Page 11 of Kiss an Angel

Daisy wondered if Heather was this rude to everyone.

“Brady performs with my brothers, Matt and Rob. I just stand around and style.”

“Style?”

“Strike poses for the audience. Don’t you know anything?”

“Not about the circus.”

“You must not know anything about men, either. I saw you go into Alex’s trailer earlier. Do you know what Sheba says about women who get involved with Alex?”

Daisy was fairly certain she didn’t want to hear. “Who’s Sheba?”

“Sheba Quest. She owns the circus since her husband died. And she says any woman who tries to get too close to Alex has a death wish.”

“Is that so?”

“They hate each other.” She took a deep drag and coughed. When she’d recovered, she regarded Daisy with a narrow-eyed squint that was intended to annihilate, but merely looked ridiculous on a fairy sprite. “I’ll bet he gets rid of you after he’s fucked you a couple of times.”

Daisy had been hearing the vilest obscenities since she was a child, but she still found the word disconcerting when it came fr

om a youngster. She didn’t use obscenities herself. Another quirk in her rebellion against her upbringing.

“You’re so pretty. It’s a shame to spoil it with that sort of language.”

Heather gave her a look of worldly scorn. “Fuck off.” Plucking the cigarette from her mouth, she dropped it and ground it out beneath the sole of her sandal.

Daisy gazed at the butt with longing. There had been at least three good puffs left in it.

“Alex can have any woman he wants,” Heather tossed over her shoulder as she began to walk away. “You might be his girlfriend for now, but you won’t be around for long.”

Before Daisy could tell her she was Alex’s wife, not his girlfriend, the teenager had disappeared. Even putting the best face on it, she could hardly say her first encounter with one of the circus people had gone well.

She spent the next half hour roaming the lot, watching the elephant rides from a safe distance and trying to stay out of everyone’s path. She realized there was a subtle order in the way the circus was set up. The midway in front held the food and souvenir concessions along with a tent decorated with brightly painted vertical banners depicting wild animals gruesomely devouring their prey. A sign across the entrance read quest brothers menagerie. Opposite it sat a trailer with a ticket window at one end. Heavy trucks had been parked off to the side and away from the crowd, while the house trailers, RVs, and campers occupied the back.

As the crowd began gathering in front of the big top, she moved past the stands selling food, souvenirs, and cotton candy to get closer. The smells of Belgian waffles and popcorn mingled with the odors of the animals and a faint hint of mildew from the nylon big top. A man in his early thirties with thinning sandy hair and a big voice was trying to entice the onlookers into the menagerie.

“For only one dollar you’ll see the most vicious Siberian tiger in captivity, along with an exotic camel, a llama the kids’ll love, and a ferocious gorilla . . .”

As the spiel went on, Daisy moved around the side, passing a cook tent where some of the workers were eating. From the time of her arrival, she had noticed how noisy everything was, and now she found the source of that continuous rumble, a truck that contained two large yellow generators. Heavy cables extended out from it, some of them snaking toward the big top, others toward the concession stands and house trailers.

A woman in a robin’s-egg-blue cape edged with marabou emerged from one of the campers and stopped to speak with a clown wearing a bright orange wig. Other performers began to gather under a canopy that she decided must be the performers’ entrance to the big top, since it sat opposite the entrance the crowd was using. She had seen no sign of Alex, and she wondered where he was.

The elephants appeared, magnificent in their crimson-and-gold blankets with plumed headpieces. As they lumbered over to take their place, she shrank back toward one of the house trailers. Small dogs terrorized her, and if an elephant came near her, she was fairly certain she’d faint.

Several sleek horses decked out in jeweled harnesses pranced by. She nervously fumbled in her pocket for the nearly empty pack of cigarettes she’d managed to bum from one of the truck drivers and drew one out.

“Line up for spec, everybody! Let’s go!”

The man, who earlier had been enticing the crowd to view the menagerie, made the announcement as he slipped into a ringmaster’s bright red jacket. At the same time Alex appeared, mounted on a sleek black horse, and Daisy realized he wasn’t just the circus manager but a performer as well.

Dressed in a theatrical adaptation of a Cossack’s costume, he wore a silky white shirt with billowy sleeves and flowing black trousers tucked into a pair of high black leather boots that molded to his calves. A jewel-encrusted scarlet sash encircled his waist, and the fringed ends trailed down over the horse’s side. It wasn’t difficult to imagine him riding across the Russian steppes on his way to rape and pillage. She spotted a coiled whip hanging from his saddle, and with a sense of relief, she realized she had let her imagination run wild. The whip lying on the bed had been nothing more than a circus prop.

As she watched him lean down from the horse to talk with the ringmaster, she remembered she had taken sacred vows that bound her to this man, and she knew she could no longer keep ducking her conscience. With unblinking honesty, she saw that agreeing to this marriage had been the most cowardly thing she had ever done. She had been too lacking in character, too unsure of her ability to care for herself, to turn her back on her father’s blackmail and make her own way, even if it had meant going to jail.

Would this be the pattern for the rest of her life? Ducking responsibility and taking the easy way out? She felt ashamed remembering that she’d spoken those sacred wedding vows with no intention of keeping them, and she knew she had to make amends.

Her conscience had been whispering the solution for hours, but she’d refused to listen. Now she accepted the fact that she wasn’t going to be able to live with herself unless she made an attempt to keep those vows. Just because it would be difficult didn’t make it any less necessary. She had the distinct fear that if she ran away from this, there would be no hope for her.