Fancy Pants (10 page)
"Curve your neck a little more, Francesca," Lloyd instructed. "Makeup,
where are you?"
"Right here, Lloyd."
"Come on, then."
The makeup man looked vague. "What do you need?"
"What do I
need?
" Lloyd threw
out his hands in a dramatic gesture of
frustration.
"Oh, ri-i-ight." The makeup man grimaced apologetically, then called
out to Sally, who was standing just behind the camera. "Hey, Calaverro,
reach into my box, will you, and toss me over Fletcher's fangs?"
Fletcher's
fangs?
Francesca felt the bottom drop out of her stomach.
Sally slapped the odious objects into the makeup matfs hand. "It's a
vampire picture, sweetie. What do you expect him to wear—a G-string?"
Francesca felt as if she'd stumbled into some terrible nightmare.
Jerking away from Fletcher Hall, she rounded on Byron. "You lied to
me!" she shouted. "Why didn't you tell me this was a vampire picture?
Of all the miserable, rotten— My God, I'll sue you for this; I'll sue
you to within an inch of your ridiculous life. If you think for one
moment I'll let my name appear on—on—" She couldn't say the word again,
she absolutely couldn't! A vision of Marisa Berenson flicked into her
mind, the exquisite Marisa hearing about what had happened to poor
Francesca Day and laughing until rivulets of tears ran down her
alabaster cheeks.
Clenching her fists, Francesca cried, "You tell me right this minute
exactly what this odious film is about!"
Lloyd sniffed, clearly offended. "It's about life and death, the
transfer of blood, the very essence of life passing from one person to
another. Metaphysical events of which you apparently know nothing." He
stalked away in a huff.
Sally stepped forward and crossed her arms, obviously enjoying herself.
"The film's about a bunch of stewardesses who rent a mansion that's
supposed to be haunted. One by one they get their blood sucked by the
former owner—good old Fletcher, who's spent the last century or so
pining for his lost love Lucinda. There's a subplot with a female
vampire and a male stripper, but that's closer to the end."
Francesca didn't wait to hear any more. Shooting a furious glance at
all of them, she swept from the set. Her hoopskirt rocked from side to
side and the blood boiled in her veins as she dashed out of the mansion
and toward the trailers in search of Lew Steiner. They'd made a fool of
her! She had sold her clothes and traveled halfway around the world to
play a minor part in a vampire movie!
Quivering with rage, she found Steiner sitting at a metal table under
the trees near the food truck. Her hoopskirt tilted up in the back as
she came to a sudden stop, banging against the table leg. "I accepted
this job because I heard Mr. Byron had a reputation as a quality
director!" she declared, stabbing the air with a harsh gesture directed
roughly toward the plantation house.
He looked up from a half-eaten ham on rye. "Who told you that?"
An image of Miranda Gwynwyck's face, smug and self-satisfied, swam
before her eyes, and everything became blindingly clear. Miranda, who
was supposed to be a feminist, had sabotaged another woman in
a
misguided attempt to protect her brother.
"He told me he was making a spiritual statement!" she exclaimed. "What
does any of this have to do
with spiritual statements—or life force or
Fellini, for God's sake!"
Steiner smirked. "Why do you think we call him Lord Byron? He makes
crap sound like poetry. Of course, it's still crap when he's done with
it, but we don't tell him that. He's cheap and he works fast."
Francesca searched for some misunderstanding, for the small ray of hope
her optimistic soul demanded. "What about the Golden Palm?" she asked
stiffly.
"The Golden what?"
"Palm." She felt like a fool. "The Cannes Film Festival."
Lew Steiner stared at her for a moment before he released a belly laugh
that brought with it a small
chunk of ham. "Honey, the
only 'can' Lord Byron's ever had anything to do with is the kind that
flushes. The last picture he did for me was
Co-ed Massacre,
and the one
before that was a little number called
Arizona Prison Women.
It did
real good at the drive-ins."
Francesca could barely force the words from her mouth. "And he actually
expected me to appear in a vampire picture?"
"You're here, aren't you?"
She made up her mind immediately. "Not for long! I'll be back with my
suitcases in exactly ten minutes, and I expect you to have a draft
waiting for me to cover my expenses as well as a driver to take me to
the airport. And if you use a single frame of that film you shot today,
I'll bloody well sue you to within
an inch of your worthless life."
"You signed a contract, so you won't have much luck."
"I signed a contract under false pretenses."
"Bullshit. Nobody lied to you. And you can forget about any money until
you're finished shooting."
"I demand to be paid what you owe me!" She felt like some dreadful
fishwife bargaining on a street corner. "You have to pay me for my
travel. We had an agreement!"
"You're not getting a penny until you're done with your last scene
tomorrow." He raked his eyes over her unpleasantly. "That's the one
Lloyd wants you to do nude. The deflowering of innocence, he calls it."
"Lioyd will see me nude the same day he wins the Golden Palm!" Turning
on her heel, she began to storm away only to have one of the hateful
pink flounces on her skirt catch on the corner of the metal table. She
jerked it free, tearing it in the process.
Steiner leaped up from the table. "Hey, be careful with that costume!
Those things cost me money!"
She yanked the mustard container from the table and squeezed a great
glob of it down the front of the skirt. "How dreadful," she scoffed.
