Coming Up Roses (5 page)

Before she could turn and continue to the
stable with Fairy, H.L. grabbed her arm. Again she whirled around,
this time snapping out, “Stop that!”

Fairy whickered, unnerved by Rose’s sharp
command.

H.L. released her instantly. “Sorry.” Despite
the word, he appeared unrepentant. “But I’ve got to talk to you,
Miss Gilhooley.”

If Fairy was unnerved, Rose was completely
upset. She was routinely accosted by press people, but not when she
was alone, right after an act, with her horse; and certainly not by
one who appeared all but deranged with agitation. Members of the
press usually approached her in the daytime, by appointment, and
behaved in a respectful and respectable manner.

Right now she needed to attend to Fairy. She
needed to calm down, too. Her concentration during her act was so
complete as to involve her entire self, inside and out. It upset
her routine to have people approach her before she’d had time to
collect herself.

She also felt uncomfortable talking to people
unconnected with the show while she was still in costume. Rose
might have been born on the frontier and grown up in unusual
circumstances, but she knew propriety from impropriety—and this
costume was a decidedly improper one in which to conduct a polite
conversation.

“
I don’t have time to talk to you right
now, Mr.—” Drat, she could only remember his initials. “Whatever
your name is,” she concluded grumpily, irked that he, of all
people, should have caught her unprepared.

“
I’ll walk with you,” he said blithely.
“Maybe I can help you.”

“
I don’t need your help, thank you.
Besides, I’m sure you wouldn’t know what to do for a tired
horse.”

She’d meant it as sort of an insult, although
Rose was too polite to be rude to strangers unless severely tried,
which she was at the moment. H.L. only laughed. “Hell, you can
teach me!”

Rose felt her eyes open wide. She might be
unsophisticated, and she might have grown up on the American
frontier and have little formal education, but she wasn’t
accustomed to men swearing in front of her. She barked, “I most
certainly can not! I have work to do. Will you please excuse me,
Mr.—” Blast. She’d done it again.

“
May,” he supplied nonchalantly, as if
she hadn’t just told him to get lost. “H.L. May. And I’m going to
write about you, Miss Gilhooley. Your act was the most amazing
thing I’ve ever seen.”

This time, she wasn’t so willing to forgive
him. He was beginning to worry her, in fact, with his leech-like
adherence to his purpose and his feverish intensity of manner.
Since his avowed purpose was in direct opposition to her own, which
was to enjoy a little quiet time with Fairy after a difficult act
so that they could both relax, she didn’t appreciate him one
bit.

She stopped walking, causing Fairy to whicker
again. Fairy didn’t like disruptions to her schedule any more than
Rose did. She decided to be blunt. “Mr. May, you’re annoying me. I
have to take care of my horse, and I don’t need help.”

“
Aw, hell, Miss Gilhooley, all you need
to do is answer a couple of questions tonight. We can talk more
later. I won’t be in the way. I promise.”

“
You’re already in the way,” Rose said
through clenched teeth.

He laughed again. He was, without a doubt,
the most impervious, not to mention aggravating, person Rose had
ever met. Well, except for the few occasions when she’d been
accosted by men who were liquored-up. Rose knew liquor did horrid
things to men. On those occasions, however, she’d been armed. At
the moment, all Rose had with which to defend herself were her
fingernails, and she kept them short because of her act. Well, and
her feathered headdress, which only tickled. A whole lot of help
that would be.

“
Nonsense,” H.L. said jovially. “I
promise I won’t be a nuisance. I’ll just tag along. That way I’ll
get to write about what you do after your act is over.”

He gave his head a small shake, and Rose
thought she detected reverence in his expression, although it was
difficult to tell since he was so brash and rude. Reverence from
this source would also be incredible, so she decided she’d been
hallucinating.

“
I swear, I’ve never seen anything like
your act. You’re amazing.”

Bother. She guessed she couldn’t shake him
off her tail. And, although she hated to admit it, it was sort of
flattering to have a cultured big-city reporter so enamored of her
showmanship. However, she still didn’t view with joy the prospect
of having him ogle her corsetless body while she rubbed Fairy
down.

