Kiss an Angel(36)

“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.