Sweet Jesus. She clutched her stomach and doubled over. What was happening to her? Sweet Jesus, make it stop! It was too much to bear.
She slumped forward. Her cheek pressed into the dirt. She knew she was going to die.
As abruptly as the pain had come, it disappeared. She gasped for air. Trembling, she pushed herself to her knees.
The tiger eyes burned with quiet rage.
Now you know how a captive feels.
Alex was furious. He stalked through the lot with Sheba Quest at his side and a whip coiled in his fist. It was Saturday night, payday for the workers, and some of them were already drunk, so he carried his bullwhip as a deterrent. At the moment, however, it wasn’t the workers who were giving him difficulty.
“Nobody steals from me!” Sheba declared, “and Daisy’s not going to get away with this just because she’s your wife.” The low, clipped tones of the circus owner’s voice underscored her anger. Her red hair blazed behind her, and her eyes shot sparks.
Alex’s deathbed promise to Owen had placed him in a constant struggle of wills with his widow. Sheba Quest was his employer, and she was determined to push him as far as she could, while he was equally determined to honor Owen’s wishes. So far, it had been a series of compromises satisfying neither one of them, and open warfare had been inevitable.
“You don’t have any proof that Daisy took the money.”
Even as he spoke, he was angry with himself for trying to defend her. There was no other suspect. He wouldn’t have put it past her to take his money—she seemed to regard that as her due—but he hadn’t expected her to steal from the circus. It just showed that he was still capable of letting his sex drive interfere with his good judgment.
“Get real,” she snapped. “I checked the cash drawer after she came back on duty. Face it, Alex. Your bride is a thief.”
“I’m not making any accusations until I’ve had a chance to talk to her,” he said stubbornly.
“The money’s missing, isn’t it? And Daisy was in charge. If she didn’t steal it, why has she disappeared?”
“I’m going to find her and ask.”
“I want her arrested, Alex. She stole from me, and as soon as you find her, I’m calling the police.”
He stopped in midstride. “We don’t ever call the police. You know that as well as anyone. If she’s guilty, I’ll take care of her just like I’d take care of anybody else around here who breaks the law.”
“The last person you ‘took care of’ was that driver who was selling dope to the workers. There wasn’t a whole lot left of him when you were done. Is that what you’re going to do to Daisy?”
“Lay off.”
“You’re a real shit, you know that? You’re not going to protect your dopey little bimbo from this. I want every cent back, and then I want her punished. If you don’t do it to my satisfaction, I’ll make sure the law does.”
“I said I’d take care of it.”
“See that you do.”
Sheba was the toughest woman he knew, and now he looked her straight in the eye. “Daisy doesn’t have anything to do with what happened between the two of us. I don’t want you trying to get to me through her.”
He saw a flash of the vulnerability she so rarely displayed, but it was gone as quickly as it had appeared. “I hate to deflate that ego of yours, but you seem to have an exaggerated idea of your importance to me.”
She walked away, and as he watched her go, he knew she was lying.
The two of them shared a long, complicated history that went back to the summer he had just turned sixteen, when he was spending his school vacation traveling with Quest Brothers and listening to Owen’s views on manhood. The Flying Cardozas had also been with the show that summer, and Alex was immediately besotted with the twenty-one-year-old queen of the center ring.
At night he fell asleep dreaming of her beauty, her grace, and her breasts. The girls he’d known until then seemed like children in comparison to the luscious and unattainable Sheba Cardoza. In addition to lusting after her, he felt a kinship with her in her drive for perfection and relentless push to be the best. In Sheba, he saw a will that matched his own.
She also had an egotistical streak, nurtured by her father, that Alex had never possessed. Sam Cardoza had raised Sheba to believe she was better than everyone else. But she also had a softer, maternal side, and although she was young, she served as a mother hen to the other members of the troupe, clucking over them when they misbehaved, filling their stomachs with her home-cooked spaghetti dinners, and counseling them on their love lives.
