“Why didn’t you warn me, you heartless little witch?” he demanded, setting her on her feet beside the Jacuzzi. The gleam in his eyes belied his fierce frown.
“And miss that little scene?” Gypsy choked. “I wish Poppy could have seen it; he’d have dined out on that for a month! Oh, darling, you were perfect—Amy loves you already.”
“How could you tell?” Chase asked wryly, and then a sudden thought apparently occurred to him. “Gypsy… is Amy going to live with us?”
“Of course she is, darling,” his future bride told him serenely.
Chase raised his eyes toward heaven with the look of a man whose cup was full. More than full. Running over.
“Don’t worry.” Gypsy patted his cheek gently. “If you’re good, she’ll only come after you with her broom once a week or so.”
“Gypsy?”
“What is it, darling?”
“You’re kidding?”
“No, darling.”
“Gypsy?”
“Yes, darling?”
“I’ll never survive it.”
“Of course you will, darling.” She smiled up at him sunnily. “My hero can adapt to anything. That’s one of the reasons I love him.”
“News for you, sweetheart,” he murmured, kissing her nose. “Your hero has feet of clay.”
Gypsy smiled very tenderly. “That’s another of the reasons I love him.”
“My Gypsy,” he whispered. “My love.”
They were late for supper. But Amy didn’t fuss.
ten
THE SHRILL DEMAND OF THE TELEPHONE finally roused Gypsy, and she felt a distinct inclination to swear sleepily. They’d flown half around the world the day before, from Geneva, Switzerland, to Portland, Oregon, with only brief layovers. Gypsy wasn’t even sure what month it was— never mind the day. She was suffering from lack of sleep, a horrendous jet lag, and the irritating conviction that she’d forgotten something in Geneva.
And now the phone. It was only a little after eight A.M.— the birds weren’t even up, for Pete’s sake!
Gypsy half climbed over Chase to reach the phone; he was dead to the world and didn’t move. She fumbled for the receiver and managed finally to lift it to her ear, murmuring, “What?”
“You’ve been gone,” a soft, muffled masculine voice told her sadly. “For weeks … and you didn’t tell me….”
Gypsy slammed the receiver down and sat bolt upright in bed, staring at the phone as if it had just this moment come to life. Now, that was a hell of a thing to wake up to in her condition! She had to ask Chase. She had to know.
Chase stirred and looked up at her with sleep-blurred eyes.
“You look like a house fell on you,” he observed, muffling a yawn with one hand. “Who was that on the phone?”
Shock tactics, she decided, might have some effect.
She snatched the sheet up to cover her breasts and stared at Chase in patent horror. “We have to get a divorce. Immediately,” she announced in a very firm voice.
Chase raised himself on his elbow and stared at her with sleepy courtesy. “We just got married a few weeks ago,” he pointed out patiently. “Are you tired of me already?”
Gypsy struggled hard to maintain her expression of shocked indignation. “I’ve married the wrong man! I fell in love with a voice over the telephone, and now I find out that it wasn’t you at all. Get out of my bed!”
Chase was soothing. “You probably had a bad dream. Jet lag will do that to you. Lie down, sweetheart.”
“I want a divorce.”
“I won’t let you divorce me. I like being married. Besides, my father would stand me in front of a firing squad if I lost you. He’s telling half of Geneva about his daughter-in-law, the famous writer.”
“Well, if that’s the only reason you want to hang on to me, I’ll go and see a lawyer today!”
“It’s Saturday.”
“Is it? Monday, then.”
Chase pulled her down beside him and arranged them both comfortably. “Not a chance. Amy loves me. And Corsair’s coming around. You’d never find anyone as adaptable as me. Besides, we’ve already arranged to house-sit in Richmond for the winter.”
With an inward sigh Gypsy abandoned her ploy to find out if Chase was really her “night lover.” “Did we say hello to Jake and Sarah last night?” she asked suddenly. “I seem to remember something about it.”
Chase laughed. “Well, sort of. I was carrying you, and you waved at them and asked how they liked my Jacuzzi. I think you were sound asleep at the time.”
