***
“Claire! Wake up.” The voice cut through me like a knife. My eyes popped open. Bad idea, I moaned and promptly closed them.
“Get up now,” the voice ordered.
“Mike?” But it wasn’t Mike. I opened my eyes more carefully this time. Mike was gone and so was the meadow. It was Carlo who stood over me now. I closed my eyes and prayed for a swift death. Painless was already out of the question. My head was pounding and I was pretty sure if I moved I would be violently ill. I kept my eyes closed and tried to separate the two masculine voices that were blending together over me.
“Damn it, Carlo. What happened to this one?”
“She fell.”
“She fell.” The other man snorted.
“How’s this? What happened to her won’t be near as bad as what will happen to you if you don’t put her in the auction today.”
“I can’t put her up there like that, and you know it.”
“You can and you will.”
“Don’t threaten me, Carlo.”
“Do you care to test me?” Carlo’s voice was soft and menacing at the same time.
The other man was silent for a long time before I heard him snap, “Take her around to the front.”
I was lifted then, and carried off to wherever and whatever the ‘front’ was, I supposed. Not that I was especially anxious to find out; what I wanted most was to sleep.
Carlo dropped me none too gently on the ground. Several onlookers gasped, but no one came to my aid. I was sprawled on the ground in what appeared to be an old mining town. From the looks of it, we were in the town square. Rows of seats stretched out in front of me, nearly all of them occupied by men; I could only pick out a few women in the crowd. Behind me was a large stage, with a podium to the right. A wide banner proclaimed ‘PUBLIC AUCTION’ in bold block letters.
“Cheerful,” I muttered. A man came forward to assist me onto the platform. I recognized his voice. He was the man who had argued with Carlo.
“Take a seat right over here, miss.”
There were other women on the stage. No one smiled, no one spoke, but they didn’t need to; their eyes alone spoke of their desperation. The rest of the stage was taken up by various odds and ends. An elderly woman was placing colorful tags on the merchandise. I pulled at the tag she pinned to my shirt, trying to get a better look. Fifteen…I was number fifteen. My hands clenched into fists and I stared straight ahead. Anything was better than staying with the guards, and one lone asshole would be a lot easier to escape from than twelve. It had to be.
I touched a finger to the front of my head and felt the lump. At least Aries escaped, I consoled myself. The last thing I remembered was looking to make sure she had gone. One of the guards must have hit me. I was curious to see what the rest of my face looked like, and wished I had a mirror.
Before long, the auctioneer was calling my number. He opened the bidding at seventy-five. I shrugged. Well, it was more than my dress had cost, I thought morbidly. The crowd was silent.
“Do I hear seventy-five? Let me hear seventy-five for the lovely bride!”
By the skeptical looks from the crowd, I discerned that I was looking far from lovely.
“Eighty,” a woman’s voice rang out clear and cool.
I lifted my head and searched for the voice, surprised. It was a tall woman clad in a short, barely-there, ruffled crimson gown. Her face was heavily made up and her hair was teased to gaudy perfection.
“Is that the woman who runs the brothel?” I whispered to the girl seated next to me.
She nodded tensely.
So that was Lydia: Lydia with the deep pockets, if I remembered correctly. The guards had said she was known to pay top dollar for her girls.
“Oh, this is great,” I mumbled. The girl next to me glanced dubiously in my direction. The look she gave me seemed to question my sanity. Well, I was starting to question that myself lately, I admitted.
“Eighty-five.” I heard a man’s voice this time. I picked him out in crowd easily enough. He held his auction card high in the air.
“Ninety,” Lydia countered.
“Ninety-five.”
“One hundred.”
I could not believe what I was hearing. The brothel owner and Grandpa Moses were engaged in a bidding war for me. Maybe God has a sense of humor after all, I thought dismally.
“One hundred and five.”
“One hundred ten.”
“Three hundred.” I sat up in the high-backed chair. Three hundred; the bid came from Grandpa Moses. My eyes flew back to Lydia. Don’t counter, I pleaded silently. Don’t counter.
“Going once, going twice—”
“Four hundred.”
Damn it.
“Five hundred.”
“Sold for five hundred to the gentleman in the back.”
I exhaled and stood up. That was it, then. I had just been purchased by Grandpa Moses.
The old man hurried to my side. He actually moved much faster than I would have thought possible. I frowned. That meant that I would have to move quickly, I realized. Because under no circumstance was I going to marry him. Maybe he was senile. The thought put a little bounce in my step.
The old man’s eyes seemed to sparkle with warmth as he took my hands.
“Annabelle?”
“Huh?”
“Annabelle, is it you? It is! It is! I would know you anywhere, my girl!”
He snapped me up into a crushing hug and spun me around several times before setting me back on solid ground. I moaned, held my head in my hands, and tried to stay on my feet. The old man pulled me to him again and patted my head repeatedly.
“There, there,” he crooned.
“Ouch! Stop!” I yelped into his chest.
He only stopped patting long enough to point an accusing finger at the crowd gathered around us.
“What have you people done to my Annabelle?”
“Is this young lady related to you?” the auctioneer politely inquired.
“That she is!” the old man bellowed. “My sister’s only babe, she is—went missing seven years ago, she did. Oh, but what a glorious day this is! My Annabelle is home!”
“Oohh…” I moaned weakly. I prayed that he would get tired of jostling me and shouting in my ear—and soon. I was starting to wonder if heads could spontaneously explode.
“Come along now, Annabelle. Let’s get you home.” He steered us through the crowd, whispering, “Oh, my Annabelle,” every few feet.
I could have told him that I was not his precious Annabelle; that’s exactly what I should have done. At least, that would have been the right thing to do. But a backward glance at Carlo strengthened my resolve to be wrong. I wasn’t sure if the auctioneer gave refunds, and I was not about to find out. So, in the end, I decided that pretending to be Annabelle was, by far, the best option I had at the moment.
The old man led me to a large horse-drawn carriage in the center of a modern-looking parking lot.
Oh, what the hell. “A carriage?”
He winked at me. “Ads to the ambiance of the auction, don’t you think?”
Sure, unless you were actually in the auction. But I kept my sour thoughts to myself, took a deep breath, and hoped that my smile was convincing.
“Oh, dear, your head…I just realized.” He leaned in to speak with a man in the carriage.
“There. Harold will drive slowly and you can lie down. We’ll be home in no time.”
“Harold?” I gestured to the middle-aged man who was climbing into the driver’s seat at the front of the carriage. He was classically handsome and very well dressed in a dark suit and tie.
“My trusted friend and long-time business partner. But you must remember Harold.”
“Ah…”
“Oh, poor thing, you must have hit your head very hard indeed. I’ll call the doctor out first thing, don’t you worry.”
I wondered if it was too late to stumble around moan
ing ‘Where am I?’
“Of course I remember Harold,” I reassured my…oh God, what was he? I did some quick thinking. Annabelle was Bob’s sister’s daughter; that would make him my uncle. Err, Annabelle’s uncle, I amended.
“You see, that man looks so young, I did not think it could possibly be Harold.”
My ‘uncle’ shook with laughter and Harold smiled and even preened a bit.
“Let’s go home, Annabelle.”
I quickly found out that lying down did not help. In fact, it was worse. I know this because I threw up in the satin-lined carriage twice before we had reached our destination. I was so weak by the time we pulled into an enormous circle drive that Harold was forced to carry me into the house.
The last thing that I remembered was being laid down on cool sheets in a dark room.