Wild Heart by Patricia Gaffney Read Free Book Online Page A

not the words but just the sound, and know who she was talking to. Sam was easy; to him she talked softly while she smiled, always smiled, and when she laughed it was because of Sam. No—sometimes Philip, but then the laughter was lower, shorter, deeper in her throat, as if what was funny was also not funny. She hardly ever laughed with her father, and when she talked to him her voice got thinner, tighter; her breath stayed high in her chest and sometimes when she sighed it out he could hear sadness.
    West. She called him Charles, his other name. She didn't talk to West very much, so he listened to the silence between them. It meant something. It made him wonder if they were mates. His skin got hot when he thought that. They had touched; he'd seen them. She had rested her back against West, and he had rubbed her with his hands. They had done that in secret, thinking no one saw. Then they'd stopped. If they were mates, was it for life or only for the summer?
    He didn't like West. He stank of something he put on his head, and his eyes when he looked at the lost man were sharp and hungry but still cold. Sometimes he touched Sydney on her back or behind her arm, petting her when he thought no one saw. Sometimes she let him; sometimes she moved away so he had to stop.
    He wanted to shoulder him away from her, bare his teeth and warn him to keep away. Animals did that in the mating season. But he wore a man's clothes now, ate cooked food, slept on a blanket. Did that make him a man? He couldn't be sure. He still wanted to fight for Sydney, though. If she wasn't West's mate, he wanted her for his.
    * * * * *
    "Sydney, close your eyes this time."
    "What?"
    "Stay where you are, but just close your eyes. I think he'll go closer."
    Obediently, she shut her eyes and waited, leaning her head against the back of the wrought-iron loveseat. The garden door squealed on rusty hinges as her father went out. Silence for a moment, just the buzzing of a bee in the ivy. Then the door squeaked open and the lost man came in.
    These studies had begun as tests of his sense of territo-riality, but eventually they'd shifted—when it became clear that he either had no such sense or no intention of showing it—to observations of "aversion and attraction vis-a-vis proximity," as her father put it. While he or Charles watched through an ivy-covered chink in the brick wall fifteen feet to Sydney's left, the lost man was repeatedly sent into the empty garden—empty but for one other person. Philip, Sam, Charles, Sydney, Aunt Estelle, even Inger, the downstairs maid—they'd all had their turns at the game, and now Sydney, because she happened to be still around (everyone else, even Sam, had tired of it and gone off to take a nap), was having a second turn.
    She heard a faint sound, maybe a footstep. Maybe not. How quietly he moved—she hadn't realized it before today. Seconds passed. Complete silence now; he could be sitting under the rose trellis ... or he could be standing right next to her. Looking at her. Her eyelids began to flutter from the effort to keep them closed.
    Did he think she was sleeping? She tried to moderate her breathing, slow it down and make it deep and even. Her skin tingled, and she felt a flush creeping up her neck. She became acutely aware of her whole body, everything about herself—her low-waisted yellow frock; the angle of her elbows as she clasped her hands in her lap; her knees, just touching. The dryness of her lips, which were not quite closed. Where was he? There was no sound, none at all. Was he even here?
    Then it was impossible; she couldn't stand it another second. She opened her eyes.
    There he was, not three steps away. Hands at his sides, body bent slightly toward her. Her sudden wakefulness didn't startle him—he had known she wasn't sleeping.
    They stared and stared, and she thought, This should be worse, this should be intolerable, but it wasn't. The tension was gone, and there was only interest, hers the equal