Corbin's Fancy by Linda Lael Miller

damned well was meant toremind her of things she didn’t dare think about. “Don’t you?” he challenged, in a voice that was little more than a gruff whisper.
    “I hate you, you reprobate!”
    “I could tell,” he answered smoothly.
    “If you think—if you think for one minute, Jeff Corbin, that you’re going to—that I will—”
    Without apparent upset, he walked away, leaving Fancy to stand there, beneath her borrowed canvas canopy, stammering like an idiot.
    She stared after Jeff for a moment, then picked up the trick wand purchased in more prosperous days and flung it at his broad, impervious back. It struck him between the shoulder blades, burst into ludicrous bloom, and fell to the grass.
    Jeff turned with an ominous laziness, arching one eyebrow. “Don’t ever do that again,” he warned. “If you do, I’ll forget my principles and turn you across my knee.”
    “I could have sworn you didn’t have any principles,” muttered Fancy, furious but too afraid to challenge him further.
    If he heard her, he did not respond. Phineas’s balloon was gliding to the ground, the gondola swinging in a breezy seesaw motion as it descended, and Jeff strode off toward the craft.
    Fancy went to where he had stood, picked up the flower wand in one shaking hand. The bright colors of the bouquet seemed to blur as she stared at them. Drat that insufferable ass, who needed him, anyway?
    You do, taunted a little voice in Fancy’s mind.
    *   *   *
    Phineas sat on a tree stump near his wagon, sipping coffee. His eyes were mischievous as they touchedFancy’s overheated face, clearly saying, “I told you he’d come.”
    Fancy risked one glance at Jeff, who was perched on the wagon tongue beside her, the top hat in his lap, a ponderous frown on his face. “You need either a bigger hat or a smaller rabbit,” he observed, tugging poor Hershel out and then thrusting him in again. “He’s wedged in here like pork in a sausage skin.”
    Stubbornly, Fancy refused to comment. Why couldn’t Jeff Corbin just go back to where he belonged and leave her alone? In annoyance, she stood up, folded her arms across her chest, and walked around to the back of the wagon to fetch her valise. After taking out a bar of soap and a hairbrush, she started off toward the stream she’d visited earlier.
    The water was ice cold, but Fancy stripped to her camisole and drawers and waded in to her ankles, determined. In the distance, she could hear the sounds of the carnival camp—laughter, the lowing and shifting of animals, the crackle of bonfires. A wounding sadness swept over her, a longing for a house with walls and windows and a roof.
    Teeth chattering, Fancy bent to lather the soap cake in the frigid stream. To distract herself, she went on dreaming. There would certainly be a bathtub in her house, filled with hot, scented water. There would be beds with proper sheets and blankets and, best of all, there would be people.
    “Oh, there’s Fancy now,” they would say to each other, if she chanced to be late returning from some errand. And if she didn’t return, they would come looking for her.
    Fancy waded deeper into the stream, the pebbledbottom slick and icy beneath her feet, the water numbing her knees. When the creek gurgled around her stomach, she removed her drawers and camisole and flung them ashore, nearly going under in the process. With an industry born of almost intolerable cold, she washed her hair, scoured the rest of her body, and started back toward the grassy bank.
    “Are you crazy?” demanded an all-too-familiar masculine voice.
    Fancy stumbled backward, shuddering. The shrinking moon revealed the strong planes of Jeff Corbin’s face, the breadth of his shoulders, the narrow power of his hips. “Not crazy enough to come out of the water with you standing there!” she sputtered furiously. “Go away!”
    “I brought a blanket,” he chimed in reply, teasing. “Don’t you want it, Frances?”
    “Leave it on the