The final judge faced the crowd and said one word. “Whitlaw.”
Daisy jumped. A well of hope started up inside her. There was a moment of utter silence from the crowd. Maybe the strain had finally driven her mad.
Maybe he hadn’t said it. It couldn’t be true.
But Mr. Flisk turned to look at her with venomous eyes. The crowd murmured more loudly.
“Well,” the grocer managed after a meaningful pause. “We’ll see you all next Saturday. And it looks like we have our entertainment in order. After all, we’ve just lined up the jester.” He gave Daisy an exaggerated waggle of his eyebrows and let out a great, braying laugh, one that explained precisely why she’d been chosen.
Chapter Two
Daisy tried to sneak away.
It should have been easy; nobody would look at her, let alone talk to her. Yet somehow, the crowd seemed to have more elbows on the way out. People stepped in her way as if she were not present. Feet stamped on her own. And no apologies were made.
After she had the wind knocked out of her a third time by an “accidental” blow that nobody else seemed to notice, she gave up on fighting her way out of the square with the crowd. She simply waited, stamping her feet to keep them from freezing, until everyone had left.
Almost everyone. A small knot of women remained on the street corner, clustered in the growing darkness under an unlit lamp.
She didn’t want to go past them. She knew who was at the center of that knot, knew it before she could see him. Before she heard his voice.
“I was wondering,” one of the women was saying. “I have always so wanted to ask you…”
“Yes?” Daisy recognized Crash’s voice, even though she couldn’t see him through the crowd around him. It felt like a shock to hear him even after all these months apart.
A flush of heat—shame and excitement all mixed together—filled her. Speak of wishes gone awry.
“By all means,” Crash said, “ask me anything you like.”
The woman giggled, and Daisy felt a kind of sorry kinship for her fellow sufferer. She did her best to slink past the little gathering. That poor woman might have been a flirt, but Crash was an incorrigible charmer. He flirted with anyone and everyone who gave him the opportunity, men and women alike. Everyone had to learn not to play with fire in her own way, and Crash had been as good a place for Daisy to learn that lesson as any.
Enjoy the ride, Daisy wished the girl as she slipped past. I hope your heart can withstand what comes after.
“It’s this,” the woman said, wide-eyed. “What are you?”
Ah. Daisy felt a little less sorry for her. That had to be the worst way to flirt with Crash.
She caught a glimpse of him through the ring of women.
Crash took off his rounded hat and smoothed back black, lightly curled hair. Daisy had spent long enough staring at him to know that he looked like nobody she’d ever seen. In those heady months when she’d thought of nobody else, she’d spent a great deal of time looking at him, and then at the rest of the world. Sailors, woodcuts of foreign delegations—it hadn’t mattered. She’d searched for his features everywhere and found them only in him.
Those wide, dark eyes angled ever so slightly. His light brown skin never paled in winter. His hair never straightened. His cheeks took days to turn to patchwork stubble, which she knew only because he rarely bothered to shave.
“What am I? What sort of question is that?” She could imagine his smile—just a little tilted. “I should think that was clear enough.”
Daisy ducked her head, proceeding down the steps. She couldn’t help but glance at him as she slipped past.
“I am not a pineapple.” He made a show of looking down his body, checking himself. Of course he drew attention to his own figure in the process. Crash was slim, lithe, and muscled. He had long fingers, slightly callused, square at the tip. Once, he’d held her…
She gave her head a shake and pointedly turned her face away.
But Crash was hard to ignore. “I am not an elephant, nor a mouse, nor an oak tree. I seem to land firmly in the human category.”
“Yes, but…” The other woman’s voice was trailing off behind Daisy. “What sort of human are you?”
“That much is apparent at one glance,” Crash said. “I’m one hundred percent pure perfection. Now, if you’ll excuse me?”
Daisy wouldn’t look back. She wouldn’t let him know she was paying attention.
“But—”
“Business calls,” Crash said.
