Through the Looking Glass (3 page)

Her gentle, childlike voice was disarming; it took Gideon several moments to digest what she'd told him. "Expecting me?" he ventured finally.

"Naturally."

Gideon was about to question her further when they rounded the back of one of the wagons and saw something that made him forget everything else.

The carnival was camped along the edge of the forest about a hundred yards from the road so that several of the wagons and tents could take advantage of the shade. Between a faded pink tent and a mauve-colored wagon, a red-and-blue-checked circular tablecloth had been spread on the ground in the shade. Around the edges of the cloth were five people frowning in concentration at the cards they held in their hands.

Only one of them looked familiar to Gideon; he was the absurdly dressed man who had asked the time. By comparison, he didn't look so ridiculous now. On his left was a lean, aristocratic gentleman with fine silver hair who seemed to be wearing a white toga. Clockwise around the circle, next was a clown in full makeup and costume, a woman with wild black hair dressed colorfully as a gypsy, and a redheaded man somewhere in his twenties who was wearing a Scottish kilt and a garland of wildflowers in his hair.

Gideon stopped in his tracks and stared at them. The tablecloth was covered with the remnants of tea, complete with a delicate pot and dainty cups and saucers as well as a number of plates holding nothing but crumbs. The clown had a monkey on his shoulder that was busily eating a banana, a cockatoo roosted on the shoulder of the toga-clad man, and Leo was chattering insistently in the ear of the gypsy.

"Go away!" she muttered, elbowing him sharply.

"Bet, Tina," the toga-clad man said in an irritable tone.

"Can't you see I'm trying—" She turned her head to glare at the persistent cat, finally holding her cards down close to his nose. "Look at this!"

Leo peered, then emitted a squeak and hastily sat down.

"Fold," the four men chorused instantly as they tossed their cards down.

Tina looked at the small pile of pennies in the center of the tablecloth,
then
turned her head again to glare at Leo. "Ill
give
you a collar," she said. "How do you feel about a hangman's noose?"

Leo said, "Wooo," miserably, and hung his head.

Gideon shook himself out of the stupor and continued walking, finding Maggie waiting patiently at a huge wagon some little distance from the others. He hardly looked at the wagon. Jerking a thumb backward, he asked incredulously, "Are they kidding?"

She looked past him at the tea-and-poker party,
then
lifted her puzzled gaze to his face.
"About what?"

He stared down into utterly limpid green eyes.

She was very lovely. He decided he should leave.
Immediately.
Her eyes were like wells, so deep he could only see the placid surface reflecting light and just hinting at all the possibilities of what might lie underneath. Treasures were hidden in wells. It was also possible, he reminded himself, for one to drown in them.

"Never mind," he murmured. "I don't think it matters."

For an instant, so brief he might have imagined
it,
he saw again that flash of sheer intelligence, the utterly rational and shrewd humor. Then the surface of her gaze was unbroken once more, serene and without even ripples to hint at things moving in unseen depths. Her smile was warm, like sunlight through a cloud, catching at his breath.

"This is my wagon." She turned and climbed the steps to the open door.

Gideon felt bereft for a moment, rudderless. It wasn't a comfortable sensation for a man of thirty-five, especially when that man had never taken an unplanned turn in his life. But a small voice in his mind whispered now, seductively, that treasures weren't found on the predictable and neatly paved walkways where a thousand feet passed daily. He tried to ignore the voice; he'd never heard the damned thing before, and it promised, at the very least, a lack of control that appalled him.

"Gideon?" She looked out at him, brows lifted. "Aren't you coming in?"

After a moment he climbed the steps and went into her wagon.

"Sit down," she invited, gesturing toward a brightly green love seat as she leaned the camp chair against the wall, put the bundle of cloth on the foot of the bed, and opened the door of a big wardrobe to begin searching through it.