“
Well,” she said with less than her
customary courtesy—he was really a most aggravating fellow—”I guess
I can’t stop you.” She turned and clicked to Fairy, who walked
beside her obediently. Rose reflected that it was comforting to
have something obey her commands, even if H.L. May was too dense to
do so.

“
Great.” H.L. seemed totally undismayed
when Rose took off for the stables without waiting for him. He
merely trotted along next to her.

Rose cast him a sidelong glance from the
corner of her eye and was irked to observe that he didn’t show the
slightest degree of embarrassment. She’d known for six years now
that newspaper people were aggressive sorts and inclined to be
pushy and insensitive, but she hadn’t understood until this minute
that some of them had no feelings at all. It was quite
vexatious.

She also felt a little edgy, knowing she was
hemmed in on both sides. Generally, she had only Fairy beside her
as she walked to the stables. She felt much more comfortable
without H.L. May walking with them. She kept expecting him to say
or ask something awkward or embarrassing.

Nevertheless, Rose knew Colonel Cody courted
the press, so she aimed to do her duty by him. She didn’t give a
rap about H.L. May or his articles, but Rose held up William F.
Cody almost as a saint in her life, and she’d not disappoint him if
she could help it.

This reporter made her awfully nervous,
though. Rose had the disheartening feeling that she’d be less
anxious if H.L. May were a plain man. Or old. Or obviously
dissolute and dissipated. Or short, soft, and flabby. Unhappily for
Rose, he was none of those things.

H.L. May was a large, robust, young,
healthy-looking fellow, with a charming grin, a handsome face,
lovely eyes—they looked dark in the dim light leaking from the
arena, but Rose recalled that they were a dancing hazel green. He
also towered over her, although that wasn’t hard to do.

Rose frequently felt insignificant, but the
feeling most often occurred when she was contemplating her lack of
formal education and her frontier upbringing. She was unused to
feeling insignificant just because she was small. Her overall
smallness worked to her advantage in the most important area of her
life: Her work.

At the moment, if she’d been able to grow six
inches and gain thirty pounds, she’d have done it instantly,
because then H.L. May wouldn’t seem so overpowering to her. Or
maybe he would. With a sigh, Rose decided that H.L. May was
uniformly bad news in her life, and there probably wasn’t anything
she could have done about it, even with help from a miracle growth
spurt.

“
Here’s the stable,” she
grumbled.

“
Aha. Where the
real
work takes place.” H.L. sounded
smug.

Rose shot him another glance, this one more
sour than before. What did he mean, the real work? If he thought
doing all those tricks in front of thousands and thousands of
strangers was easy, he didn’t know real work from his own hind end.
She chose not to say so, Knowing he could use words better than she
and fearing she’d lose any verbal battles he cared to wage.

Shoot, she was already thinking of their
relationship, if you could call it a relationship, in terms of
warfare. This boded ill for any articles he aimed to write about
her.

At least Fairy was happy. The small mare
pranced gaily into the stable, knowing she was going to be groomed,
covered with a snug blanket, led to her comfy stall, and given food
and water. Colonel Cody only gave his animals the best, too, so
Fairy would get a share of oats this evening, as she always did
after a show.

“
There you go, girl.” Ignoring H.L. and
determined to carry on with her job as if he weren’t there, Rose
clicked to Fairy, who obligingly walked over to stand near the
equipment Rose used to brush her and rub her down. She was a good
horse. Given tonight’s company, Rose blessed her for it. Fairy
represented normality under abnormal circumstances.

“
That horse is sure well trained,” H.L.
observed, watching with interest.

Rose dared to glance at him. She wasn’t
pleased to find him relaxed, leaning against the stable wall, his
arms crossed over his chest, and watching her acutely, as if his
eyes functioned as tiny motion-picture cameras. Rose had seen an
exhibition of motion-pictures at the Fair. She got the impression
his brain was recording and cataloging everything his sharp green
eyes saw.

“
Yes, she is.” She went to where her
tools were laid out, picked up the curry brush, slipped her hand
under the leather strap, and began working on Fairy’s beautiful
white coat. Rose had contemplated naming the lovely mare
Buttermilk, but decided she was far too dainty for such a
countrified name. The name Fairy suited her much better.

