Noah looked down his nose at her. “Are you going to sit on that suitcase all day, sprite, or shall I take it out to the van?”
Alex got up. “Take it, by all means. By the way, when are we getting the groceries?”
“On the way.”
“On the way where?”
He picked up the valise and started for the door. “Don’t spoil my surprise,” he told her over his shoulder.
Alex decided to give it up. She went back into the loft and began boxing up the baby food and cat food she’d stockpiled, knowing it would be easier to take what she had and just buy some extra when they got groceries. Besides, she thought, who knew where “on the way” might turn out to be? From the mysterious way Noah talked, it was the back of beyond at the very least—and possibly Mars.
Were there toothless lions or hungry kittens on Mars? Probably not, she decided, choking back a laugh. Or babies either, most likely. Which meant no baby food. She reminded herself to take along her blender in case Cal was forced to eat meals prepared from scratch. She heard Noah come into the loft, and turned to frown at him.
“Is there electricity on Mars?”
Noah took the question in stride. “Last I heard, there weren’t even little green men. Science disproved them. Why?”
Alex sat down on a box and started laughing. “Doesn’t anything shake you?” she asked him finally.
“If you mean did I consider your question strange,” he said affably, “the answer is yes. I trust you mean to explain it.”
“I was equating this mysterious place you’re taking me to with Mars,” she explained.
“Ah. Now the question makes sense. Yes, there is electricity there, but it’s not the most dependable since it originates with an antique generator that only works when it wants to. Do we need electricity?”
“For my blender. In case we run out of baby food for Cal.”
Noah leaned against the low partition and stared at her. “If we run out,” he told her, “we can always get more. We can trade a few baubles to the savages.”
“Very funny. You won’t tell me where we’re going, after all.”
“You told me yourself that the pioneers blazed a trail across this country, and I’d guess there are a few side trails as well; I don’t think we’ll get so far from civilization that we’ll fall off the edge of the world.”
“And get eaten by dragons—I know, I know.”
Noah was half-hiding a grin. “Well, you have to admit the thought’s a bit on the absurd side.”
“For all I know,” she said with dignity, “I’m being kidnapped into white slavery. And along those lines, I’d like to remind you that my lion would protect me with every instinct his toothless self can lay claim to. I would also like to inform you that lion-taming is not the only thing I learned how to do in the circus.”
“Knife-throwing?” he queried with a look of mock uneasiness.
“Yes.” She held up a finger in warning. “And my best friend was a Gypsy, so I can curse as well.”
“You certainly can,” he agreed, remembering the scene earlier that morning and choking back a laugh.
“That’s not what I meant,” she told him, reading his expression accurately.
“I meant to ask you where you learned some of those words,” he said, persistent.
“Will you help me pack these?” she asked with a gesture toward the cans and jars lined up on the counter.
“If you’ll answer my question.”
Alex sighed. “I told you that the circus wasn’t exactly Ringling Brothers; most of the people were a bit—rough. They’d been everywhere, and rarely did they go first class. After four years I picked up quite a few very impolite words. Satisfied?”
Noah began helping her pack the cans and jars. He was smiling, but he sent her a thoughtful look. “If these people were so rough—and I’ll certainly take your word for that—then how did you survive four years with them? They … didn’t hurt you or anything, did they?”
“No, they didn’t hurt me.” Alex smiled at him. “Even the worst of circus people have certain codes. I was one of them, so I was respected. Besides, my tough act didn’t fool anybody; they knew I was a kid. Instead of taking advantage of that, several of them taught me how to take care of myself.”
“And I’ll bet,” Noah murmured, “they didn’t teach you to fight by the Marquess of Queensberry’s rules.” He was torn between fascination and alarm by this revelation of her past.
Alex laughed. “Hardly. They advised survival and never mind manners or ethics.”
He sat back on his heels and regarded her thoughtfully. “How did that mesh with the control you had to learn in order to train animals?” he asked, honestly interested.
She looked faintly surprised. “You know, I never thought about that. I suppose I was too young to realize it shouldn’t mesh. I mean, nobody ever told me that learning to throw a man twice my weight over my shoulder was any different from staring down a lion without moving a muscle.”
Noah began packing the jars and cans again, silent for a long moment. He was thinking of a sixteen-year-old kid filled with nothing but bravado and instinct, running away from a foster home to join a circus. A kid with mental as well as physical strength, with the power to tame lions and toss men over her shoulder. A kid who had lived for four years among people with shadowy pasts and uncertain futures, and yet had emerged with a clear sense of herself and of what she wanted from life.
He wished he had known that kid, wished he could have watched a woman emerge from that willful, brave child’s spirit.
“You’re very quiet,” Alex observed, gazing at him quizzically.
Noah was trying to build a mental picture of that girl’s life. “Did you fly trapeze?” he asked. “You mentioned that to one of the workmen.”
Alex looked both amused and puzzled. “Some. I learned the basics.”
“What else?” When she lifted a brow at him, Noah smiled a little. “I’m just curious.”
She shrugged. “Well, I tried most things. The teeterboard. High wire. Juggling and tumbling. I was even a clown a few times.”