He was glad to sit. The interior of the wagon struck his senses like a blow. He looked around slowly, his gaze lingering on the scarlet velvet bedspread and tasseled pillows covering the bed that took up most of the space. He closed his eyes, opening them again when she settled beside him. She was holding a first-aid box open on her lap.

While he watched silently, she got out a tube of antiseptic and some gauze and put the box on the floor, then took his wrist and guided his arm until it rested across her thighs. He could feel the warmth of her, and a soft scent like wildflowers in a meadow rose to his nostrils. Her long, clever fingers were bare of rings.

"Are you married?" he asked.

She was carefully spreading antiseptic cream over the scratch on his arm and didn't look up. "No."

"Involved with anyone?"

"No. Are you?"

He gazed at her profile and felt more then heard a sigh escape him. "I wasn't when I got here."

Finished with her task, she tossed the used gauze into a small trash can near the door. "It'll heal better if it isn't covered," she said, capping the tube of cream.

"Did you hear what I said?" he demanded.

"Yes." She put the tube back into the box and then sat back, looking at him. A tiny smile curved her lips and her fey eyes were completely unreadable.

"I just made a verbal pass," he explained.

She considered the matter,
then
shook her head. "No. You indicated interest. A verbal pass is something like—'Why don't we have breakfast in bed?' "

"Why don't we have breakfast in bed?"

"You do come straight to the point, don't you?"

He eyed her, a little amused at both of them, and very surprised at
himself
. It was totally unlike him to move so fast, and even less like him to be so blunt. Still, having begun in that vein, he kept going. "We're both over twenty-one. At least, I hope—?"

"I'm twenty-eight," she supplied sedately.

"Then you've certainly heard quite a few verbal passes."

"A few."

He wanted to ask how she had responded to passes from other men, but bit back the question. She would say it was none of his business —or, at least, any other woman would. And she'd be right. Her past was no concern of his, and that had never troubled him in previous relationships with women; in fact, he'd never even been tempted to ask.

"Are you just going to ignore my pass?" he asked.

She looked at him, an uncomfortable perception surfacing in her vivid eyes. Rising up out of the depths, he thought, like some mysterious, all-knowing siren. "Unless and until your motives change, yes, I think I will."

"My motives?"

Mildly she said, "You don't like giving up control to anyone else, and as long as you don't understand me, you feel it puts me in control. You don't want the vulnerability of a possible relationship, just the control of knowledge. Sex, you believe, is a means to finding that knowledge. In your experience, women tend to give up all that they are to a lover, whether he responds in kind or not. How am I doing?"

Gideon cleared his throat and leaned back in the corner of the love seat, removing his arm from her warm thighs. He devoutly hoped he didn't look as unnerved as he felt. She had neatly—and with devastating accuracy—stripped his motives bare while becoming even more of an enigma herself. "That makes me sound like a selfish bastard, doesn't it?" he said, neither admitting nor denying what she'd said.

"Most people are selfish; it's the nature of the beast. You have a logical mind and it's perfectly logical to think that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line."

"Are you saying it isn't?"

In a very gentle voice she said, "Not between people. Between people, shortcuts are usually painful."

She was right—and he was even more surprised at himself. Did he really feel so out of control? Had he been so shaken by his confused response to her that his first instinct had been to reach for an immediate, shallow intimacy? Such an abrupt leap, assuming she had accepted, virtually guaranteed that there would be little more than a brief fling between them. Because she was right about something else; intimacy without knowledge was seldom anything but damaging.

And he knew that.

After a moment he said, "I apologize."

Maggie looked faintly surprised. "I wasn't offended. I just want you to understand that I don't believe sex is a means to an end. By the time two people become that intimate, most of the questions should already be answered."

"You're right." Gideon was mildly surprised at his own lack of defensiveness; he
was,
more than anything, intrigued by her insight into his motives, and disturbed by those motives themselves. "But how did you know? About me, I mean. Did it show so plainly?"

"No. I just knew."

