pooka accepted Merripen's presence with a calm deference he showed to few people.
"What do you want?" Merripen asked without looking at him.
Cam approached the open stall leisurely, smiling as Pooka lowered his head and nudged his chest. "No, boy… no sugar lumps." He patted the muscular neck. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, exposing the tattoo of a black flying horse on his forearm. Cam had no memory of when he'd gotten the tattoo… It had been there forever, for reasons his grandmother would never explain.
The symbol was an Irish nightmare steed called a pooka, an alternately malevolent and benevolent horse who spoke in a human voice and flew at night on widespread wings. According to legend, the pooka would come to an unsuspecting human's door at midnight, and take him on a ride that would leave him forever changed.
Cam had never seen a similar mark on anyone else. Until Merripen.
Through a quirk of fate, Merripen had recently been injured in a house fire. And as his wound was being treated, the Hathaways had discovered the tattoo on Merripen's shoulder.
That had raised more than a few questions in Cam 's mind.
He saw Merripen glance at the tattoo on his arm. "What do you make of a Rom wearing an Irish design?" Cam asked.
"There are Roma in Ireland. Nothing unusual."
"There's something unusual about this tattoo," Cam said evenly. "I've never seen another like it, until you. And since it came as a surprise to the Hathaways, you've evidently taken great care to keep it hidden. Why is that, my phral? "
"Don't call me that."
"You've been part of the Hathaway family since childhood," Cam said. "And I've married into it. That makes us brothers, doesn't it?"
A disdainful glance was his only reply.
Cam found perverse amusement in being friendly to a Rom who so clearly despised him. He understood exactly what had engendered Merripen's hostility. The addition of a new male to a family tribe, or vitsa, was never an easy situation, and usually his place would be low in the hierarchy. For Cam, a stranger, to come in and act as the head of the family was nearly unendurable. It didn't help that Cam was poshram, a half-breed born of a Romany mother and an Irish gadjo father. And if there was anything that could make matters even worse, Cam was wealthy, which was shameful in the eyes of the Rom.
"Why have you always kept it hidden?" Cam persisted.
Merripen paused in his brushing and gave Cam a cold, dark glance. "I was told it was the mark of a curse. That on the day I discovered what it meant, and what it was for, I or someone close to me, was fated to die."
Cam showed no outward reaction, but he felt a few prickles of unease at the back of his neck.
"Who are you, Merripen?" he asked softly.
The big Rom went back to work. "No one."
"You were part of a tribe once. You must have had family."
"I don't remember any father. My mother died when I was born."
"So did mine. I was raised by my grandmother."
The brush halted in midstroke. Neither of them moved. The stable became deadly quiet, except for the snuffling and shifting of horses. "I was raised by my uncle. To be one of the asharibe."
"Ah." Cam kept any hint of pity from his expression, but privately he thought, You poor bastard.
No wonder Merripen fought so well. Some Gypsy tribes took their strongest boys and turned them into bare-knuckle fighters, pitting them against each other at fairs and pubs and gatherings, for onlookers to make bets on. Some of the boys were disfigured or even killed. And the ones who survived were hardened fighters down to the bootstraps, and designated as warriors of the tribe.
"Well, that explains your sweet temperament," Cam said. "Was that why you chose to stay with the Hathaways after they took you in? Because you no longer wanted to live as an asharibe? "
"Yes."
> "You're lying, phral," Cam said, watching him closely. "You stayed for another reason." And Cam knew from the Rom's visible flush that he'd hit upon the truth.
Quietly, Cam added, "You stayed for her."
Chapter Two
Twelve years earlier
There was no goodness in him. No softness. He had been raised to sleep on hard ground, to eat plain food and drink cold water, and to tight other boys on command. If he ever refused to fight, he was beaten by his uncle, the rom baro, the big male of the tribe. There was no mother to plead for him, no father to intervene in the rom baro's harsh punishments. No one ever touched him except in violence. He existed only to fight, to steal, to do things against the gadje.