"It looks as if this one needs to be laundered!"
"You bitch!" he screamed after her as she stalked away. "You'll never
work again! I'll see to it that no
one hires you to empty out the
garbage."
"Super!" she called back. "Because I've had all the garbage I can
stand!"
Grabbing two handfuls of ruffle, she hitched her skirts to her knees,
cut across the lawn, and headed for the chicken coop. Never, absolutely
never in her entire life had she been treated so shabbily. She'd make
Miranda Gwynwyck pay for this humiliation if it was the last thing she
did. She'd bloody well marry Nicholas Gwynwyck the day she got home!
When she reached her room, she was pale with rage, and the sight of the
unmade bed fueled her fury. Snatching up an ugly green lamp from the
dresser, she hurled it across the room, where it shattered against the
wall. The destruction didn't help; she still felt as if someone had hit
her in the stomach. Dragging her suitcase to the bed, she wadded in the
few clothes she had bothered to unpack the night before, slammed down
the lid, and sat on it. By the time she had forced the latches closed,
her carefully arranged curls had come loose and her chest was damp with
perspiration. Then she remembered she was still wearing the awful pink
costume.
She nearly wailed with frustration as she opened the suitcase again.
This was all Nicky's fault! When she got back to London, she'd make him
take her to the Costa del Sol, and she'd lie on the bloody beach all
day and do nothing except think up ways to make him miserable! Reaching
behind her, she began struggling with the hooks that held the bodice
together, but they had been set in a double row, and the material fit
so tightly that she couldn't get a grip to loosen them. She twisted
farther around, releasing a particularly foul curse, but the hooks
wouldn't budge. Just as she'd reconciled herself to looking for someone
to help her, she thought of the expression on Lew Steiner's fat, smug
face when she'd squirted mustard on the skirt. She nearly laughed
aloud. Let's see how smug he looks when he sees his precious costume
disappearing from sight, she thought with a burst of malicious glee.
No one was around to help her, so she had to carry the suitcase
herself. Lugging her Vuitton bag in one hand and her cosmetic case in
the other, she struggled down the path that led to the vehicles, only
to discover when she got there that absolutely no one would drive her
into Gulfport.
"Sorry, Miss Day, but they told us they needed all the cars," one of
the men muttered, not quite looking her in the eye.
She didn't believe him for a moment. This was Lew Steiner's doing, his
last petty attack on her!
Another crew member was more helpful. "There's a gas station not too
far down the road." He indicated the direction with a turn of his head.
"You could make a phone call from there and get somebody to pick you
up."
The thought of walking down the driveway was daunting enough, let alone
having to walk all the way to a petrol station. Just as she realized
she'd have to swallow her pride and go back to the chicken coop to
change her dress, Lew Steiner stepped out of one of the Airstream
trailers and gave her a nasty smirk. She decided she'd die before she'd
retreat an inch. Glaring back at him, she hitched up her suitcases and
headed across the grass toward the driveway.
"Hey! Stop right there!" Steiner yelled, puffing up next to her. "Don't
you take another step until I have that costume back!"
She rounded on him. "You so much as touch me, and I'll have you charged
with assault!"
"I'll have you charged with theft! That dress belongs to me!"
"And I'm sure you'd look charming in it." She deliberately caught him
in the knees with her cosmetic
case as she turned to walk away. He
yelped with pain, and she smiled to herself, wishing she'd hit him
harder.
It would be her last moment of satisfaction for a very long time to
come.
the Buick Riviera. "Route ninety-eight, I told you. Ninety-eight to
fifty-five, fifty-five to twelve, then set the cruise control straight
into Baton Rouge."
"Telling me an hour ago and then falling asleep doesn't help much,"
Dallie grumbled. He wore a new
cap, dark blue with an American flag on
the front, but it wasn't doing the trick against the midafternoon sun,
so he picked up a pair of mirrored sunglasses from the dashboard and
put them on. Scrub pine stretched out on either side of the two-lane
road.
He hadn't seen anything but a few rusted junk cars for miles, and his
stomach had started rumbling. "Sometimes you're about worthless," he
muttered.
"You got any Juicy Fruit?" Skeet asked.
A patch of color in the distance suddenly caught Dallie's attention, a
swirl of bright pink wobbling slowly along the side of the road. As
they drew closer, the shape gradually became more distinct.
He pulled his sunglasses off. "I don't believe it. Will you just look
at that?"
Skeet leaned forward, his forearm resting on the back of the passenger
seat, and shaded his eyes. "Now don't that just about beat all?" he
chortled.
Francesca pushed herself on, one plodding step at a time, struggling
for every breath against the vise of her corset. Dust streaked her
cheeks, the tops of her breasts glistened with perspiration, and not
fifteen minutes earlier, she had lost a nipple. Just like a cork
bobbing to the surface of a wave, it had popped out of the neckline of
her dress. She had quickly set down her suitcase and shoved it back in,
but the memory made her shudder. If she could take back just one thing
in her life, she thought for the hundredth time in as many minutes,
she'd take back the moment she had decided to walk away from the
Wentworth plantation wearing this dress.