Gypsy frowned. “Were they over here, then? Shouldn’t they have been at your place?”
“Our place,” Chase corrected. “And they were over here keeping Amy company until we arrived. Jake’s determined to win her over,” he added with a chuckle. “He says he wants the friendship of any woman who can defeat him at arm wrestling.”
Gypsy accepted this information without a blink. “Oh.” She yawned suddenly and changed the subject again. In an injured tone she said, “It’s inhuman to drag a person halfway around the world. If man had been meant to fly—”
“He’d have wings?” Chase finished politely.
“No. He’d have a cushion tied to his rump to make up for airport lounges,” she corrected disgustedly. “I seem to have spent eons in them, and my rump hurts!”
Chase patted it consolingly. “You’ll recover. And, besides, whose fault was it that we made the trip in one fell swoop?”
“Mine, and don’t rub it in.” Gypsy sighed. “Can I help it if I wanted to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible?”
“No, but you could have warned me before we went over that you had a phobia about flying.”
“It isn’t a phobia, it’s just an uneasiness,” she defended stoutly.
“Uh-huh.” Chase grinned at her. “Tell me what the Swiss Alps look like from the air.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not, sweetheart?”
“Because I had my eyes closed, and you know it, dammit!”
Chase laughed at her expression. “Seriously, honey, we should have taken Dad’s suggestion: gone overland to Bordeaux and then taken a ship.”
“Across the Atlantic?” Her tone was horrified.
They’d had this same discussion in Geneva, and Chase laughed as much now as he had then. “It beats me how you’re willing to fly over an ocean, although you hate flying—but you aren’t willing to sail across an ocean, although you love swimming.”
“A plane’s faster,” Gypsy said definitely.
“So?”
“So don’t make me explain my little irrational fears. I warned you long ago that I was no bargain, but you just wouldn’t listen. So now you have an irrational wife.”
“I have a wonderful wife,” Chase corrected comfortably. “And I have Dad’s stamp of approval to verify it. I thought he was going to cry when you hugged him that last time at the airport. You definitely made a conquest there.”
Gypsy smiled. “I love your dad. He reminds me of Poppy—very quiet, but with a deadly sense of humor.”
“Mmmm. I think you’ve about got him talked into settling in Portland when he retires. You can work on him some more when he comes over for Christmas.”
“It’d be nice to have both families nearby,” she agreed, then frowned as part of his remark set up a train of thought. “Christmas. That reminds me—before we left for Geneva, I saw you and Mother come in here with a package all wrapped up. It looked like a painting. Somehow or another, I forgot to ask you about it.”
Chase laughed silently. “That’s my Gypsy—give her enough time, and she’ll get around to it eventually!”
Gypsy raised up on an elbow and stared down at him severely. “Stop avoiding the subject. What have you and my mother been up to?”
“That question sounds vaguely indecent,” he murmured.
“Chase!”
“I have a shrewish wife,” he told the ceiling, then relented as the gleam in her eyes threatene
d grievous bodily harm. “Take a look behind you, shrew,” he invited. “On the wall— where you were too much asleep last night to notice it.”
Gypsy twisted around to look. Then she sat up and looked a while longer. Then she looked at Chase as he sat up beside her.
He smiled. “Rebecca painted it for me. Although she said she didn’t know why I wanted it—since I was bound to end up with the original. I asked her to paint it that Sunday I invited them for lunch. And we left it here because I knew we’d spend our first night back in this room.”
After a moment he added softly, “I didn’t know she’d put me in it.”
Gypsy looked at the painting again. Her first thought was that Rebecca must have seen the seascapes in Chase’s bedroom and, with her usual perception, decided to paint another seascape which would blend in… and yet stand out. Because this painting wasn’t bleak or lonely.
