Now that she had reached the age of twenty-six, Daisy knew she was a throwback to the Victorians, and she also understood enough about human psychology to realize that her resistance to premarital sex had its roots in rebellion. From the time she was a small child, she’d watched the revolving door on her mother’s bedroom and known she could never be like that. She craved respectability. Once, she’d even thought she’d found it.
His name was Noel Black, and he was a forty-year-old executive in a British publishing firm who she’d met at a house party in Scotland. He was everything she admired in a man: stable, intelligent, well-educated. It hadn’t taken her long to fall in love with him.
She’d always been a woman who’d craved touch, and Noel’s kisses and expert caresses had inflamed her to the point where she’d nearly lost her mind. Even so she hadn’t been able to set aside her deeply entrenched principles and go to bed with him. Her refusal initially irritated him, but gradually he’d grown to understand how strongly she felt about it, and he’d proposed marriage. She’d eagerly accepted and floated through the days until the ceremony could take place.
Lani had pretended to be overjoyed, but Daisy should have known that her mother was terrified of being alone, to the point of desperation. It hadn’t taken Lani long to embark on a carefully calculated plan to seduce Noel Black.
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.”
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.
Even as she knew what she had to do, her mind balked. How could she honor vows she’d made to a stranger?
You didn’t make them to a stranger, her conscience reminded her. You made them to God.
At that moment Alex spotted her. Her decision was too new for her to be comfortable talking to him now, but she had no escape. She took a nervous puff on her cigarette and kept a wary eye on his fierce-looking horse as he approached. The horse was wearing exceptionally beautiful tack and trappings, including a richly embroidered crimson silk saddle cloth and a bridle set with filigreed gold medallions and elaborately mounted red stones that looked like real rubies.
He glared down at her. “Where have you been?”
“Exploring.”
“There are a lot of rough people around the circus. Until you get used to things, stay where I can keep an eye on you.”
Since she had just promised she was going to do her best to respect her vows, she swallowed her resentment toward his dictatorial manner and made herself respond pleasantly.
“All right.”
Her palms had begun to sweat from proximity to the horse, and she pressed herself closer against the trailer. “Is he yours?”
“Yes. Perry Lipscomb takes care of him for me. He has an equestrian act, and he hauls Misha in the trailer with his own horses.”
“I see.”
“Go on in and watch the show.”
He flicked the reins, and she stepped back quickly, then gave a hiss of dismay as what was left of her cigarette burst into flames.
“Will you stop that!” she screeched, batting at her clothes and stomping out the burning embers that had fallen to the ground.
He looked back at her, and one corner of his mouth lifted. “Those things are going to kill you if you don’t watch out.” With a low chuckle, he returned to take his place in line with the other performers.
She didn’t know which she found more discouraging, the fact that he’d destroyed one of her cigarettes with his theatrics or the knowledge that he seemed to have bested her in every encounter today.
She was still stewing as she took the long way around the animals and slipped in through the back entrance. She found a seat on one of the wooden bleachers. It was hard and narrow, with nowhere to rest her feet except between the fannies of the people in the next row, but she quickly forgot her discomfort as she enjoyed the excitement of the children around her.
She loved children. Although she’d never told anyone, her secret ambition had always been to teach kindergarten. Even though she couldn’t imagine the dream would ever become a reality, she liked thinking about it.
The lights dimmed and a drumroll built to a crescendo as a spotlight came up on the ringmaster standing in the center ring. “Laaaadeees and gentlemen! Children of aaaaall ages! Welcome to the thrills and chills of the tw
enty-fifth edition of the Quest Brothers Circus!”
Music broke out, played by a band that consisted of two musicians with drums, a synthesizer, and a computer of some kind. They launched into a lively version of “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” and a white horse ridden by a showgirl carrying an American flag came through the back entrance. Performers holding colorful banners followed, smiling and waving to the crowd.
The Brady Pepper Acrobats appeared, three good-looking men trailed by Heather, attired in gold spangles, shiny tights, and full makeup. A rhinestone and ruby tiara with a soaring comet at its center was mounted in her hair, now softly curled. Daisy had no difficulty picking out Brady Pepper from his sons. A muscular man of medium height, he reminded her of a street tough grown older. The acrobats were followed by a group of equestrians, clowns, jugglers, and a troupe of performing dogs.
Alex came into the arena on his ferocious black horse, and he alone of all the performers didn’t wave and smile. As he circled, he appeared as aloof and mysterious as his Russian heart. He acknowledged the presence of the crowd but somehow set himself apart and gave a strange kind of dignity to the garish display. The crowd cheered as the elephants ended the parade.
The show began, and as the acts progressed, Daisy was surprised by the high caliber of talent. Following a trio of Rumanian trapeze artists called the Flying Toleas, the lights dimmed and the music faded. A pinpoint of blue light came up on the ringmaster, who stood alone in the center of the darkened arena.
“You are about to see a performance presented nowhere else on earth but at Quest Brothers Circus. But first, I’m going to tell you an amazing story.” His voice grew dramatically hushed, and a haunting Russian folk tune began to play in the background.
“Almost thirty years ago in the frozen wilds of Siberia, a wandering tribe of Cossack bandits stumbled upon a very young boy, wearing nothing but rags and a priceless icon hanging on a leather thong around his neck. The Cossacks took him into their community and taught him the skills they had learned from their own fathers. But only the icon he wore offered any clue as to his true identity.”