The hoopskirt now looked like a gravy boat, protruding in the front and
back and squished in on the sides from the combined pressure of the
suitcase in her right hand and the cosmetic case in her left, both of
which felt as if they were tearing her arms from their shoulder
sockets. With each step, she winced. Her tiny French-heeled shoes had
rubbed blisters on her feet, and each wayward puff of hot air sent
another wave of dust blowing up into her face.
She wanted to sit down on the side of the road and cry, but she wasn't
absolutely certain she would be able to force herself to get back up
again. If only she weren't so frightened, her physical discomforts
would be easier to endure. How could this have happened to her? She'd
walked for miles without coming to the petrol station. Either it didn't
exist or she had mistaken the direction, but she had seen nothing
except a blistered wooden sign advertising a vegetable stand
that had never materialized. Soon it would
be dark, she was in a
foreign country, and for all she knew a herd of horrid wild beasts
lurked in those pines just off the side of the road. She forced herself
to look straight ahead. The only thing that kept her from returning to
the Went-worth plantation was the absolute certainty that she could
never make it back that far.
Surely this road led to something, she told herself. Even in America
they wouldn't build roads to nowhere, would they? The thought was so
frightening she began playing small games in her head to keep herself
moving forward. As she gritted her teeth against the pain in various
parts of her body, she envisioned her favorite places, all of them
light-years away from the dusty back roads of Mississippi. She
envisioned Liberty's on Regent Street with its gnarled beams and
wonderful Arabian jewelry, the perfumes at Sephora on the rue de Passy,
and everything on Madison Avenue from Adolfo to Yves Saint Laurent.
An
image sprang into her mind of an icy glass of Perrier with a small
sliver of lime. It hung in the hot air in front of her, the picture so
vivid she felt as if she could reach out and clasp the cold, wet glass
in the palm of her hand. She was beginning to hallucinate, she told
herself, but the image was so pleasant she didn't try to make it go
away.
The Perrier suddenly vaporized into the hot Mississippi air as she
became aware of the sound of an automobile approaching from behind and
then the soft squeal of brakes. Before she could balance the weight of
the suitcases in her hands to turn toward the noise, a soft drawl
drifted toward her from the other side of the road.
"Hey, darlin', didn't anybody tell you that Lee surrendered?"
The suitcase slammed into the front of her knees and her hoop bounced
up in the back as she twisted around toward the voice. She balanced her
weight and then blinked twice, unable to believe the vision
that had
materialized directly in front of her eyes.
Across the road, leaning out the window of a dark green automobile with
his forearm resting across the top of the door panel, was a man so
outrageously good-looking, so devastatingly handsome, that for a moment
she thought she might
actually have hallucinated him right along with the Perrier and the
sliver of lime. As the handle of her suitcase dug into her palm, she
took in the classic lines of his face, the molded cheekbones and lean
jaw, the straight, perfect nose, and then his eyes, which were a
brilliant Paul Newman blue and as thickly lashed as her own. How could
a mortal man have eyes like that? How could a man have such an
incredibly generous mouth and still look so masculine? Thick, dark
blond hair curled up over the edges of a blue billed cap sporting an
American flag. She could see the top of a formidable pair of shoulders,
the well-formed muscles of his tanned forearm, and for one irrational
moment she felt a crazy stab of panic.
She had finally met someone as beautiful as she was.
"You carryin' any Confederate secrets underneath those skirts?" the man
said with a grin that revealed the kind of teeth that belonged on
magazine pages and made people count back guiltily to the last time
they'd flossed.
"I think the Yankees cut out her tongue, Dallie."
For the first time, Francesca became aware of another man, this one
leaning out the back window. As she took in his sinister face and
ominously slitted eyes, warning bells clanged in her head.
"Either that or she's a spy from the North," he went on. "Never knew a
southern woman to keep quiet for so long."
"You a Yankee spy, darlin'?" Mr. Gorgeous asked, flashing those
incredible teeth. "Pryin' out Confederate secrets with those pretty
green eyes?"
She was suddenly conscious of her vulnerability—the deserted road, the
failing sunlight, two strange men, the fact that she was in America,
not safe at home in England. In America people packed loaded guns on
their way to church, and criminals roamed the streets at will. She
glanced nervously at the man in the back seat. He looked like someone
who would torture small animals just for fun. What should she do? No
one would hear her if she screamed, and she had no way to protect
herself.
"Shoot, Skeet, you're scaring her. Pull that ugly head of yours in,
will you?"
Skeet's head retracted, and the gorgeous man with the strange name she
hadn't quite caught lifted one perfect eyebrow,
waiting for her to say something. She decided to brave it out—to be
brisk, matter-of-fact, and under no circumstances let them see how
desperate she actually was.
"I'm awfully afraid I've gotten myself into a bit of a muddle," she
said, setting down her suitcase.
"I seem to have lost my way. Frightful
nuisance, of course."
Skeet poked his head back out the window. Mr. Gorgeous grinned.
She kept going doggedly. "Perhaps you could tell me how far it is to
the next petrol station. Or anywhere
I might find a telephone,
actually."
"You're from England, aren't you?" Skeet asked. "Dallie, do you hear
the funny way she talks? She's a English lady, is what she is."
Francesca watched as Mr. Gorgeous—could someone really be named
Dallie?—swept his gaze down over the pink and white ruffles of her
gown. "I'll bet you got one hell of a story to tell, honey. Come on and
hop in. We'll give you a lift to the next telephone."
