The Awakening Read online

  At six o’clock, Taylor Driscoll walked in, and Hank felt a surge of irrational hatred for the man. And as Taylor looked down at Amanda with soft, loving eyes, Hank broke a pencil in half.

  “Are you ready?” Taylor asked quietly.

  Amanda straightened her desk and left without saying a word of farewell to the others. She still hadn’t spoken when she and Taylor were seated in the back of the limousine.

  “So, that’s where you work?” Taylor asked. He wasn’t used to making conversation. For the last eight years he’d talked to Harker about the ranch and to Amanda about what she was studying.

  “Where I work, but not where I belong,” Amanda said with some bitterness.

  Taylor smiled. In his new position of not being her teacher, he was determined not to tell her what he thought of that filthy house filled with those filthy people. He reached across the seat and took her hand. “No, darling, you don’t belong with them. You belong with me and people of your own kind.”

  Amanda looked at him and wondered if she were like him. She didn’t feel much like going to a carnival but she didn’t want to go home either. Maybe she did belong with Taylor. Of course she belonged to Taylor!

  The carnival was loud and dirty; it stunk; it glittered; it was garish—and Amanda loved it immediately. It was what she needed to forget people who thought she was a spoiled little rich girl.

  Taylor stepped out of the limousine and wanted to get right back in. The place was as hideous as he remembered. There was a sign looming over his head:

  Princess Fatima, a full-blooded Bedouin

  from the fabled City of Nineveh, will dance

  the mystic anaconda dance exactly as danced

  by Hypatia in the Holy Writ.

  Next to the sign was a fifteen-foot-high picture painted on canvas of a plump, scantily clad woman with a snake wrapped around her. This is what he went to college for? he thought. This is what he went to college to escape.

  “Amanda, we can leave if this place offends you.”

  Amanda’s eyes were wide in wonder as she looked about her at the skill booths, the rides, the exhibits, the food vendors. Everyone seemed to be yelling at once. “No, it’s wonderful, isn’t it?” She took his hand. “Oh, Taylor, thank you so much for bringing me. What shall we do first? Are you hungry? How about some popcorn? I used to eat that when I was a child. What do you think a corn dog is? Shall we find out?”

  “Oh yes, please let’s do,” Taylor said, thinking he just might get sick. Did other men go through this for the women they loved? If so, it’s a wonder anyone ever got married.

  An hour later Taylor was sure he was going to be sick. He’d eaten popcorn, peanuts, a nasty thing called a corn dog and, feeling that he’d done his duty, he had politely refused the chocolate-covered caramels Amanda had offered him. He had even acted awestruck when a fat, dirty fortune-teller had looked at Amanda’s palm and said, “You will dance with a queen and have a son who will become king.”

  Now she was looking longingly at a booth in which a vile-smelling young man in a red satin shirt was trying to get Taylor to throw a ball at wooden milk bottles in order to win a hideously ugly doll covered in pink and purple feathers.

  “Amanda, what if a person were to win?” he asked, aghast.

  “It’s just for fun,” she said.

  “Come on, mister,” the young man called. “Three balls for a nickel. Ain’t a lovely lady like this worth a mere nickel?” He looked Amanda up and down. “I’d pay a nickel to win her.”

  Amanda looked at Taylor with pleading eyes, and while he was trying to think of a reason why he couldn’t participate in this ignorant, loutish game, they were shoved aside by another couple as if they weren’t there.

  Amanda’s good mood left her when Dr. Montgomery and Reva stepped in front of them. She saw Hank slam the first ball into the milk bottles, all of them falling.

  “Shall we go?” Amanda said to Taylor.

  Hank turned around with a false surprised look on his face. “Well, Miss Caulden, fancy meeting you here. Driscoll,” he said, nodding at Taylor.

  “You gonna throw again, mister?” the barker asked, still eyeing Amanda.

  Hank threw another ball and knocked more milk bottles down, then turned to Taylor. “Didn’t they teach pitching where you went to school?”

  “I think we should go,” Amanda repeated to Taylor, but he didn’t move.

  Hank knocked down a third set of wooden bottles.

  “Your choice,” the barker said to Reva, motioning to the kewpie dolls hanging from the ceiling and walls of the booth.

  Reva’s face lit up as she pointed to a pink feathered doll.

  Something primitive broke open inside Taylor, and he realized that it wasn’t the vulgar prizes that were to be won that made men play this game but it was a man exhibiting his skill to win a woman. In the years since coming to the Caulden Ranch, Taylor had almost forgotten his past, all those years of struggling to put himself through school. One of his early jobs had been working at night in a carnival just like this one. He would take over for anyone who, for some reason or other, couldn’t work that night. He’d worked in every booth, on every ride, in every fake exhibit.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a nickel.

  “Taylor,” Amanda said, “you really don’t have to do this. I have no desire to own one of those…those…”

  “Kewpie dolls,” Hank supplied. “Afraid he’ll lose and embarrass you?” he asked softly.

  “He hasn’t lost anything to you yet,” she answered, but she held her breath. She didn’t really want Taylor to make a fool of himself.

  Taylor knew the trick was that the bottom row of bottles were weighted heavily. When he’d worked for the carnival, he’d had to demonstrate to the audience that the bottles could be knocked down.

  Easily, he knocked all three sets of bottles down, and Amanda, with a triumphant look at Hank, chose a purple-feathered doll.

  “Shall we try the shooting gallery?” Taylor asked Hank. “Or do you use only brute force and not skill?”

  “Try me,” Hank said.

  “I’m not sure—” Amanda began, but the two men stalked ahead of the women. Amanda gave Reva a weak smile and looked at the garish, fragile doll. “It is kind of cute, isn’t it?”

  “Which? Their idiocy or the doll?”

  “Definitely the doll,” Amanda answered.

  The men went from one booth to another. Hank had to work harder, because he had no inside information on how to win the games, but he tried as if he were competing for his life. Taylor won at the booths that required skill and knowledge, but Hank beat him badly at the strength test. He made the bell ring, shoved a stuffed animal into Reva’s full arms, then rang it a second time to win an animal for Amanda—but she refused to accept it.

  By nine o’clock the women were weighted down with dolls, stuffed animals, plates, ugly little cups and saucers, and “surprise” packages. The two men prowled ahead of them like lions on the hunt.

  When they’d covered every booth, the men turned and glared at each other.

  “May we please take these things back to the car?” Amanda asked. “And if it’s all the same with you, Taylor, I’d like to go home. I can feel a raging headache coming on.”

  Reva stood there, her arms full to brimming, and looked from one man to the other. She didn’t think that Amanda had any real idea of what was going on, but Reva did. She was sure that Taylor had been winning prizes for her—not Amanda. She’d seen the way Taylor had glanced in her direction every time he won. He’d shoved the prize into Amanda’s arms but it had been Reva he had looked at.

  I think I may be in love with him, Reva thought with horror. He was completely wrong for her—he had no money at all—and she figured he’d never in his life marry someone like her, but right now she wanted to leave the carnival and be with him. Don’t do it, she told herself. He needs money as much as you do, and he’ll sell himself by marrying Amanda so he can get t