Most Gypsies did not hate the pale, doughy Englishmen who lived in tidy houses and carried pocket watches and read books by the hearth. They only distrusted them. But Kev's tribe despised gadje, mostly because the rom baro did. And whatever the leader's whims, beliefs, and inclinations were, you followed them.
Eventually, because the rom baro's tribe had inflicted such mischief and misery whenever they set up camp, the gadjos had decided to scourge them from the land. The Englishmen had come on horses, carrying weapons. There had been gunshots, clubbings, sleeping Romas attacked in their beds, women and children screaming and crying. The camp had been scattered and everyone had been driven off, the vardo wagons set on fire, many of the horses stolen by the gadjos.
Kev had tried to fight them, to defend the vitsa, but he had been struck on the head with the heavy butt of a gun. Another had stabbed him in the back with a bayonet. The tribe had left him for dead. Alone in the night, he had lain half-conscious by the river, listening to the rush of dark water, feeling the chill of hard, wet earth beneath him, dimly aware of his own blood seeping in warm runlets from his body. He had waited without fear for the great wheel to roll into darkness. He had no reason or desire to live.
But just as Night yielded to the approach of her sister Morning, Kev found himself gathered up and carried away in a small rustic cart. A gadjo had found him, and had bid a local boy to help carry the dying Rom into his house.
It was the first time Kev had ever been beneath the ceiling of anything other than a vardo. He found himself torn between curiosity at his foreign surroundings and rage at the indignity at having to die indoors under the care of a gadjo. But Kev was too weak, too much in pain, to lift a finger in his own defense.
The room he occupied was not much bigger than a horse stall, holding only a bed and a chair. There were cushions, pillows, framed needlework on the walls, a lamp with beaded fringe. Had he not been so ill, he would have gone mad in the overstuffed little room.
The gadjo who had brought him there… Hathaway… was a tall, slender man with pale yellow hair. His gentle manner, his diffidence, made Kev hostile. Why had Hathaway saved him? What could he want from a Romany boy? Kev refused to talk to the gadjo and wouldn't take medicine. He rejected any overture of kindness. He owed this Hathaway nothing. He hadn't wanted to be saved, hadn't wanted to live. So he lay there flinching and silent whenever the man changed the bandage on his back.
There was only one time Kev spoke, and that was when Hathaway had asked about the tattoo.
"What is this mark for?"
"It's a curse," Kev said through gritted teeth. "Don't speak of it to anyone, or the curse will fall on you, too."
"I see." The man's voice was kind. "I will keep your secret. But I'll tell you that as a rationalist, I don't believe in such superstitions. A curse has only as much power as the subject gives it."
Stupid gadjo, Kev thought. Everyone knew that to deny a curse was to bring very bad luck on oneself.
It was a noisy household, full of children. Kev could hear them beyond the closed door of the room he had been put in. But there was something else… a faint, sweet presence nearby. He felt it hovering, outside the room, just out of his reach. And he yearned for it, hungered for relief from the darkness and fever and pain.
Amid the clamor of children bickering, laughing, singing, he heard a murmur that raised every hair on his body. A girl's voice. Lovely, soothing. He wanted her to come to him. He willed it as he lay there, his wounds mending with torturous slowness. Come to me…
But she never appeared. The only ones who entered the room were Hathaway and his wife, a pleasant but wary woman who regarded Kev as if he were a wild animal that had found its way into her civilized home. And he behaved like one, snapping and snarling whenever they came near him. As soon as he could move under his own power, he washed himself with the basin of warm water they left in his room. He would not eat in front of them but waited until they had left a tray by the bed. His entire will was devoted to healing enough to be able to escape.
On one or two occasions the children came to look at him, peeking around the edge of the partially open door. There were two little girls named Poppy and Beatrix, who giggled and squealed with happy fright when he growled at them. There was another, older daughter, Amelia, who glanced at him with the same skeptical assessment the mother had. And there was a tall blue-eyed boy, Leo, who looked not much older than Kev himself.