“But couldn’t we—”
“I’m afraid not,” she heard Crash saying.
“I haven’t even said—”
She could just imagine the cocky smile Crash must be giving the woman. “It wouldn’t have mattered,” she heard him say. “Now run along.”
Daisy could almost hear the sound of a heart breaking. She knew that sound all too well; she’d heard it in her own chest. She couldn’t even really blame Crash for it; he’d done nothing but tell her the truth. It was her own fault that she’d wanted lies.
She didn’t look behind her, but she could hear him following. “Excuse me,” he said. “Pardon me.”
There followed a set of gasps and a burst of applause. No doubt he’d done something ridiculous—something foolishly Crash-like, like doing a backflip off the steps to escape his hangers-on.
She’d spent enough time watching him to know what he could do. She wasn’t going to look. She wasn’t.
“Daisy,” Crash called behind her.
The word sounded like a warning. Once he’d said her name very differently, almost reverently. As if she were not some kind of joke. But she couldn’t allow herself to dwell on that once. It wouldn’t help.
The snow underfoot had changed from delicate white lace to the disgusting, dingy slush of well-trodden streets. Icy water seeped through the seams of her shoes. A cold wind tugged at her, and she cinched her scarf around her neck. She didn’t look back. She wasn’t foolish.
“Ahoy, Daisy.”
She wouldn’t turn. That little skirling breeze coming up behind her would make her eyes water, and she was not, she absolutely was not, going to let Crash see her cry. Not even if her tears were merely wind-induced.
But Crash had never been deterred by…well, anything, Daisy suspected. Certainly not anything so mild as someone purposefully failing to hear him. He came jogging up to her, settling to a walk at her side.
At least he wasn’t on that terrible contraption he’d taken to riding about everywhere. What did he call that two-wheeled unbalanced monstrosity? A velocipede?
Ha. An accurate description; it made her think of some monstrous twenty-legged thing, rushing about. One of these days he was going to crack his skull when he fell from the dratted thing, and she…
She wasn’t going to care when he killed himself, not one bit.
“Daisy,” he said. “You rushed off far too soon.”
She made the mistake of meeting his eyes. Crash was a man who had mastered the speaking glance. This one could have been an epic saga. It was the unshakeable look that a farm lad gave to his sweetheart when she was sentenced to be fed to a dragon. Don’t worry, it promised. I’ll save you. I’ve a plan.
It was the kind of look that would have that blushing farm girl spreading her legs for her love in the barn the night before she was condemned to die. She’d give up her virginity, her trust, her love, her future in one trembling hour. When she bid her swain farewell through tears and kisses, she would believe in her soul that he was going to kill the beast. She’d believe he would save her until the dragon crunched her between its teeth.
Even now, even knowing Crash as she did, a flush of heat blossomed along the back of her neck.
Daisy’s mind knew all about Crash, even if her body pretended ignorance. She’d already given him everything. She’d had that trembling hour. All these months later, Daisy had no virginity, no trust, no love, and her future was chock-full of dragons.
r /> “Aha,” Crash said, coming to a temporary halt. He snapped his fingers. “Right. Of course. I forgot. I’m to address you as Miss Whitlaw now.”
He gave her a teasing smile, arranged the cloth at his neck into a mockery of a cravat, and shifted his tone. When he spoke, he sounded almost proper—the way Daisy’s mother sounded at her most querulous. The way Daisy spoke when she wanted people to take her seriously.
“My dear Miss Whitlaw,” he said in that distinctive, plummy-sounding voice, “I know you’ve little desire to speak with me at the moment. But I have a business proposition to put before you.”
“You may recall,” Daisy said severely, “that I do not care for your line of business.”
That smile on his face flickered. “My line of business is the business of making people happy.”
Ha. “Yes,” she said. “A great many people.”
“A great many people,” he agreed, instead of getting angry at her implication like a normal person would. “I’m here to offer my services.”
“I had your services once,” Daisy snapped. “I don’t need them any longer.”