Now, that was unnerving, he thought.
"How?"

"It's a knack I have," she answered serenely.

Before Gideon could probe further, there was a thud near the door that might have been a knock, and the redhead member of the tea party, the garland of flowers still in his hair, peered in at them and spoke in an aggrieved tone with a touch of Scotland in the rhythm.

"Maggie, love, you've got to do something about Oswald! He's taken them again."

She turned her head to look at the visitor. "Farley, I can't teach Oswald to love bagpipes. And I can't keep him from hiding them from you. Why don't you challenge him to a poker game and bet the pipes? He always loses to you."

Farley brightened. "That's a thought, it is indeed, love. It'll appeal to his sense of honor, what's more."

"Of course it will. Farley, this is Gideon."

"Hello," Farley said briefly to the other man, and then vanished from the doorway.

Gideon told himself silently that endearments probably came naturally to Farley; it didn't mean a thing.

Maggie apparently considered their previous conversation over, because she picked up the first-aid box and rose to her feet. She put the box away in the big wardrobe, then came back around the foot of the bed and looked at Gideon with a faint smile. "Do you want to go meet the other people you'll be putting out of work?"

He
blinked,
the attack totally unexpected. Not that it was an attack, exactly; her voice remained sweet and calm.
But the words...
Getting to his feet, he said slowly, "You obviously know I mean to sell the carnival."

"Yes. Natural, I suppose. Our income barely covers expenses, and we could by no stretch of the imagination be a tax write-off. You aren't carny, so you have no feeling for this life or what it means to the people involved. I understand Balthasar was such a distant connection you aren't certain how you were related to him, so no family feeling is involved."

Gideon opened his mouth, but she was going on in the same soft, childlike voice.

"The wagons are all antiques and will probably fetch a healthy price. Trained animals are always in demand, and those that don't perform can certainly go to zoos. We have a number of costumes and carnival games you can doubtless unload for a few dollars. You won't have to worry about severance pay, of course, or retirement benefits or pension plans; carnies don't sign employment agreements. So it doesn't really matter that most of the people here quite literally have no place else to go, or that at least three of them were born in Wonderland wagons. That certainly isn't your problem."

At least I knew who I was

when
I got up this morning,

but
I think I must have been changed

several
times since then.

She was still an enigma, but Gideon now knew at least one thing about her: She could flay the bark off an oak tree without raising her voice or losing her gentle smile. He felt a bit flayed and— now—defensive.

"What do you expect me to do?" he demanded. "I don't know a damned thing about carnivals, and I have no desire to own one."

"Of course not.
Along with the other drawbacks, it's a totally alien way of life to you. I expect you're doing the only reasonable thing to be done."

Her voice was unchanged, and her agreement held no sarcasm whatsoever, but for some reason Gideon felt even worse about the situation. "What will you do?" he asked, unable to halt the question.

"Unlike the others, I do have somewhere else to go."

"Where?"

"That isn't your concern. Do you want to meet the others now, or shall I break the news to them myself?"

Gideon wanted to shake her. He wanted to kiss her. She stood in her ridiculous wagon telling him things he didn't want to hear in her sweet voice, looking up at him with her enigmatic, haunting eyes. And he was still intrigued by her, dammit, even more than ever.

Realizing that he badly needed to think this through before he made a total fool of himself, he said tightly, "It's getting late. Ill
stay
in town tonight and come back in the morning. Ill
meet
the others then."

"As you wish."

He hesitated,
then
asked unwillingly, "You'll be here, won't you?"

She chose to answer the question generally, though it had been directed specifically at her. "Well be here."

Gideon hesitated again, then swore beneath his breath and left the wagon.

Maggie stepped to the doorway and leaned against one side, gazing after him. His tall form moved with natural grace, she noted idly, and with the unthinking power that came not only from physical strength but from intellectual and emotional certainty; Gideon Hughes had always known exactly who and what he was.