“A happy clown?”
“Sort of.” Alex thought back a few years and smiled faintly. “A smile, but tears too. My Gypsy friend painted my face, I remember. She said it was apt.”
“Did she ever read your palm?” he asked lightly.
“Oh, sure. She said—” Alex halted abruptly, remembering just exactly what the wizened old lady had said.
You’re searching, child. You’ve always searched. You find him sometimes. Sometimes he finds you. Many partings, though. Much loss and pain. But happiness too. You’ll find him again, child. A meeting in darkness, a stormy meeting, and another beginning.
“Alex?”
She looked at him for a moment, then conjured a teasing smile from somewhere. “She said I’d meet someone tall, dark, and handsome, of course.”
Noah didn’t believe that. Her face, he thought, had held brief shock, and the green eyes had darkened. But he didn’t probe.
A rational part of his mind didn’t want to hear the answer.
Instead, he gave her an anxious look. “Have you met that guy yet, d’you think?”
“I am not about to pander to your ego.” She closed the last of the boxes. “There, that’s all done. Let’s get them loaded into the van, all right?”
It was long after darkness had fallen before Alex’s van pulled out into the street, its multicolored paint job obscured by night. Noah was at the wheel, while Alex sat in the bucket seat beside him and the two cats slept in the back with the luggage and boxes.
Alex was playing a guessing game.
“Why did we bring fishing rods?”
“Because we’re going to fish.”
“In a lake?”
“No. A stream.”
“We’re going east, right?”
“Unless we want to drive into the ocean.”
“Funny. How far are we going?”
br /> “As the crow flies, about a hundred and seventy miles.”
She reached into the glove compartment for a road map and a flashlight, then spent several minutes peering and measuring. “That puts us somewhere in the Sierra Nevada mountain range if we keep heading east,” she decided.
“Spoil my surprise, why don’t you?” he grumbled.
“We’re going there?”
“If you must know—yes.”
Alex swallowed a laugh at his disgruntled tone. “Well, I still don’t know exactly where. All I know is that there are no restaurants, and there’s a generator, and there’s a stream. And, presumably, room for a lion.”
“Definitely room for a lion.”
She moved slightly and got a bit more comfortable. “Mmm. How long is this little trip going to take?”
“Hours. Which is one reason we brought along hot coffee.”
“We can take turns driving,” she offered.
“I’m the only one who knows where we’re going,” Noah pointed out.
There was a silence that consumed several miles, then Alex sighed. “This may be a bar to our future relationship,” she said, “but I can’t stand riding in a moving vehicle without talking to someone. Talk to me.”
Noah started to laugh. “Who’d you talk to on the way out here?”
“Cal, of course. And if you don’t talk to me, I’m going to crawl back there and wake him up.”
“Don’t disturb him. What shall we talk about?”
“Cabbages and kings.”
“I should have known you’d enjoy Lewis Carroll.”
Alex laughed. “Of course. The nonsense appealed to me.”
“What else have you read, sprite?”
“Do we have to talk about me?” she complained. “I’m boring.”
“Not to me, you aren’t.”
“You sweet talker, you,” she said, and smiled.
His grin flashed in the darkness. “I’m serious! I want to know everything about you, Alex. So start with foster care and work your way to now.”
She was reluctant, but his obvious interest and his questions got her started talking. She told him about her childhood, choosing to talk about the good times and her own misbehavior, with its sometimes comical results. Unconsciously revealing her own pain, she mentioned friends from foster care who had been adopted and, therefore, left her life.
And she told him about the circus and her friends there. What it was like to perform in a cage full of half-tamed big cats, and to ride on the back of an elephant. Of tumbling as a clown and flying on the trapeze.
Somewhere during the telling she slipped easily into sleep, not noticing that Noah had silently used the automatic controls to recline her seat.
He turned on the radio, keeping the sound low in order not to disturb her. And he drove with the half-conscious, half-instinctive awareness of an expert driver, his mind focused mainly on her and what she’d told him.
And what she had revealed in the telling.
SEVEN
THE SUN WAS rising when Alex stirred and sat up, yawning. She blinked at the new day, then turned to gaze at Noah’s relaxed form behind the wheel. Then she looked through the windshield to find they were in the moun-tains and everything was dawn-colored and beautiful.
“Good Lord, I’ve slept through the trip,” she murmured.
“So you have.” He sent her a smile. “As a matter of fact, you’ve been lousy company. Mind getting the coffee? It’s on your side.”
Alex fumbled to bring her seat upright, then reached for the thermos. “Why didn’t you wake me? You must have needed coffee hours ago.”
“I managed.” Accepting the cup she held out, he was able to cope one-handed with the winding road. “Thanks.”
She found a collapsible cup in the glove compartment and poured coffee for herself before capping the thermos again. Unusually reluctant to completely wake up and face the day, she yawned once more and peered at the winding road ahead. Dreams, she thought dimly. But this time the dreams had been a crazy kind of split-screen image, half-showing a blond woman gazing at an empty, dusty road, and half-showing a crying Gypsy girl in a jolting wagon.
