Dare to Love by Jennifer Wilde Page B

child.
    â€œAll finished?” he inquired.
    I nodded. “Did Rudolpho show you around the camp?”
    â€œEvery inch of it. Fascinating experience,” he added dryly. “Shall we leave now?”
    â€œNot yet,” I protested. “We must see the dances.”
    People had formed a wide circle around the clearing in front of the caravans. Clasping my elbow firmly, Brence shoved and nudged until we were standing at the. front of the crowd. Two fires burned, wood crackling as the flames danced, washing the ground with wavering orange patterns. Three gypsies in colorful attire strummed guitars, and another slapped a tambourine. The music was sensual and savage. The crowd was restless, eager for the spectacle to begin.
    Brence put his arm around my shoulders and looked down at me with a half smile playing on his lips, but I had the feeling he was preoccupied and only pretending to give me his attention. He sighed and gazed at the fires, and although his arm rested heavily on my shoulders, he might have been completely alone. These moments of remoteness occurred frequently, as did the moody silences, but they never lasted long. He had confessed that this interim period before he began his new career was difficult for him, and I knew that he had a great deal on his mind. I only wished that he would share it with me. My life was an open book to him, but Brence had been extremely reserved about his own life, giving only the briefest of sketches.
    Born into the aristocracy, Brence had been a pampered child, but his father had lost the family fortune while Brence was still a boy. As a result, he had always been on the fringes of things, included in all the activities but, because of lack of money, never really able to participate. At Eton and later on at Oxford he felt like an outsider, never able to entertain in his rooms, never able to indulge in boyish larks. His mother died when he was in his teens, and when he was twenty his father succumbed to a heart attack, leaving him alone and penniless. Brence left Oxford and took a commission in the army, departing for India almost immediately.
    Was it this early deprivation that explained his consuming ambition, his determination to make a name for himself in the world? He needed to prove something, and that need was a kind of obsession. Sometimes I felt he was very vulnerable, for all his strength, for all his confidence. I longed to comfort him. I longed to be everything to him. As we stood waiting for the dancers to appear, I wondered how long it would be before he stopped treating me with such respect and casual affection, and started treating me like a woman. Only then could I give him the support and assurance I sensed he needed.
    The music built to a crescendo, stopped abruptly, and there was a moment of silence. Castanets began to click. A gypsy girl stepped into the clearing, her long black hair wild and tangled, her sullen mouth blood-red, dark eyes glaring at the crowd with open hostility as she moved around the circle with the grace of a tigress, clicking her castanets all the while. The music began again, the melody slow, matching the movements of her body. She wore a faded green dress with bodice cut low to show off a magnificent bosom. A tarnished gold belt encircled her slender waist, and the rows of silver and gold braid that adorned the full green skirt were tarnished as well. Golden hoops dangled from her earlobes. She swirled around, and the music swirled, too, growing louder, throbbing with passion.
    As I watched, I remembered, and my body seemed to vibrate to the music. It was difficult to stand still. The girl swayed back and forth, her arms above her head, the castanets chattering. She threw her head back and hissed, vicious, passionate, a beautiful animal eager to engage in fierce combat with the lover who had not yet appeared. She stamped her heels on the hard-packed earth, looking this way and that, scowling impatiently, and when the gypsy