She hesitated. Getting into a car with two strange men didn't strike
her as the absolute wisest course to take, but she couldn't seem to
think of an alternative. She stood in the road, ruffles dragging in the
dust and suitcases at her feet, while an unfamiliar combination of fear
and uncertainty made her feel queasy.
Skeet leaned all the way out the window and tilted his head to look at
Dallie. "She's afraid you're rapist scum gettin' ready to ruin her." He
turned back to her. "You take a good hard look at Dallie's pretty
face,
ma'am, and then tell me if you think a man with a face like that has to
resort to violatin' unwilling women."
He definitely had a point, but somehow Francesca didn't feel comforted.
The man named Dallie wasn't actually the person she was most worried
about.
Dallie seemed to read her mind, which, considering the circumstances,
probably wasn't all that difficult a thing to do. "Don't worry about
Skeet, honey," he said. "Skeet's a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist, is what
he is."
That word, coming from the mouth of someone who, despite his incredible
good looks, had the accent and manner of a functional illiterate,
surprised her. She was still
hesitating when the door of the car opened and a pair of dusty cowboy
boots hit the road. Dear God . . . She swallowed hard and looked up—way
up.
His body was as perfect as his face.
He wore a navy blue T-shirt that skimmed the muscles of his chest,
outlining biceps and triceps and all sorts of other incredible things,
and a pair of jeans faded almost to white everywhere except at the
frayed seams. His stomach was flat, his hips narrow; he was lean and
leggy, several inches over six feet tall, and he absolutely took her
breath away. It must be true, she thought wildly, what everyone said
about Americans and vitamin pills.
"The trunk's full, so I'm gonna have to throw your cases in the back
seat with Skeet there."
"That's fine. Anywhere will do." As he walked toward her, she turned
the full force of her smile on him. She couldn't help it; the response
was automatic, programmed into her Serritella genes. Not appearing at
her best before a man this spectacular, even if he was a backwoods
bumpkin, suddenly seemed more painful than the blisters on her feet. At
that moment she would have given anything she owned for half an hour in
front of a mirror with the contents of her cosmetic case and the white
linen Mary McFadden that was hanging in a Piccadilly resale shop right
next to her periwinkle blue evening pajamas.
He stopped where he was and stared down at her.
For the first time since she'd left London, she felt as if she'd
arrived in home territory. The expression
on his face confirmed a fact
she had discovered long ago—men were men the world over. She peered
upward with innocent, radiant eyes. "Something the matter?"
"Do you always do that?"
"Do what?" The dimple in her cheek deepened.
"Proposition a man less than five minutes after you meet him."
"Proposition!" She couldn't believe she'd heard him correctly, and she
exclaimed indignantly, "I was most certainly not propositioning you."
"Honey, if that smile wasn't a proposition, I don't know what one is."
He picked up her cases and carried them to the other side of the car.
"Normally I wouldn't mind, you understand, but
it strikes me as just short of foolhardy to be hanging out your
advertising when you're in the middle of nowhere with two strange men
who might be pervert scum, for all you know."
"My advertising!" She stomped her foot on the road. "Put those
suitcases down this minute! I wouldn't
go anywhere with you if my life
depended on it."
He glanced around at the scrub pine and the deserted road. "From the
looks of things, it's getting mighty close."
She didn't know what to do. She needed help, yet his behavior was
insufferable, and she hated the idea
of demeaning herself by getting in
the car. He took the choice away from her when he pulled open the back
door and unceremoniously shoved the luggage at Skeet.
"Be careful with those," she cried, racing up to the car. "They're
Louis Vuitton!"
"You picked a real live one this time, Dallie," Skeet muttered from the
back.
"Don't I just know it," Dallie replied. He climbed behind the wheel,
slammed the door, and then leaned out the window to look at her. "If
you want to retain possession of your luggage, honey, you'd better
get
inside real quick, because in exactly ten seconds, I'm slipping the old
Riviera into gear and me and
Mr. Vee-tawn won't be anything to you but
a distant memory."
She limped around the back of the car to the passenger door on the
other side, tears struggling to reach the surface. She felt humiliated,
frightened, and—worst of all— helpless. A hairpin slid down the back
of
her neck and fell into the dirt.
Unfortunately, her discomfiture was just beginning. Hoopskirts, she
quickly discovered, had not been designed to fit into a modern
automobile. Refusing to look at either of her rescuers to see how they
were reacting to her difficulties, she finally eased onto the seat
backside first and then gathered the unwieldy volume of material into
her lap as best she could.
Dallie freed the gearshift from a spillover of crinolines. "You always
dress for comfort like this?"
She glared at him, opening her mouth to deliver one of her famous
snappy rejoinders only to discover
that nothing sprang to mind.
They rode for some time in silence while she stared doggedly ahead, her
eyes barely making it over the top of her mountain of skirts, the stays
in the bodice digging into her
waist. As grateful as she was to be off
her feet, her position made the constriction of the corset even
more
unbearable. She tried to take a deep breath, but her breasts rose so
alarmingly that she settled for shallow breaths instead. One sneeze,
she realized, and she was a centerfold.
"I'm Dallas Beaudine," the man behind the wheel announced. "Folks call
me Dallie. That's Skeet Cooper in the back."
where are you?"
"Right here, Lloyd."
