Kiss an Angel(115)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The hell you don’t. The truth, Max. I want it now.”

The older man seemed to collapse. His knees bent, and he slumped down into the chair nearest him. “Don’t you see? It was my duty.”

“Your duty. Of course that’s how you’d see it. I can’t believe I was so stupid. I’ve always known how obsessed you were with family history, but it never occurred to me that you’d do something like this.” Bitterness welled in his stomach. From the beginning, he and Daisy had been nothing but puppets serving Max’s obsession with the past.

“Something like what? By God, you should be grateful.” Max erupted from the chair. His finger shook as he pointed it toward Alex. “For a man who’s an historian, you have no sense of your own lineage. You’re the great-grandson of the czar!”

“I’m a Markov. That’s the only family history that means anything to me.”

“A worthless band of vagabonds. Vagabonds, do you hear me? You’re a Romanov, and it’s your duty to have a child. But you wanted no part of it, did you?”

“It was my decision, not yours!”

“This is bigger than some selfish whim.”

“When she told me she was pregnant, I thought she’d done it deliberately. I accused her of lying, you bastard!”

Max winced, and he lost some of his righteous indignation. “Look at it from my viewpoint. I only had six months, and I had to act quickly. As much as I might wish that you’d fall in love with her, I could hardly expect a man with your intellectual gifts to be interested in a scatterbrain like my daughter in any way except sexually.”

Alex felt sick. What must it have been like for his gentle, intelligent wife to have been shackled with a father who had so little respect for her? “That scatterbrain is smarter than both of us.”

“There’s no need to be polite.”

“I’m not. You don’t know your daughter at all.”

“I know that I couldn’t let this marriage end without doing my best to make sure there was a Romanov heir.”

“It wasn’t your decision.”

“That’s not exactly true. Throughout history, the Petroffs have always dedicated themselves to the greater good of the Romanovs, even when the Romanovs might disagree.”

As Alex looked at Max, he realized Daisy’s father wasn’t quite sane on the subject. Max might be a reasonable man in all other aspects of his life, but not in this one.

“You were going to let the line die,” Max said. “I couldn’t allow that.”

There was no point in arguing this particular topic any further. To Max, the child Daisy carried was a pawn, but the baby meant something far different to Alex, and he felt a father’s instincts to protect it.

“What pills was she taking? What did you give her?”

“Nothing that would harm the baby. A child’s fluoride pill, that’s all.” Max collapsed in the chair. “You have to find her before she does something stupid. What if she’s gotten rid of it?”

Alex stared at the old man. Gradually, pity took the place of bitterness as he thought of all the years Max had wasted, all the chances he’d passed by to get to know his remarkable daughter.

“Nothing could make her do that. She has guts, Max. And she’ll do whatever it takes to keep that baby safe.”



Alex met the circus the next morning just as the first trucks were pulling into a lot in Chattanooga. As the days grew shorter and summer drew to an end, the circus was winding its way back south toward its winter quarters near Tampa, where they would play their last date during the final week of October. His sabbatical from the university wasn’t up until January, and he’d planned to do some research in Ukraine before then. Now he didn’t know what he’d do. Without Daisy, he didn’t much care.

He automatically scanned the new lot and saw that it was hilly, with barely enough level space to put up the top. He was bleary-eyed from fatigue, but he welcomed the challenge of a bad lot. He knew it wouldn’t take his mind off her—nothing could—but at least it would help the time pass.

Trey was driving his trailer on the morning jump, but he hadn’t arrived yet, so Alex headed over to the cook tent for some of the bitterly potent coffee that would eat a hole in his already burning stomach. Before he could fill his cup, he heard a shrill, demanding trumpet. He cursed softly under his breath and headed for the elephants.

When he got there, he wasn’t surprised to see that Neeco looked peeved. “Give me the hot shot back, Alex. Just one jab, and we can put an end to this bullshit.”

Despite Neeco’s bluster, Alex knew the elephant trainer had lost his taste for the prod after his encounter with Sinjun. He liked to think that Daisy’s ways with the animals had opened Neeco’s eyes, because he was gentler with the elephants than he had been, and they were working better for him. Still, he needed to make sure Neeco understood that he couldn’t go back to his old ways.

“As long as I’m boss, you’re not using the prod again.”

“Then get that little prick out of here.”

Alex walked over to Tater and suffered the baby’s embrace. The tip of the elephant’s trunk poked beneath his shirt collar to sniff his neck, just as he’d done with Daisy. Alex untethered him and headed toward the spool truck, with Tater trotting behind.