Kiss an Angel(11)

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.”

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 f*cked 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 from 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.”