Even at the age of twenty-one, she liked playing the grand matriarch, and it wasn’t long before she brought Alex into the clan, taking pity on the parentless sixteen-year-old who watched her with young, hot eyes. She made certain Alex ate well and badgered Owen to keep him away from the rowdier workmen, ignoring the fact that Alex had spent too many years with circuses to be sheltered now.
Alex wanted more than maternal fussing from her, but a handsome Mexican flyer named Carlos Méndez stood in his way. Like Sheba, Carlos was the last of an old circus family, and he’d been hired by Sheba’s father as the new catcher. But Sam Cardoza had more than the good of the act in mind. While Carlos Mendez’s circus ancestry wasn’t as impressive as the Cardozas’, in Sam’s eyes it was acceptable enough to make him a fitting sire for the next generation of Cardoza flyers, and Sheba pleased her father by falling in love with Carlos.
Jealousy ate at Alex. His own circus lineage was far more impressive than Méndez’s, but Sheba saw him only as a scrawny teenager who had a way with horses and a talent for the bullwhip. She chattered about her plans to marry the dashing Mexican and confided that Sam had already made Carlos agree to give their children the Cardoza name.
As summer came to an end and Alex prepared to return to school, the Cardozas received word that they had been chosen to fly with Ringling the next season. Carlos strutted the lot like a cocky rooster, but he had more arrogance than brains, and on the day Alex was to leave, Sheba arrived at Carlos’s trailer unexpectedly and caught him undressing one of the showgirls.
Alex would never forget that night. He came out of the top and found Sheba waiting for him. She was dry-eyed and eerily calm.
“Come.”
He didn’t think about disobeying her. She drew him away from the others and led him to the edge of the lot where they slipped into a small, unlit space between two of the concession wagons. His heart began to pound at her clandestine manner and the dark sense of purpose that was as forbidden as the musky smell of her perfume.
She looked deeply into his eyes. Without a word spoken between them, she opened her blouse and let it fall low on her arms. Her full breasts with their large, dark tips gleamed in a stray patch of moonlight that slivered between the wagons. She lifted his hands and put them to her.
A hundred times he had imagined something like this, but his fantasies didn’t prepare him for the reality of holding her breasts and feeling those large nipples beneath his fingers.
“Kiss them,” she said.
He groaned and dropped his head, overwhelmed that this magnificent woman would give him such an offering. Although he wasn’t a virgin, his sexual experience was limited, and he’d never known such fierce excitement. His erection pulsated against his tight pants. At the same time, he was filled with awe and a wrenching gratitude for the gift she was giving him.
Her fingers worked his zipper. He breathed hard against her moist flesh. She reached inside his pants. He felt her touch him and lost control. With a low groan, he exploded.
He shuddered with passion and humiliation. She pressed her lips to his mouth and offered him a long, deep kiss. Then she lifted her head and, with her bare breasts still moist from his mouth, turned toward the opening at the end of the concession wagons.
That was when Alex saw Carlos standing there watching them.
The hard, triumphant glint in Sheba’s eyes told Alex she’d known he was there all
along, and he was gripped by a sense of betrayal so devastating he couldn’t breathe. She didn’t care for him at all. She’d merely used him to exact her revenge.
As she gazed at her former lover, she seemed to have forgotten Alex existed. “I’m hiring a new catcher,” she said coldly. “You’re fired.”
“You can’t fire me,” the catcher sputtered. “I’m a Méndez.”
“You’re nothing. Even this boy is more of a man than you.”
She turned away and once again sealed her lips over Alex’s young mouth. Through his lust, through the haze of betrayal, he felt a chilling spark of admiration that frightened him more than his uncle’s whip ever had. He understood her ruthless exhibition of pride. Like himself, Sheba would never let anyone or anything threaten who she was, no matter how dear the cost. Even as he hated her for using him as her pawn, he respected her.
