Her Leading Man (34 page)

“
I don’t want to keep you tied down or confined
to
the
house! I want you to be sensible.”

“
I am sensible! I don’t think it’s any less
sensible
for a woman to want to be a doctor than for a motion
picture studio to
bribe the police!”

“
Dash
it, Christina, you’re being irrational!”

“
I am
not!”

Good heavens,
they were having their first argument.

They were fighting. The truth hit Christina like
a
blow. She was mad at the man she loved, and he
was mad at her—and
why? Because they disapproved
of each other. She sank back down onto the
padded
bench,
feeling stricken and exhausted and wishing
she wasn’t a Mayhew so that she could
break down
and have a good cry.

Her head was lowered, and when she felt Martin’s
hand on her
shoulder, she started. Glancing up, she
saw that he
appeared
worried.

And that didn’t make any sense. After all, she was
the oddball here.
Martin was behaving just like a
man. She, on the other hand, was behaving
like a
fully
liberated female, and she wasn’t. She was as
oppressed and beleaguered as the
rest of the members
of her sex—and she hated it.

“
I’m sorry, Christina. I didn’t mean to get
angry.
I guess I’m a little tired.”

She gazed at him, feeling unhappy and ashamed
of herself; not for
standing up for her right to vote,
but for getting angry with Martin, who was
the most
generous and special man in the world. “I’m tired,
too, Martin. I
didn’t mean to snarl at you.”

His grin appeared both lopsided and halfhearted.
“
Think nothing of it. If all the women in your family
are like your
grandmother, I suspect you learned to
snarl before you learned to
talk.”

That wasn’t funny
.
It hurt like a knife
wound to
her
heart, actually. She sucked in a quick breath of
shock and disbelief.
She hadn’t thought Martin
,
whom she’d always
known to be polite, sympathetic,
and considerate, could stab like
that.

Apparently he was shocked, too. Pressing a hand
over his eyes, he
muttered, “God, Christina, I’
m
sorry. I don’t know
where that came from.”

“
I do.” She felt drained. Wooden. As if all the
life
had been sapped from her body, and only its shell
remained. “You’re a
man.”

He withdrew his hand from her shoulder with a
groan. Putting a
hand to the small of his back, he
stretched, grimacing as if he ached all
over. “Undeniable.”

Christina watched as he turned away from her,
walked to the
bureau, stripped off his remaining
clothes, and donned a pair of striped
pajamas. Although
she didn’t know why, she was rather more
glad than not that
he didn’t wear a night
shirt. What
Martin Tafft wore to bed was nothing to her. Or
it
wouldn’t
be after tonight.

It wasn’t unusual for Christina’s family to hold
strenuous
discussions on any
number and variety of
issues. Until this minute, she hadn’t realized
how
devastating
it could be to have someone she had chosen
to love disagree
with
something she believed in so
strongly that it went a good way toward
making up
her
whole personality and character
.

She didn’t see how they could ever come to grips
with this difference
of opinion. She was sure she
couldn’t have a satisfying relationship with a
man
who
didn’t share her views on women’s rights
.

Unfortunately, whether she got along with him or
not,
she
could still love him
.
With her hands folded in
her
lap, she
watched Martin. He looked so different with
his hair dyed
black
.
The makeup mavens had even dyed
his eyebrows
.
She
imagined he’d wear dark makeup
when they shot the scenes he’d be in,
too.

Perhaps that was part of tonight’s problem: He
didn’t look like
himself. He didn’t look friendly and
nice and good-natured. He looked like
Pablo Orozco,
who was a worm. Christina pretty much expected the
Pablo Orozcos of the
world to be bullheaded antifeminists.
She hadn’t expected it of Martin, and
she
felt
shattered and lonely.

“
Do you need help?” His voice was hollow
now,
as if all of his energy had vanished, just as had
Christina’s.

She stood and finished removing her clothes. “No,
thank
you.”

He turned suddenly. “Listen, Christina, I’m sorry.
I didn’t mean to
argue with you. We’re both tired,
and we’ve both had a stressful couple of
days. Let’s
turn in and get some sleep, and hope things will
look
better
in the morning.”

Her smile probably looked wan. She felt wan. “All
right.”

She was exhausted. Her head ached. Her heart ached.
She wanted to pummel
her grandmother. And Martin.
And then she wanted to stick her head in one of
those
newfangled gas ovens and be done with it.

She couldn’t recall ever being this low in spirits
before. It didn’t
help that Martin didn’t even try to
make love with her that night, but only
held her tenderly.
She loved him so much. And she disagreed
w
ith him so absolutely.

