“My Gypsy Sammy.” He grinned at her. “My perfect Gypsy Sammy.”
She laughed, set her hands on either side of his head, and leaned over him to kiss him.
His legs were not quite helpless, as she had discovered on previous occasions. Before she knew it, she was on her back and he was on top of her, his legs between hers, and his lips were on hers, his tongue deep in her mouth, and his hands were fierce on her and then beneath her bu**ocks and holding her firm while he thrust deep into her.
She lifted her legs from the bed and wrapped them about his lean hips, and they loved each other long and hard until they were both panting and slick with sweat and they broke together into glory and collapsed into the world beyond.
They lay side by side afterward, sated and drowsy and dozing, their hands touching. Last night had felt a bit like goodbye, she thought. The melancholy of it had remained with her this morning. And now?
No, she did not want to think.
“I believe you will make a wonderful new life here,” he said at last. “You have neighbors who seem very ready to accept you and welcome you into their midst. You will make friends here. And you have family here. You have a grandfather who wishes to be a part of your life. Listen to him this evening, Samantha, and think well before you reject him for all the apparent wrongs of the past.”
“I have agreed to listen,” she reminded him.
“I think you did the right thing,” he said, “coming here. And I think it will be time for me to leave tomorrow, before speculation and a bit of gossip can blossom into scandal as they surely would if I stayed longer.”
“I have delayed your travels for long enough,” she said.
He did not answer her, and they lay side by side, no longer either drowsy or dozing. Samantha fought tears. She fought the urge to beg him to stay just one more day or perhaps two. For he was right. It was time for him to leave. It was time for him to go in search of his life and for her to settle to her new one.
It was time to let him go.
After a while he turned and sat up, moving his legs over the side of the bed.
“I had better return to the inn,” he said. “I will bring the carriage later to take you to Cartref?”
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”
She felt about as bleak as it was possible to feel.
Mr. Bevan had the good manners and easy address of a true gentleman, Ben thought, even if he was not one by birth. And he dressed with fashionable elegance yet without any ostentation or grand display of wealth. The wealth was clearly there, however.
He took them on a tour of the house. Everything was of the finest but with not the merest suggestion of vulgarity. The room in which they lingered longest was the long gallery at the back of the house. It was filled with paintings and a few sculptures by the great masters, a few of them acquired by his father, he told them, but the majority by him. And he always purchased what he most liked, he explained to them, rather than what was most valuable. Though Ben guessed there was a fortune in that room alone. There were paintings in every other room too, some of them by acclaimed masters, some by unknown artists Mr. Bevan had admired and wanted to encourage.
And wherever he took them, there were views from the windows, over the rolling Welsh countryside, over the beach and the sea.
He plied them with sherry and conversation in the drawing room and then with good wine and food and conversation in the dining room. He told them about his travels and his reading. And he asked them about their own lives with skilled questions that would draw more than monosyllabic answers from them and yet would not seem intrusive. When Ben asked him about his businesses, he answered thoroughly but without monopolizing all their time and perhaps boring Samantha.
He appeared totally at his ease and in perfect good humor with his guests.
Samantha, Ben guessed, was troubled even as she admired the house and ate and drank and listened to her grandfather’s conversation and Ben’s and made her own contributions. She was looking extremely beautiful in a turquoise blue high-waisted dress he had not seen before. Her hair was elaborately styled considering the fact that she had not had the services of her maid today. It shone in the candlelight.
While they drank tea in the drawing room after dinner, Mr. Bevan told them about the male voice choir made up of eighty or so of his miners.
“There is no finer choir in all of Wales,” he told them, “and that is saying something. I am not entirely impartial, of course, but they did win at the eisteddfod in Newport both last year and the year before. I always say that coal dust must do marvels for the vocal cords.”
“Iced—?” Ben asked
“Eye-steth-fod,” Mr. Bevan said, pronouncing the word clearly. “A Welsh arts festival.”
He turned his eyes on Samantha, who was swirling the dregs of her tea in her cup, and watched her in silence for a few moments.
“Your grandmother was dancing when I first set eyes on her,” he said. “The Gypsies had camped down by the sea, as they sometimes did, and I went to have a look with some of the other lads from around here. I was twenty-one at the time. Her feet were bare, and her bright, full skirts were swirling about her ankles and her dark hair was tumbled about her face and shoulders, and I had not seen anything as lovely or as full of life and grace in all my days. I didn’t know anything at that time about not putting birds or butterflies or wild things in cages. I wooed her and I married her, all within six weeks, against everyone’s advice, her own people’s included. We were going to live happily ever after. She was sixteen.”