Alex shook away the memory as Noah spoke, concentrating on what he was saying to her.
“We’ll be there in about an hour. The cabin is miles from anything or anyone, so Cal won’t have to stay inside all the time. That is, unless—He won’t wander off, will he?”
“No, he’ll stay close. Whose cabin is it?”
“Belongs to a friend of mine. I did some work for him a while back, and he said I could use the cabin whenever I liked. I called him yesterday, and he said he wasn’t going back up there until fall.”
“We staying that long?” Alex asked politely, beginning to wake up.
“It crossed my mind,” Noah answered. “We could abandon the world.”
“No, we couldn’t,” she said suddenly. “I just remembered—we didn’t get groceries. We’ll starve if we abandon the world.”
He chuckled. “We got groceries. Or, rather, I did. You slept right through it. I found an all-night grocery store, locked up the van, and brought the stuff out and loaded it. You slept.”
Alex stared at him. “I didn’t realize I was so tired.”
Noah sent her a look that was warm and gentle. “I don’t think it was just tiredness, sprite. You’ve been tense ever since Teddy showed up.”
She thought about that. Yes, she’d been tense, and she hadn’t slept well since Cal’s safety had been threatened. But being with Noah had made her feel protected. She had never in her life looked to anyone else for protection; the fact that she’d apparently accepted it from Noah was—well, just another confirmation.
How long had she loved this man?
They reached the cabin an hour later after following a winding dirt road that was scarcely more than a trail into an unspoiled wilderness. The little trail stopped beside a cabin on the edge of a clear stream. Mountains towered all around; the cabin and the stream were situated in a narrow valley that was itself far above sea level, and nothing else built by man could be seen.
Alex didn’t realize she was holding her breath until Noah came around the van to stand beside her. Then she looked up at him happily. “It’s beautiful!”
Noah could have echoed the comment, but he wouldn’t have been talking about the view or the rustic log cabin. He would have meant something far more human and heart-catchingly appealing. The sleepless night had left his willpower dangerously low and his instincts just barely above surface level; he had to clear his throat before he could speak.
“Why don’t we let the pets out and then unload the van?” he suggested.
She agreed cheerfully, going around to the rear of the van and swinging open the double doors. Cal waited patiently while they shifted aside grocery boxes, the kitten sitting with equal patience between his front paws.
“That kitten’s weird,” Noah commented as he set two boxes outside on the ground.
“No, he isn’t,” Alex defended the little creature, unconsciously proving the force of Noah’s belief when she lifted the kitten and then set him casually in Cal’s thick mane once the lion was on the ground.
“Oh, no?” Noah gazed pointedly at the picture of a lion wandering around the clearing with a tiny white kitten perched easily between its round ears.
Alex followed his look and then laughed. “I suppose he is a little strange at that.”
Noah watched the kitten’s expertise in maintaining his balance on his large mount, then shook his head in bemusement as he followed Alex into the cabin.
Within moments Alex had decided that although Noah’s friend had obviously wanted a rustic vacation cabin, he also liked his comfort. The cabin was large and beautifully kept, outside as well as in. The interior consisted of three large rooms: two bedrooms and a large combination living/dining area with a spotless kitchen, and a completely modern and functional bathroom. The decoration was plain but comfortable, wit
h sturdy furniture and wear-resistant fabrics in warm brown and rust tones. And there was a huge river-rock fireplace that promised warmth even if the generator-powered baseboard heaters failed.
Alex was more than tempted to abandon the world.
They settled in quickly, leaving the front door open to allow Cal to wander in and out while they unpacked and put away provisions. Noah started the generator, which gave them lights and power. Then Alex fixed breakfast and fed the pets. She refused Noah’s offer to help in cleaning up, ordering him instead to go to bed and catch up on lost sleep.
“I’m fine,” he objected. “A shower and shave and I’ll be as good as new.”
“You’re punchy,” she told him firmly. “You nearly tripped over Cal a minute ago, and if you can’t see something that big, you need sleep!”
He grinned. “All right, so losing sleep affects me.”
“It’s nice to know you’re not perfect,” she muttered, scraping plates at the sink.
“You mean I am nearly perfect?”
“Go to bed.”
“I suppose I can’t persuade you to come with me?”
“Noah!”
“Okay, okay. Don’t wander off while I’m asleep, will you?”
“Wouldn’t think of it.”
Alex worked contentedly, listening to Cal grumble softly at the kitten attacking his whiskers and feeling relaxed and almost at peace.
Not completely at peace because she was still wary at the thought of beginnings with uncertain and potentially painful endings. Still, she knew the beginning to be behind them, and that in itself was a commitment to follow through to whatever lay ahead.
And she knew, too, that her agreement to accompany Noah up here was also a tacit agreement that it was time their relationship progressed.
Alex had virtually skipped an important part of a girl’s life; she had left childhood behind one night when she’d hidden herself in the railroad cars of a departing circus. She had never tested her wings in the normal fashion of teenage girls, never sat beside a boy in a beat-up car and waited breathlessly for a first kiss. Her first kiss had come to a woman, assured by years of handling dangerous animals and potentially dangerous people.