Page 10 of Kiss an Angel

To Noel’s credit, he’d managed to resist for nearly a month, but Lani always got her man, and in the end, she’d gotten him.

“I did it for you, Daisy,” she’d said when it was over, and a heartbroken Daisy had discovered the truth. “I had to make you see what a hypocrite he is. My God, you’d have been miserable if you’d married him.”

They had quarreled bitterly, and Daisy had packed up her possessions to leave. Lani’s suicide attempt had put a stop to that.

Now she pulled the lacy strap of her wedding dress up over her shoulder and sighed. It was, a deep and hurtful sound, the sort of sigh that came from the bottom of her soul because she’d lost the words to express her feelings.

For other women, sex seemed to come so easily. Why not for her? She’d promised herself she would never have sex outside of marriage, and now she was married. But, ironically, her husband was more of a stranger to her than all the men she’d refused. The fact that he was brutally attractive didn’t change anything. She couldn’t imagine giving herself without love.

Her eyes wandered to the bed. She rose and walked toward it. Something that looked like a piece of black rope peeked out from beneath the pair of jeans tossed carelessly onto the rumpled blue sheets. She reached down to touch the soft, worn denim, then ran her finger along the open teeth of the zipper. What would it be like to be loved by a man? To wake up every morning and see the same face staring at you over the pillow? To have a home and children? A job? What would it be like to be normal?

She set the jeans aside, then abruptly stepped back as she saw what lay beneath them. Not a piece of rope at all, but a whip.

Her heart began to pound.

We can do this easy or we can do it rough. Either way I’m going to win.

Her husband had told her there would be consequences if she disobeyed him. When she’d asked him what they were, he’d said she’d figure it out for herself by tonight. Surely he hadn’t meant that he intended to beat her?

She tried to force her breathing back into its regular pattern. Men in the eighteenth century might have been able to get away with beating their wives, but times had changed. And she would call the police if he so much as laid a finger on her. She wouldn’t be a victim of any man’s violence, regardless of her desperate circumstances.

Surely there was a simple explanation for all this: the fire, the whip, and even that ominous-sounding threat. She was exhausted and unsettled by the shake-up in her life, and it was hard for her to think clearly.

Before she could do anything, she had to get out of her outfit. Once she’d put herself back together, she’d feel better. She dragged her bag up on the couch where she opened it and found that her dressy clothes had been removed, although what was left didn’t seem much more suitable for this ragtag place. She settled on a pair of khaki slacks, a melon-colored knit poor-boy top, and sandals. The tiny bathroom proved to be much cleaner than the rest of the place, and by the time she’d repaired her hair and makeup, she felt enough like herself to go outside and explore.

The smell of animals, hay, and dust hit her nostrils as soon as she stepped down into the sandy soil. The warm breeze of late April blew across the lot, making the sides of the big top gently billow and snapping the multicolored pennants that decorated the midway. She heard the sound of a radio playing from an open window in one of the house trailers and the blare of a television quiz show coming from another. Someone was cooking on a charcoal grill, and her stomach rumbled. At the same time, she thought she caught a whiff of cigarette smoke. She followed it to the other side of her trailer and saw a fairy sprite of a girl leaning against the metal siding sneaking a smoke.

She was a delicate, fawnlike creature with straight, golden brown hair, Bambi eyes, and a soft curl of a mouth. In her early-to-middle teens, she had small breasts that poked against a faded T-shirt with a rip at the neck. She wore jeans shorts and imitation Birkenstocks that looked huge on her dainty feet.

Daisy greeted her pleasantly, but the girl’s Bambi eyes stayed sullen and hostile.

“I’m Daisy.”

“Is that your real name?”

“My real name is Theodosia—my mother had a flair for drama—but everybody calls me Daisy. What’s your name?”

There was a long silence. “Heather.”

“How pretty. Are you with the circus? Of course you are or you wouldn’t be here, would you?”

“I’m one of the Brady Pepper Acrobats.”

“You’re a performer! That’s great. I’ve never met a circus performer.”

Heather regarded her with the perfect disdain only teenagers seem able to master.

“Did you grow up with the circus?” As Daisy asked the question, she weighed the morality of bumming a cigarette from a youngster. “How old are you, anyway?”

“I just turned sixteen. I’ve been around for a while.” She stuck the cigarette in the corner of her mouth where it looked vaguely obscene. Squinting against the smoke, she began tossing the rings she held into the air until she had all five of them going. Her smooth forehead puckered in concentration, giving Daisy the impression that juggling wasn’t easy for her, especially as her eyes began to tear from the smoke.

“Who’s Brady Pepper?”

“Crap.” Heather missed a ring, then caught the other four. “He’s my father.”

“Is it just the two of you in the act?”

Heather looked at her as if she were crazy. “Yeah, right. Like it’s going to be just me and Brady when I can’t even keep five rings in the air.”

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