Athena hid her pleasure and greeted them all with a smile. “You praise me far too highly. It was indeed my brother’s idea, and quite unexpected. I have just arrived myself.”
“Then we are not too late for a tour,” Millicent said. “It must be terribly exotic. And, of course, we shall want to contribute to the performance—you must allow us to help!” She looked up over Athena’s head. “Perhaps this… gentleman?”
Athena was keenly aware of Morgan behind her, of his earthy scent and masculine bulk. And the obvious fact that he was not a gentleman. He was more than likely prepared to insult her friends as he had tried to insult her. She could only pray that he did not.
“Ladies,” she said, “may I present Mr. Morgan Holt, one of the performers of French’s Fantastic Family Circus.”
The ladies fell silent, gazing at Holt. Athena wondered if they were having the same reaction she had, or if they merely found him an uncouth curiosity. Most of her friends did not share her habit of going into the slums to distribute food and clothing. To them, he would not seem much different from the “lower elements” their fathers and brothers warned them about.
“I declare,” Suzanne exclaimed. Millicent giggled, and Grace shushed her.
The back of Athena’s neck continued to prickle. “I am sure that Mr. French will be pleased to show us the grounds, but Mr. Holt may have other engagements.”
“What a pity,” Cecily said with frosty emphasis. “We do not wish to keep you, Mr. Holt.”
A gentleman would have taken Cecily’s dismissal with good grace and beat a dignified retreat, but Morgan Holt did not move. Instead, it was Cecily who took a step back, bumping into Suzanne and causing a minor disturbance.
“I have no other… engagements,” Holt said, faint mockery in his tone. “Should I show you the wolves first, Miss Munroe?”
Morgan stood still and let himself be stared at, as contemptuous as a raven surrounded by chattering sparrows. No, not sparrows, but extravagantly plumed parrots who had ventured from their cages for an afternoon.
The leader of the flock accepted their homage in regal majesty, prim and proper in her wheeled chair and only slightly less gaudy than the others. And he wondered, not for the first time, why he remained with her.
Their meeting had been less than cordial. Even had he not known her identity, he would have pegged her as the kind of woman—lady—who had existed only on the fringes of his life: an engraving in a tattered magazine; a beribboned mannequin on the arm of some overstuffed peacock parading down the dusty main street of a nameless town; a face from the box seats during a performance.
What else should she be? He knew what kind of people she and her brother were. His father had envied and aped them all his life. How many promises Aaron Holt had made, to his wife and children, always beginning and ending the same: “You’ll lack for nothing once I make my strike,” or “When I’m rich, in just another year or two…”
Athena Munroe came from a world Morgan touched only by rare chance, as alien to him as tea cakes to a timber wolf. The fabric of her gown alone might have seen a poor family through an entire winter. The pearls about her slender neck and in her ears were tasteful and even more costly. She wouldn’t have looked at him twice if he hadn’t spoken first.
And yet, within the space of a few minutes, he had said more to her than he generally did to his fellow troupers in a day.
And he was afraid.
He knew the reason, though it made no sense. When he had first seen Athena Munroe, when he had looked into her bright hazel eyes, he felt for an instant that he’d found the source of the voice. The voice, the call from the north, the one he had ignored and dismissed that last night in Colorado Springs.
The feeling persisted even when he realized the folly of such thoughts. It certainly was not her beauty that held him rooted to the spot, staring like a boy with his first woman.