Sheba spent the next sixteen years as a featured performer for the world’s great circuses, and she didn’t travel with Quest Brothers again until her career had begun to fade. By that time, her father had died, and Sheba, still unmarried and childless, had become the last Cardoza.
Owen welcomed her back to Quest Brothers and built his show around her. In his infrequent telephone conversations with Alex, he revealed just enough for Alex to realize the old man had become obsessed with her.
Alex and Sheba met again two summers ago, and it was immediately apparent that the balance of power between them had shifted. At thirty-two, he had entered the prime of his manhood and had nothing left to prove, while her best years as a performer were behind her. He knew his worth and had long ago put the self-doubt of adolescence behind him. She was beautiful, restless, and for reasons he did not immediately understand, still unmarried and childless.
The fire burned hot between them, but this time she was the pursuer. He didn’t want to hurt Owen, so at first he ignored her sexual aggression. It soon became apparent, however, that the circus owner was resigned to their affair, and in his peculiar way was offended when Alex continued to spurn the woman he valued above all others.
Alex eventually let her into his bed. She was lithe and supple, earthy and passionate, and he’d never enjoyed sex more. He liked her toughness, as well as the fact that she no longer had the power to hurt him. But although he cared about her, he didn’t love her.
“Why haven’t you gotten married?” he asked one night as he sat down at the table in her luxurious trailer, where she was preparing to feed him for the second time that day. Both of them wore bathrobes, his plain, hers an exotic paisley pattern that made the auburn lights in her hair seem even richer. “I thought you were hell-bent to have kids. I know your old man expected it.”
She set a plate of lasagna in front of him, then went back to the stove to get her own. But she didn’t immediately return. Instead, she stood where she was and stared down at the food she’d prepared. “I guess I wanted too much. You know as well as I do that there are some things you can’t teach. The best flyers are born with natural ability, so any man I marry has to come from good family. I won’t marry down, but I also want to love him. Love and lineage. It’s a tough combination.”
She brought her plate over to the table. “My father used to say it was better for the Cardozas to die out than for him to have grandchildren without good blood.” She sat down and picked up her fork. “Well, I have my own saying. Better for the Cardozas to die out than for me to marry some weakhearted sonovabitch I can’t respect.”
“Good for you.”
She picked up her fork to take a bite, then set it back down and began to openly study him, a teasing gleam in her eyes. “The Markov family goes back even farther than the Cardozas. Sam told me all those years ago I shouldn’t have let you go. I laughed at him because you were only a kid, but those five years between us don’t mean much now, do they? We’re both the last of a circus dynasty.”
Amused, he shook his head. “And I don’t have any intention of keeping the Markov dynasty going. Sorry, sweetheart, but you’ll have to look somewhere else for your center-ring sperm bank.”
She laughed, picked up a dinner roll, and tried to stuff it whole into his mouth. “Lucky I don’t want you. If I did, you wouldn’t have a chance.”
Their affair burned on, so lusty and pleasurable that he didn’t attach significance to the increasingly possessive looks she began to throw at him or the way she gradually stopped teasing him about being her inferior. “We’re soul mates,” she told him one night, her voice husky with emotion. “If you’d been a woman, you would have been me.”
She was right, but something deep inside him rebelled at the comparison. He admired Sheba, but there was a ruthlessness about her that repelled him, maybe because he saw so much of it in himself. To keep her from saying more, he splayed her muscular legs and entered her with one hard thrust.
Despite the subtle changes in her behavior, he was unprepared for what happened one sultry afternoon in a vacant lot outside Waycross, Georgia. That was where Sheba told him she loved him. And as she spoke, he saw that she meant every word.
“I’m sorry,” he said as gently as he could when she was done, “but this isn’t going to work.”
“Of course it is. It’s destiny.”
She refused to listen as he said he could never love anyone—he’d had the capacity for loving beaten out of him when he was a kid—and the gleam in her eyes told him she saw his rejection as a game. She rose to the challenge with the same determination she’d used to conquer the triple somersault, and it was only as he stood packing his suitcase to leave after his last performance that she truly comprehended. He meant what he said. He didn’t love her. And he wasn’t going to marry her.