"Come on, then."
The makeup man looked vague. "What do you need?"
"What do I
need?
" Lloyd threw
out his hands in a dramatic gesture of
frustration.
"Oh, ri-i-ight." The makeup man grimaced apologetically, then called
out to Sally, who was standing just behind the camera. "Hey, Calaverro,
reach into my box, will you, and toss me over Fletcher's fangs?"
Fletcher's
fangs?
Francesca felt the bottom drop out of her stomach.
Chapter
7
"Fangs!" Francesca screeched. "Why is Fletcher wearing fangs?"7
Sally slapped the odious objects into the makeup matfs hand. "It's a
vampire picture, sweetie. What do you expect him to wear—a G-string?"
Francesca felt as if she'd stumbled into some terrible nightmare.
Jerking away from Fletcher Hall, she rounded on Byron. "You lied to
me!" she shouted. "Why didn't you tell me this was a vampire picture?
Of all the miserable, rotten— My God, I'll sue you for this; I'll sue
you to within an inch of your ridiculous life. If you think for one
moment I'll let my name appear on—on—" She couldn't say the word again,
she absolutely couldn't! A vision of Marisa Berenson flicked into her
mind, the exquisite Marisa hearing about what had happened to poor
Francesca Day and laughing until rivulets of tears ran down her
alabaster cheeks.
Clenching her fists, Francesca cried, "You tell me right this minute
exactly what this odious film is about!"
Lloyd sniffed, clearly offended. "It's about life and death, the
transfer of blood, the very essence of life passing from one person to
another. Metaphysical events of which you apparently know nothing." He
stalked away in a huff.
Sally stepped forward and crossed her arms, obviously enjoying herself.
"The film's about a bunch of stewardesses who rent a mansion that's
supposed to be haunted. One by one they get their blood sucked by the
former owner—good old Fletcher, who's spent the last century or so
pining for his lost love Lucinda. There's a subplot with a female
vampire and a male stripper, but that's closer to the end."
Francesca didn't wait to hear any more. Shooting a furious glance at
all of them, she swept from the set. Her hoopskirt rocked from side to
side and the blood boiled in her veins as she dashed out of the mansion
and toward the trailers in search of Lew Steiner. They'd made a fool of
her! She had sold her clothes and traveled halfway around the world to
play a minor part in a vampire movie!
Quivering with rage, she found Steiner sitting at a metal table under
the trees near the food truck. Her hoopskirt tilted up in the back as
she came to a sudden stop, banging against the table leg. "I accepted
this job because I heard Mr. Byron had a reputation as a quality
director!" she declared, stabbing the air with a harsh gesture directed
roughly toward the plantation house.
He looked up from a half-eaten ham on rye. "Who told you that?"
An image of Miranda Gwynwyck's face, smug and self-satisfied, swam
before her eyes, and everything became blindingly clear. Miranda, who
was supposed to be a feminist, had sabotaged another woman in
a
misguided attempt to protect her brother.
"He told me he was making a spiritual statement!" she exclaimed. "What
does any of this have to do
with spiritual statements—or life force or
Fellini, for God's sake!"
Steiner smirked. "Why do you think we call him Lord Byron? He makes
crap sound like poetry. Of course, it's still crap when he's done with
it, but we don't tell him that. He's cheap and he works fast."
Francesca searched for some misunderstanding, for the small ray of hope
her optimistic soul demanded. "What about the Golden Palm?" she asked
stiffly.
"The Golden what?"
"Palm." She felt like a fool. "The Cannes Film Festival."
Lew Steiner stared at her for a moment before he released a belly laugh
that brought with it a small
chunk of ham. "Honey, the
only 'can' Lord Byron's ever had anything to do with is the kind that
flushes. The last picture he did for me was
Co-ed Massacre,
and the one
before that was a little number called
Arizona Prison Women.
It did
real good at the drive-ins."
Francesca could barely force the words from her mouth. "And he actually
expected me to appear in a vampire picture?"
"You're here, aren't you?"
She made up her mind immediately. "Not for long! I'll be back with my
suitcases in exactly ten minutes, and I expect you to have a draft
waiting for me to cover my expenses as well as a driver to take me to
the airport. And if you use a single frame of that film you shot today,
I'll bloody well sue you to within
an inch of your worthless life."
"You signed a contract, so you won't have much luck."
"I signed a contract under false pretenses."
"Bullshit. Nobody lied to you. And you can forget about any money until
you're finished shooting."
"I demand to be paid what you owe me!" She felt like some dreadful
fishwife bargaining on a street corner. "You have to pay me for my
travel. We had an agreement!"
"You're not getting a penny until you're done with your last scene
tomorrow." He raked his eyes over her unpleasantly. "That's the one
Lloyd wants you to do nude. The deflowering of innocence, he calls it."
"Lioyd will see me nude the same day he wins the Golden Palm!" Turning
on her heel, she began to storm away only to have one of the hateful
pink flounces on her skirt catch on the corner of the metal table. She
jerked it free, tearing it in the process.
Steiner leaped up from the table. "Hey, be careful with that costume!
Those things cost me money!"
She yanked the mustard container from the table and squeezed a great
glob of it down the front of the skirt. "How dreadful," she scoffed.
"It looks as if this one needs to be laundered!"