The central figure was Gypsy. She was wearing the silk nightgown and leaning back against the rock jutting up behind her, staring out to sea. Above her were storm clouds, curiously shaped, as if Nature had been in a teasing mood that day, bent on luring mortals out to sea. The clouds were wispy, insubstantial; their dreamy visions seen only by those who cared to see. There was a unicorn leaping from one cloud, a castle topped another; a rainbow cast its hazy colors over the ghost-ship sailing beneath it, a ghostly pirate at its wheel. There was Apollo, driving his sun behind dark clouds; there was a masked figure on a white steed; there was a knight climbing toward his cloud-castle.
And there was Chase—real, substantial. The view caught him from the waist up, half hidden by the rock Gypsy was leaning against. And Chase wasn’t looking out to sea at the siren-visions of clouds. He was looking at Gypsy, and his face was soft with yearning.
Gypsy took a deep breath, realizing only then that she’d suspended breathing for what seemed like eternal seconds. “I never stop wondering at Mother’s perception,” she murmured almost inaudibly She looked again at the cloud-heroes, seeing in each one an elusive resemblance to Chase.
“She saw it, Chase—she saw it all. I was looking at visions of heroes and seeing you without realizing it.”
“And I was looking at you,” Chase murmured, bending his head to kiss her bare shoulder.
“I’m so glad you’re a patient hero,” she whispered, smiling up at him as he lowered them both back to the comfortable pillows.
Chase grinned faintly. “An original hero, anyway. What other man would have scoured Geneva—of all places!—to find a Buddha with a clock in his middle?”
Gypsy giggled helplessly. “Did you see your dad’s face when we carried it in? And when you told him very seriously that your watch had stopped?”
“He looked even more peculiar when we opened the other boxes,” Chase noted ruefully. “Such odd souvenirs for a honeymoon: an abstract wooden sculpture of a knight on horseback, a bogus nineteenth-century sword—complete with scabbard, a hideous little genie-type lamp covered with tarnish…. You’d do great on a scavenger hunt, sweetheart.”
“You’re the one who fell in love with the sword,” Gypsy pointed out calmly.
“A memento of our courtship,” Chase said soulfully
“Right. Just don’t try to dance while wearing it.”
“As long as you don’t try to conjure a genie from that lamp.”
“Why not?” she asked in mock disappointment.
“I shudder to think what’d pop out.”
Gypsy sighed. “You’re probably right.”
“And speaking of being right”—he patted her gently— “I’ve been meaning to tell you that the Swiss cooking did wonders in adding that extra ballast you needed.”
“Uh-huh.” Gypsy twisted slightly for a view of her blanket-covered posterior. “Too much ballast, if you ask me. Just look! I’m getting broad in the beam!”
He choked on a laugh. “Your beam looks great to me.”
“Flatterer.”
“The choice of words was yours.” He drew her a bit closer. “Besides, you still weigh no more than a midget. I’ll have to fatten you up some more before we go to work on Radinka or Shadwell.”
Gypsy started laughing. “You’re hung up on those names! I thought you just used them as a terrifying example of the names I’d come up with on my own.”
Sheepishly Chase murmured, “They kinda grow on you though.”
“No, Chase,” she told him firmly.
“I suppose not. Still—”
“No.”
“No?”
“Definitely no. I’d be a widow as soon as the kids realized what you’d done to them.”
He sighed. “My first opportunity to come up with some really creative names,” he mourned sadly.
“Exercise your creative powers by naming Angel’s kittens. Or you can name the Mercedes. Or we’ll get a dog—”
“We already have one,” Chase told her casually.
Gypsy lifted her head to stare down at him. “We do?”
“Uh-huh. Bucephalus.”
“But he belongs to the Robbinses—”
“Not anymore. Remember when we called before the wedding to explain about Amy being in sole charge of the house while we were gone?” When Gypsy nodded, he went on. “You had to leave the room because Rebecca wanted to talk to you about flowers or something. Anyway, I was talking to Tim. It seems he’s been offered a two-year position, which could turn out to be permanent, in London starting next year. Bucephalus would have to spend six months in quarantine, and he’d be miserable. So Tim offered to give him to us. I accepted—for both of us.”