As the absolute finality of his rejection finally sank in, everything Sheba believed about her entitlement to have whatever she wanted collapsed, and she went berserk. That was when she did the unthinkable, the act for which she would never forgive him. That was when she begged him not to leave her.
He was, perhaps, the only person on earth who could understand the enormity of what she was destroying as she cried and fell on her knees before him. She violated her pride, the very thing that made her who she was.
“Sheba, stop it. You’ve got to stop.” He tried to pull her up, but she clung tightly and cried out with a despair so devastating that he would carry the sound of it to his grave. At that exact moment, he felt her love turn to hatred.
Owen Quest, alerted by the noise, had barged into the trailer and taken it all in. Then he’d looked at Alex and gestured toward the door with his head. “You go on. I’ll take over now.”
A week later, she’d married Owen, a man nearly twice her age who could not give her children, and Alex was the only one who understood why. His rejection had damaged her very core, and she could only recapture who she was by linking herself with a powerful man who would put her on a pedestal. Since her father was dead, she had turned to Owen.
“Alex!” Heather’s frightened voice cut through his disturbing memories. “I saw Daisy! She’s over by Sinjun’s cage.”
Sheba heard what Heather said and left Jack Daily’s side to return to Alex. “I’ll handle this.”
“No, you won’t. It’s my job.”
As their eyes locked in a fierce battle of wills, he silently cursed Owen Quest for putting both of them through this. Only after Owen’s death did he realize how the sly old buzzard had manipulated him. He’d counted on Alex and Sheba to patch up their differences, marry, and keep Quest Brothers intact. Owen had never really understood either of their natures. And he certainly hadn’t counted on a thieving little brat named Daisy Devreaux to spoil his plans.
Heather fell into step next to him, struggling to keep up as her forehead wrinkled with anxiety. “It wasn’t very much money. Only two hundred dollars. That’s not much.”
He slipped his arms around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “I want you to stay out of this, Heather. Do you understand me?”
She gazed up at hi
m, her eyes dark and troubled. “You’re not going to whip her, are you Alex? That’s what my brother said. He said you were going to whip her.”
Voices woke Daisy. She raised her head from her bent knees and realized she had dozed off as she sat on the ground in front of Sinjun’s cage. As she stretched, she remembered the pain she had experienced and her eerie sense of identification with the tiger. How bizarre. She must have dreamed it, but everything had seemed so real.
She looked over at the cage. Sinjun’s head was raised, his ears turned so that their white marks showed. She followed the direction of his gaze and saw Alex storming toward her, with Sheba and Heather trailing. Slowly she rose to her feet.
“Where is it?” Sheba demanded.
“I’ll take care of this,” Alex snapped.
Daisy felt a trickle of dread as she saw the cold, set expression on his face. Sinjun began to pace restlessly in his cage. “Take care of what? What’s wrong?”
Sheba regarded her with chilling contempt. “Don’t bother to play innocent. We know you took the money, so hand it over. Or did you already hide it someplace?”
Sinjun growled.
“I didn’t hide anything. What are you talking about?”
Alex transferred the coiled whip from one hand to the other. “Two hundred dollars is missing from the cash drawer, Daisy.”
“That’s impossible.”
“It’s true.”
“I didn’t take it.”
“That remains to be seen.”
She couldn’t believe this was happening. “I wasn’t the only one working there. Maybe Pete saw something. He took over while I was trying on costumes.”
Sheba moved closer. “You’re forgetting that I stopped in to check the money drawer right after you came back on duty. Everything reconciled. The two hundred dollars disappeared after that.”
“That’s not possible. I was there the whole time. It couldn’t have disappeared.”
“I’m going to search her, Alex. Maybe she still has it on her.”
Alex didn’t raise his voice, but the note of command was unmistakable. “You’re not going to touch her.”