A Proper Lady's Gypsy Lover Read Online Free PDF Page A

to Smithfield. He should never have taken advantage of her. True, she was willing enough; in fact, he was sure her passion matched his own, but that didn’t make it right. The thought of her made him begin to grow hard, made him yearn to have her in his arms again. But that didn’t make it right either. He and Lucy-Ann did not belong together, yet he was unable to control his desire for her.
    But no, he must not allow it. Their situation was impossible; there could be no future for them. He belonged to the road, she to society. Neither could exist in the world of the other. Lucy-Ann was no longer the wild young girl she’d been—his late-summer playmate and then his lover—who would think nothing of riding astride, who saw nothing wrong with laughing loudly if she were amused, or scratching herself if she itched, or wading in the stream, or swimming naked in the pond. That girl was gone.
    He had mistaken the elegant, self-possessed society lady for the Lucy-Ann from long ago. But that girl was not the woman with a pretty bonnet, a silk petticoat, and a carriage with four horses and a footman on the back. Perhaps he had made love to a memory.
    He rubbed the mark on his cheek where the driver of that same carriage had struck him with the whip two years ago, knocking him off his horse and into the mud. Neither the mark nor the memory had completely faded.
    At the encampment, when the children ran toward him, begging him to pick them up and swing them around the way they loved, he refused. He was conscious of their surprised, hurt looks as he went to his vardo and climbed inside. He would have thrown himself fully clothed onto the bed, but it was still redolent of the lovemaking he had shared with Lucy-Ann. It was too unsettling, too sad to think it was over, that it would never happen again. That it should never have happened. He went out again and, trying to forget Lucy-Ann, he worked with the horses well into the night.
     
     
    Chapter Five
     

     
    Lucy-Ann awoke the next morning and leaped out of bed. She laughed merrily at everything her aunts said over breakfast until they begged her to be more serious. And then she sang as Smith did her hair, thinking of her lover running his fingers through it, thinking of his hands on her body, feeling desire rising in her, making her heart beat faster. Intolerable impatience overcame her. She wanted only to be with Liberty in the golden light inside his vardo . She planned to tell her aunts that she would be lunching again with Miss Darnsworth.
    No sooner had Smith finished pinning her hair than a letter came for her with no address or mark of any kind indicating from whom it came. She tore it open and read.
     
    Dear Miss Taylor,
    I would address you as my darling, but I have no right to do so. Nor did I have the right to behave as I did yesterday. I hope and pray that you will forgive me. I had meant to do otherwise, to only bid you farewell, but when I saw you I could not constrain myself.
    I have thought and dreamt of you many times although I have struggled to forget you, for I knew I must lead my life without you. But when I saw you on Wednesday and again yesterday, I forgot my resolution and attended only to my selfish desires.
    Now I have returned to good sense, as I am sure you have also. We have no future together. Our two worlds cannot be happily combined. I will never be of the ton, save in disguise, and you are much too fine a lady to join me in my life as a gambler—though I think of myself as an honorable one, as I play cards only with those who can afford to lose what I win—and as a trainer and seller of horses. And I am a traveler, a Gypsy. I do not wish to live forever in one place but would choose always to be wandering. Whereas I see that you have settled into the life of a member of high society. You will want to marry a fine gentleman and settle in a fine house and raise a fine family in comfort and respectability. I can offer you none of this, not house,