"You bitch!" he screamed after her as she stalked away. "You'll never
work again! I'll see to it that no
one hires you to empty out the
garbage."
"Super!" she called back. "Because I've had all the garbage I can
stand!"
Grabbing two handfuls of ruffle, she hitched her skirts to her knees,
cut across the lawn, and headed for the chicken coop. Never, absolutely
never in her entire life had she been treated so shabbily. She'd make
Miranda Gwynwyck pay for this humiliation if it was the last thing she
did. She'd bloody well marry Nicholas Gwynwyck the day she got home!
When she reached her room, she was pale with rage, and the sight of the
unmade bed fueled her fury. Snatching up an ugly green lamp from the
dresser, she hurled it across the room, where it shattered against the
wall. The destruction didn't help; she still felt as if someone had hit
her in the stomach. Dragging her suitcase to the bed, she wadded in the
few clothes she had bothered to unpack the night before, slammed down
the lid, and sat on it. By the time she had forced the latches closed,
her carefully arranged curls had come loose and her chest was damp with
perspiration. Then she remembered she was still wearing the awful pink
costume.
She nearly wailed with frustration as she opened the suitcase again.
This was all Nicky's fault! When she got back to London, she'd make him
take her to the Costa del Sol, and she'd lie on the bloody beach all
day and do nothing except think up ways to make him miserable! Reaching
behind her, she began struggling with the hooks that held the bodice
together, but they had been set in a double row, and the material fit
so tightly that she couldn't get a grip to loosen them. She twisted
farther around, releasing a particularly foul curse, but the hooks
wouldn't budge. Just as she'd reconciled herself to looking for someone
to help her, she thought of the expression on Lew Steiner's fat, smug
face when she'd squirted mustard on the skirt. She nearly laughed
aloud. Let's see how smug he looks when he sees his precious costume
disappearing from sight, she thought with a burst of malicious glee.
No one was around to help her, so she had to carry the suitcase
herself. Lugging her Vuitton bag in one hand and her cosmetic case in
the other, she struggled down the path that led to the vehicles, only
to discover when she got there that absolutely no one would drive her
into Gulfport.
"Sorry, Miss Day, but they told us they needed all the cars," one of
the men muttered, not quite looking her in the eye.
She didn't believe him for a moment. This was Lew Steiner's doing, his
last petty attack on her!
Another crew member was more helpful. "There's a gas station not too
far down the road." He indicated the direction with a turn of his head.
"You could make a phone call from there and get somebody to pick you
up."
The thought of walking down the driveway was daunting enough, let alone
having to walk all the way to a petrol station. Just as she realized
she'd have to swallow her pride and go back to the chicken coop to
change her dress, Lew Steiner stepped out of one of the Airstream
trailers and gave her a nasty smirk. She decided she'd die before she'd
retreat an inch. Glaring back at him, she hitched up her suitcases and
headed across the grass toward the driveway.
"Hey! Stop right there!" Steiner yelled, puffing up next to her. "Don't
you take another step until I have that costume back!"
She rounded on him. "You so much as touch me, and I'll have you charged
with assault!"
"I'll have you charged with theft! That dress belongs to me!"
"And I'm sure you'd look charming in it." She deliberately caught him
in the knees with her cosmetic
case as she turned to walk away. He
yelped with pain, and she smiled to herself, wishing she'd hit him
harder.
It would be her last moment of satisfaction for a very long time to
come.
* * *
"You missed the turnoff," Skeet chastised Dallie from the back seat ofthe Buick Riviera. "Route ninety-eight, I told you. Ninety-eight to
fifty-five, fifty-five to twelve, then set the cruise control straight
into Baton Rouge."
"Telling me an hour ago and then falling asleep doesn't help much,"
Dallie grumbled. He wore a new
cap, dark blue with an American flag on
the front, but it wasn't doing the trick against the midafternoon sun,
so he picked up a pair of mirrored sunglasses from the dashboard and
put them on. Scrub pine stretched out on either side of the two-lane
road.
He hadn't seen anything but a few rusted junk cars for miles, and his
stomach had started rumbling. "Sometimes you're about worthless," he
muttered.
"You got any Juicy Fruit?" Skeet asked.
A patch of color in the distance suddenly caught Dallie's attention, a
swirl of bright pink wobbling slowly along the side of the road. As
they drew closer, the shape gradually became more distinct.
He pulled his sunglasses off. "I don't believe it. Will you just look
at that?"
Skeet leaned forward, his forearm resting on the back of the passenger
seat, and shaded his eyes. "Now don't that just about beat all?" he
chortled.
Francesca pushed herself on, one plodding step at a time, struggling
for every breath against the vise of her corset. Dust streaked her
cheeks, the tops of her breasts glistened with perspiration, and not
fifteen minutes earlier, she had lost a nipple. Just like a cork
bobbing to the surface of a wave, it had popped out of the neckline of
her dress. She had quickly set down her suitcase and shoved it back in,
but the memory made her shudder. If she could take back just one thing
in her life, she thought for the hundredth time in as many minutes,
she'd take back the moment she had decided to walk away from the
Wentworth plantation wearing this dress.
