Lisa Kleypas - Seduce Me At Sunrise

"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."

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.