"I want to make it clear," the boy had said from the doorway, his voice quiet, "that no one intends to do you any harm. As soon as you are able to leave, you are free to do so." He had stared at Kev's sullen, feverish face for a moment before adding, "My father is a kind man. A Samaritan. But I'm not. So don't even think of injuring or insulting any of the Hathaways, or you'll answer to me."
Kev respected that. Enough to give Leo a slight nod. Of course, if Kev were well, he could have bested the boy easily, sent him to the ground bleeding and broken. But Kev had begun to accept that this odd little family really didn't mean him harm. Nor did they want anything from him. They had merely provided care and shelter as if he were a stray dog. They seemed to expect nothing in return.
That didn't lessen his contempt for them and their ridiculously soft, comfortable world. He hated them all, nearly as much as he hated himself. He was a fighter, a thief, steeped in violence and deceit. Couldn't they see that? They seemed to have no comprehension of the danger they had brought into their own home.
After a week, Kev's fever had eased and his wound had mended enough to allow him to move. He had to leave before something terrible happened, before he did something. So Kev woke early one morning and dressed with painstaking slowness in the clothes they had given him, which had belonged to Leo.
It hurt to move, but Kev ignored the fierce pounding in his head and the jabbing fire in his back. He filled his coat pockets with a knife and fork from his food tray, a candle stub, a sliver of soap. The first light of dawn shone through the little window above the bed. The family would be awake soon. He started for the door, felt dizzy, and half-collapsed onto the mattress. Gasping, he tried to collect his strength.
There was a tap at the door, and it opened. His lips parted to snarl at the visitor.
"May I come in?" he heard a girl ask softly.
The curse died on Kev's lips. His senses were overwhelmed. He closed his eyes, breathing, waiting.
It's you. You're here.
At last.
"You've been alone for so long," she said, approaching him, "I thought you might want some company. I'm Winnifred."
Kev drew in the scent and sound of her, his heart pounding. Carefully he eased to his back, ignoring the pain that shot through him. He opened his eyes.
He had never thought any gadji could compare to Romany girls. But this one was remarkable, an otherworldly creature as pale as moonlight, her hair silver-blond, her features formed with tender gravity. She looked warm and innocent and soft. Everything he wasn't. His entire being responded so acutely to her that he reached out and seized her with a quiet grunt.
She gasped a little but held still. Kev knew it wasn't right to touch her. He didn't know how to be gentle. He would hurt her without even trying. And yet she relaxed in his hold, and stared at him with those steady blue eyes.
/> Why wasn't she frightened of him? He was actually frightened for her, because he knew what he was capable of.
He hadn't been aware of pulling her closer. All he knew was that now part of her weight was resting on him as he lay on the bed, and his fingertips had curled into the pliant flesh of her upper arms.
"Let go," she told him gently.
He didn't want to. Ever. He wanted to keep her against him, and pull her braided hair down and comb his fingers through the pale silk. He wanted to carry her off to the ends of the earth.
"If I do," he said gruffly, "will you stay?"
The delicate lips curved. Sweet, delicious smile. "Silly boy. Of course I'll stay. I've come to visit you."
Slowly his fingers loosened. He thought she would run away, but she remained. "Lie back," she told him.
"Why are you dressed so early?" Her eyes widened. "Oh. You mustn't leave. Not until you're well."
She needn't have worried. Kev's plans to escape had disappeared the second he had seen her. He eased back against the pillows, watching intently as she sat on the chair. She was wearing a pink dress. The edges of it, at the neck and wrists, were trimmed with little ruffles.
"What is your name?" she asked.
Kev hated talking. Hated making conversation with anyone. But he was willing to do anything to keep her with him. "Merripen."
"Is that your first name?"
He shook his head.
Winnifred tilted her head to the side. "Won't you tell it to me?"
He couldn't. A Rom could only share his true name with others in the Rom.
"At least give me the first letter," she coaxed.
Kev stared at her, perplexed.
"I don't know many Gypsy names," she said. "Is it Luca? Marko? Stefan?"
It occurred to Kev that she was trying to play a game with him. Teasing him. He didn't know how to respond. Usually if someone tried to tease him, he responded by sinking his fist into the offender's face.