The hoopskirt now looked like a gravy boat, protruding in the front and
back and squished in on the sides from the combined pressure of the
suitcase in her right hand and the cosmetic case in her left, both of
which felt as if they were tearing her arms from their shoulder
sockets. With each step, she winced. Her tiny French-heeled shoes had
rubbed blisters on her feet, and each wayward puff of hot air sent
another wave of dust blowing up into her face.
She wanted to sit down on the side of the road and cry, but she wasn't
absolutely certain she would be able to force herself to get back up
again. If only she weren't so frightened, her physical discomforts
would be easier to endure. How could this have happened to her? She'd
walked for miles without coming to the petrol station. Either it didn't
exist or she had mistaken the direction, but she had seen nothing
except a blistered wooden sign advertising a vegetable stand
that had never materialized. Soon it would
be dark, she was in a
foreign country, and for all she knew a herd of horrid wild beasts
lurked in those pines just off the side of the road. She forced herself
to look straight ahead. The only thing that kept her from returning to
the Went-worth plantation was the absolute certainty that she could
never make it back that far.
Surely this road led to something, she told herself. Even in America
they wouldn't build roads to nowhere, would they? The thought was so
frightening she began playing small games in her head to keep herself
moving forward. As she gritted her teeth against the pain in various
parts of her body, she envisioned her favorite places, all of them
light-years away from the dusty back roads of Mississippi. She
envisioned Liberty's on Regent Street with its gnarled beams and
wonderful Arabian jewelry, the perfumes at Sephora on the rue de Passy,
and everything on Madison Avenue from Adolfo to Yves Saint Laurent.
An
image sprang into her mind of an icy glass of Perrier with a small
sliver of lime. It hung in the hot air in front of her, the picture so
vivid she felt as if she could reach out and clasp the cold, wet glass
in the palm of her hand. She was beginning to hallucinate, she told
herself, but the image was so pleasant she didn't try to make it go
away.
The Perrier suddenly vaporized into the hot Mississippi air as she
became aware of the sound of an automobile approaching from behind and
then the soft squeal of brakes. Before she could balance the weight of
the suitcases in her hands to turn toward the noise, a soft drawl
drifted toward her from the other side of the road.
"Hey, darlin', didn't anybody tell you that Lee surrendered?"
The suitcase slammed into the front of her knees and her hoop bounced
up in the back as she twisted around toward the voice. She balanced her
weight and then blinked twice, unable to believe the vision
that had
materialized directly in front of her eyes.
Across the road, leaning out the window of a dark green automobile with
his forearm resting across the top of the door panel, was a man so
outrageously good-looking, so devastatingly handsome, that for a moment
she thought she might
actually have hallucinated him right along with the Perrier and the
sliver of lime. As the handle of her suitcase dug into her palm, she
took in the classic lines of his face, the molded cheekbones and lean
jaw, the straight, perfect nose, and then his eyes, which were a
brilliant Paul Newman blue and as thickly lashed as her own. How could
a mortal man have eyes like that? How could a man have such an
incredibly generous mouth and still look so masculine? Thick, dark
blond hair curled up over the edges of a blue billed cap sporting an
American flag. She could see the top of a formidable pair of shoulders,
the well-formed muscles of his tanned forearm, and for one irrational
moment she felt a crazy stab of panic.
She had finally met someone as beautiful as she was.
"You carryin' any Confederate secrets underneath those skirts?" the man
said with a grin that revealed the kind of teeth that belonged on
magazine pages and made people count back guiltily to the last time
they'd flossed.
"I think the Yankees cut out her tongue, Dallie."
For the first time, Francesca became aware of another man, this one
leaning out the back window. As she took in his sinister face and
ominously slitted eyes, warning bells clanged in her head.
"Either that or she's a spy from the North," he went on. "Never knew a
southern woman to keep quiet for so long."
"You a Yankee spy, darlin'?" Mr. Gorgeous asked, flashing those
incredible teeth. "Pryin' out Confederate secrets with those pretty
green eyes?"
She was suddenly conscious of her vulnerability—the deserted road, the
failing sunlight, two strange men, the fact that she was in America,
not safe at home in England. In America people packed loaded guns on
their way to church, and criminals roamed the streets at will. She
glanced nervously at the man in the back seat. He looked like someone
who would torture small animals just for fun. What should she do? No
one would hear her if she screamed, and she had no way to protect
herself.
"Shoot, Skeet, you're scaring her. Pull that ugly head of yours in,
will you?"
Skeet's head retracted, and the gorgeous man with the strange name she
hadn't quite caught lifted one perfect eyebrow,
waiting for her to say something. She decided to brave it out—to be
brisk, matter-of-fact, and under no circumstances let them see how
desperate she actually was.
"I'm awfully afraid I've gotten myself into a bit of a muddle," she
said, setting down her suitcase.
"I seem to have lost my way. Frightful
nuisance, of course."
Skeet poked his head back out the window. Mr. Gorgeous grinned.
She kept going doggedly. "Perhaps you could tell me how far it is to
the next petrol station. Or anywhere
I might find a telephone,
actually."
"You're from England, aren't you?" Skeet asked. "Dallie, do you hear
the funny way she talks? She's a English lady, is what she is."
Francesca watched as Mr. Gorgeous—could someone really be named
Dallie?—swept his gaze down over the pink and white ruffles of her
gown. "I'll bet you got one hell of a story to tell, honey. Come on and
hop in. We'll give you a lift to the next telephone."