Martin felt a little better about life, Christina,
and
women’s
suffrage the next morning. It helped to have
a little distance in time
between himself and that
bleak police barracks. When he’d seen
Christina
there, he’d wanted to rush up and snatch her away
and stick her
someplace safe.

And then she’d as much as told him he was at fault
for paying her way
out of the joint. Not to mention all
the other women who’d been arrested with
her.

It was true that Martin didn’t fully approve of the
way the
motion picture
studios had begun giving payoffs
to the coppers in order to let some of
their actors’
antics slide. Still and all, Christina would be
languishing in that
wretched place yet if he hadn’t
bailed her out. And she might have had to
go back
to it
if someone from Peerless hadn’t greased the
wheels of the law with a considerable
amount of
money. In many ways, Martin was glad he didn’t
usually
have
to have anything to
do with that aspect of
the business. All he wanted to do was make
pictures.

But Christina was out of the clink and safe
now
.
She and her damned,
pigheaded grandmother. And
she’d never have to
go back to the awful place
again.

He wished he could drive her and her grandmother
back to Indio—or
drive Christina back and leave Mrs.
Mayhew in Los Angeles—but Christina had
her own
automobile, and she aimed to drive them herself. It
w
as a trifle daunting to be in love with a female
who didn’t need him.
He wasn’t sure he could ever
quite adjust to the situation, in fact.

Yet he really didn’t have too many qualms over
Christina’s
position
on
women’s suffrage. He believed
the primary holdouts on that issue were
old-fashioned
fuddy-duddies who didn’t want to admit that women
had
brains.

The nonsense about wanting to be a doctor was
another
matter, though, and his mind wrestled with it all
the way back to the
set. He couldn’t reconcile a beautiful
woman physically examining
naked
men.
Especially if
the
beautiful
woman was the one he loved.

Frowning, he tried to consider the situation
logically
and
without letting his emotions get in the way.
“Can’t be done,” he muttered
gloomily. Every single
thought he entertained about Christina Mayhew
contained
e
motions in abundance.

Hell’s bells, he wouldn’t have been surprised to
discover that he was
more emotional than she—and
she was a woman! It didn’t seem right to him.
Why
couldn’t
he have fallen head over heels in love with
a conventional female? Why had he
decided on an
obstinate, intransigent feminist?

Because
she didn’t bore him.

The answer was so obvious, he laughed. It was a
wry
laugh and it contained only a marginal amount
of
humor, but it was a laugh.

They arrived in Indio too late to resume filming
on Monday. It took a
long time to drive from Los
Angeles to San Bernardino County. The roads
were
rough,
the tires were fragile, and Christina experienced
three blown-out
tires and trouble with an overheated
engine twice along the way.

Needless to say, Martin, who drove behind her the
whole way, helped
her overcome her mechanical
problems each time
.
She felt stupid and
inadequate.
After all, she was a Mayhew, and a Mayhew of either
sex
ought to be able to take care of life’s little
difficulties when
they presented themselves. Especially if one were dealing with
something as simple
and mechanized as an automobile.
She’d awakened
that morning feeling low and
depressed, and the feeling
only intensified as the day progressed.

When she’d mentioned her distress at not being
able to attend to
her automobile’s mechanical difficulties
without his help, Martin had looked
at her in
surprise. “But no one expects you to be able to fix
cars, Christina. You
might be brilliant, but you’re still
a woman
.

And he’d laughed. It hadn’t been an unkind laugh,
but it was a laugh,
and it meant to Christina that he
expected women to be helpless when faced
with tasks
most often assumed by men.

All of which, of course, only made her feel worse.
Being a woman didn’t
excuse her from assuming the
responsibilities inherent to the operation of an
automobile,
blast it. If she could own one, she ought to
be able to take care
of one.

She didn’t know how to tell Martin so without
deepening the gaping
wound that had been gouged
open between them yesterday.

She supposed it had been foolish of her to believe
she could establish
and maintain a close personal relationship
with Martin Tafft. She was, after
all, a
Mayhew, and Mayhews were special. Or maybe they
were just weird.
Christina had to admit to feeling
more weird than special most of the
time.

Her grandmother’s smug attitude didn’t go far toward
improving
Christina’s mood. Gran sat beside her in the
Runabout, her hands propped on
her cane, a supercilious
smirk on her face. Gran enjoyed being
disliked.
Gran liked being arrested. She wore her arrest
record
like a
badge of honor, as if it proved she was doing her
part for the
advancement of women’s causes.

And she was, the poisonous old thing. With a deep,
heartfelt sigh,
Christina entertained the craven wish
that she belonged to another family. A
normal one.
One whose members assumed roles the world considered
natural. One that
didn’t expect its female
members to be different from
nine
ty
-nine percent of
their sisters on this green
earth.