If Rose were a horse, she had a feeling
nobody’d think twice about naming her Buttermilk.

Fiddle. She had to stop thinking things like
that. H.L. May brought out the insecurities in her, and that was
not a good thing if she wanted to impress him. Which she did. For
the colonel’s sake. For her own sake, of course, Rose didn’t
care.

Who do you think you’re
fooling, Rose Gilhooley
?

She managed to suppress a snort laced with
self-disgust in time to prevent it from hitting the air. Blast H.L.
May, anyhow. He rattled her. Rose didn’t allow herself to be
rattled very often these days. She’d learned in six years of hard
work with the Wild West how to keep herself to herself and to
appear quiet and dignified under the most trying circumstances. She
definitely didn’t want to have her humble origins splashed all over
the newspapers.

Well . . . She thought about it as she
brushed the mare’s coat with a soothing rhythm . . . She guessed
she didn’t honestly care if people knew about her hard beginnings.
What Rose didn’t want folks to know was how dumb she was.

Annie would figuratively smack Rose for
calling herself dumb, even to herself. Annie, whose upbringing had
been almost exactly like Rose’s, had lectured her often about how a
body couldn’t choose the life into which she was born, and that it
was what one did with one’s life after one was dumped out onto this
earth that counted. Annie invariably went on to say that Rose
had
made
something of
herself, and she ought to be proud of it.

As for her education, or lack of it, that
wasn’t Rose’s fault, either, Annie always said. What’s more, Rose
was constantly striving to improve that aspect of her life.
Therefore, according to Annie, Rose ought to hold her head high and
take a back seat to no one.

The good Lord knew, Rose thought as she
brushed, Annie herself never took a back seat. She’d made sure
she’d learned how to read and write, even though she hadn’t had any
schooling, and she was as dignified and self-assured as Queen
Victoria herself. Rose sometimes wondered why Annie was so
self-confident and if Rose would ever learn how to be that way. She
doubted it more often than not.

“
Who trained him?”

Having become involved in her own glum
musings, Rose had almost forgotten about H.L. May’s presence in the
stable. Her head jerked up, and she stared at him. “Who? I mean
what?” She stamped her foot in frustration, causing Fairy a moment
of uneasiness, which Rose allayed by cooing softly to her.

H.L. nodded at the horse. “Who trained him?
That horse you’re brushing?”

Him? Rose stared hard at H.L. May for only a
second, before she transferred her gaze to Fairy. “This,” she said,
trying not to sound as surprised as she felt, “is a mare.” Eyeing
H.L. once more, keenly, she added, “A mare is a female horse.”

He laughed. He had a loud laugh, and it
seemed to bounce off the wooden stable walls. Several of the horses
that weren’t being used in tonight’s show shuffled and huffed. Rose
knew exactly how they felt. She’d have liked to heave the curry
brush at Mr. H.L. May’s head, but she knew that would probably only
amuse him, too.

After what seemed like hours, H.L. stopped
laughing and said, “Ah. Well, then, who trained her? Whoever it was
did a darned good job.”

Rose eyed him for approximately ten
seconds more before she ground out frigidly, “Thank you. For your
information,
I
trained her.
Whom did you
think
trains the
horses I’m expected to risk my neck riding?”

He laughed again. Naturally. Rose might have
predicted as much.

“
Ah, I see,” he said after another
several hours of his impertinent laughter had disturbed the horses
and Rose’s sensibilities. “I should have known.”

“
Indeed.” Finished with brushing
Fairy’s glossy coat, Rose replaced the curry brush without doing
anything untoward with it, for which she congratulated herself, and
took up the comb with which she maintained Fairy’s sleek main and
tail.

Sometimes Rose braided her horse’s tail, but
she didn’t do so unless the weather was particularly windy. Tonight
she hadn’t. The colonel had told her that when an audience
witnessed the free-flowing tail of a fast-moving horse, they went
crazy with excitement, and Rose always tried to please the colonel.
Even for the colonel’s sake, however, she wasn’t going to risk her
neck any more than she had to, and if the wind blew just right,
Fairy’s flying tail interfered with her vision.