She hesitated. Getting into a car with two strange men didn't strike
her as the absolute wisest course to take, but she couldn't seem to
think of an alternative. She stood in the road, ruffles dragging in the
dust and suitcases at her feet, while an unfamiliar combination of fear
and uncertainty made her feel queasy.
Skeet leaned all the way out the window and tilted his head to look at
Dallie. "She's afraid you're rapist scum gettin' ready to ruin her." He
turned back to her. "You take a good hard look at Dallie's pretty
face,
ma'am, and then tell me if you think a man with a face like that has to
resort to violatin' unwilling women."
He definitely had a point, but somehow Francesca didn't feel comforted.
The man named Dallie wasn't actually the person she was most worried
about.
Dallie seemed to read her mind, which, considering the circumstances,
probably wasn't all that difficult a thing to do. "Don't worry about
Skeet, honey," he said. "Skeet's a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist, is what
he is."
That word, coming from the mouth of someone who, despite his incredible
good looks, had the accent and manner of a functional illiterate,
surprised her. She was still
hesitating when the door of the car opened and a pair of dusty cowboy
boots hit the road. Dear God . . . She swallowed hard and looked up—way
up.
His body was as perfect as his face.
He wore a navy blue T-shirt that skimmed the muscles of his chest,
outlining biceps and triceps and all sorts of other incredible things,
and a pair of jeans faded almost to white everywhere except at the
frayed seams. His stomach was flat, his hips narrow; he was lean and
leggy, several inches over six feet tall, and he absolutely took her
breath away. It must be true, she thought wildly, what everyone said
about Americans and vitamin pills.
"The trunk's full, so I'm gonna have to throw your cases in the back
seat with Skeet there."
"That's fine. Anywhere will do." As he walked toward her, she turned
the full force of her smile on him. She couldn't help it; the response
was automatic, programmed into her Serritella genes. Not appearing at
her best before a man this spectacular, even if he was a backwoods
bumpkin, suddenly seemed more painful than the blisters on her feet. At
that moment she would have given anything she owned for half an hour in
front of a mirror with the contents of her cosmetic case and the white
linen Mary McFadden that was hanging in a Piccadilly resale shop right
next to her periwinkle blue evening pajamas.
He stopped where he was and stared down at her.
For the first time since she'd left London, she felt as if she'd
arrived in home territory. The expression
on his face confirmed a fact
she had discovered long ago—men were men the world over. She peered
upward with innocent, radiant eyes. "Something the matter?"
"Do you always do that?"
"Do what?" The dimple in her cheek deepened.
"Proposition a man less than five minutes after you meet him."
"Proposition!" She couldn't believe she'd heard him correctly, and she
exclaimed indignantly, "I was most certainly not propositioning you."
"Honey, if that smile wasn't a proposition, I don't know what one is."
He picked up her cases and carried them to the other side of the car.
"Normally I wouldn't mind, you understand, but
it strikes me as just short of foolhardy to be hanging out your
advertising when you're in the middle of nowhere with two strange men
who might be pervert scum, for all you know."
"My advertising!" She stomped her foot on the road. "Put those
suitcases down this minute! I wouldn't
go anywhere with you if my life
depended on it."
He glanced around at the scrub pine and the deserted road. "From the
looks of things, it's getting mighty close."
She didn't know what to do. She needed help, yet his behavior was
insufferable, and she hated the idea
of demeaning herself by getting in
the car. He took the choice away from her when he pulled open the back
door and unceremoniously shoved the luggage at Skeet.
"Be careful with those," she cried, racing up to the car. "They're
Louis Vuitton!"
"You picked a real live one this time, Dallie," Skeet muttered from the
back.
"Don't I just know it," Dallie replied. He climbed behind the wheel,
slammed the door, and then leaned out the window to look at her. "If
you want to retain possession of your luggage, honey, you'd better
get
inside real quick, because in exactly ten seconds, I'm slipping the old
Riviera into gear and me and
Mr. Vee-tawn won't be anything to you but
a distant memory."
She limped around the back of the car to the passenger door on the
other side, tears struggling to reach the surface. She felt humiliated,
frightened, and—worst of all— helpless. A hairpin slid down the back
of
her neck and fell into the dirt.
Unfortunately, her discomfiture was just beginning. Hoopskirts, she
quickly discovered, had not been designed to fit into a modern
automobile. Refusing to look at either of her rescuers to see how they
were reacting to her difficulties, she finally eased onto the seat
backside first and then gathered the unwieldy volume of material into
her lap as best she could.
Dallie freed the gearshift from a spillover of crinolines. "You always
dress for comfort like this?"
She glared at him, opening her mouth to deliver one of her famous
snappy rejoinders only to discover
that nothing sprang to mind.
They rode for some time in silence while she stared doggedly ahead, her
eyes barely making it over the top of her mountain of skirts, the stays
in the bodice digging into her
waist. As grateful as she was to be off
her feet, her position made the constriction of the corset even
more
unbearable. She tried to take a deep breath, but her breasts rose so
alarmingly that she settled for shallow breaths instead. One sneeze,
she realized, and she was a centerfold.
"I'm Dallas Beaudine," the man behind the wheel announced. "Folks call
me Dallie. That's Skeet Cooper in the back."
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