Gypsy smiled. “That’s wonderful. Now we have a head start on our family.”
Chase began to nuzzle her throat. “Mmmm. Would you care to start working toward the rest of our family, Gypsy mine?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” she murmured, feeling that delicious tremor stir to life inside her. Then she smiled, and said almost to herself, “Gypsy mine; you’ve called me that from the first. Were you that sure of me, darling?”
“Not sure. Hopeful.” Chase pulled her easily over on top of him and smiled up at her whimsically. “I’ve never been one to search for rainbows, but you were my dream.” He hesitated, then added very softly, “‘So if I dream I have you, I have you.’”
A thousand and one thoughts tumbled through Gypsy’s mind.
“What is it, love?” Chase asked gently. “You’re giving me a very peculiar look.”
Gypsy carefully searched her memory of events. She was almost sure— Yes, she was sure! Her “night lover” had called only twice when Chase was actually in the room, and on both occasions, she’d hung up on him before he could say more than a few words. What if… what if she hadn’t been so quick to hang up? Would she have discovered that it had been a tape-recorded message? Held up to the phone by a helpful friend, perhaps?
“You’re staring at me, love. Somewhat fiercely, I might add.”
“Chase…”
“Yes, love?”
“You just quoted Donne.”
“Did I, love?” He was smiling slightly, the jade eyes veiled by sleepy lids. “The man obviously had a way with words.”
“Chase.”
“Hmmm?”
“It was you. It was you… wasn’t it?”
“What was me, love?”
Gypsy tried to ignore wandering hands. “The phone calls. It had to be you. Wasn’t it you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, love.”
“Chase, you have to tell me! I’ll go nuts, and—” A startled giggle suddenly escaped her.
Jade eyes gleamed up at her, filled with laughter. “Ah-ha! I finally found your ticklish spot. You’re at my mercy now, love.”
Gypsy choked back another giggle, trying to ward off his tickling hand. “Chase! Stop that! And tell me it was you, dammit! Darling, I have to know!”
“What was that, love? Didn’t quite catch it.”
“Chase!” she wailed.
He s
miled.
Pepper’s Way
one
WANTED: MAN Must be over six feet tall and weigh at least two hundred pounds. Must own large house on considerable acreage. Must like animals. Must have job with flexible hours. Preferably single. Call Pepper.
HE WOULDN’T HAVE GIVEN THE AD A second glance if he’d found it in the personals column of some trashy magazine. It certainly sounded typical of that kind of publication. And yet… Thor looked at the ad for the fifth time in as many minutes. Well, he fit all the requirements. And he was dying to find out what kind of woman would place such an ad in a large daily newspaper.
He’d seen the ad every day this week, and had grown more and more curious. And since he knew very well that the newspaper in which the ad was running didn’t pander to lonely-hearts or practical jokers, he couldn’t help but wonder exactly what it was all about. A publicity stunt or something. Had to be. But if it wasn’t… well, then, what was it?
He possessed two overwhelming sins, neither of which was appropriate in his profession: curiosity and a love of the absurd. Sighing, he reached for the phone and dialed the number printed after the name Pepper.
“Hello?”
It was a sweet, childish voice, presently filled with suspicion. She sounded as though she might possibly be five years old… on her next birthday.
“Pepper?” he asked cautiously.
“Yes?” Definitely wary now.
“I’m calling about your ad,” Thor began.
“Oh, Lord—another one! Listen, I’m pulling that ad tomorrow, so forget it! I’ve been listening to obscene suggestions all week, and I’m fed up! So, whoever you are, get your kicks somewhere else!”
The voice, he reflected, was still sweet and childish, but this was definitely no little girl he was talking to. Curiosity grew. Mildly, he told her, “I didn’t call to make obscene suggestions.”
“You didn’t? Then what do you want?” she demanded.
“I thought it was a matter of what you wanted,” he murmured. “A man over six feet tall, two hundred pounds—and so on.”
“Do you fit?” she asked, still suspicious.
“Yes.”
“How old are you?”