Geek Romance: Stories of Love Amidst the Oddballs

by Grayson, Kristine

  “Promised what?” Jack asked as the door closed.

  “That I’d develop the rest of the photographs,” Roz said.

  Jack leaned forward and kissed her. “Roz, sweetie,” he said when he was finished, “you really are the brilliant one in this relationship.”

  Yet that comment didn’t make her feel brilliant. Jack was still up to something, and she didn’t know what that something was.

  ***

  When she finally got to their upstairs apartment, tired, aching and stinking of chemical washes, Jack was waiting for her in the living room.

  Naked.

  “Jack, I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I’m a bit annoyed at you. This is not the time—”

  “Baby, I had a naked girl on my lap, breasts shoved in my face, and you were watching the entire time. Besides, that old biddy could have shut us down and instead, she made us rich. Any of those things would have excited me, but all three together….” He pulled her close. “This, my love, is an opportunity you do not want to pass up.”

  He kissed her, and she leaned into him, as she always did. He was right; the afternoon had been oddly erotic. She had just forgotten about it in her haste to develop those photographs.

  It had always been this way with them—from the moment she saw him, she had wanted him, even though she had not understood the feelings at the time. She had eloped with him, and learned that instead of growing weaker, that pull had grown stronger.

  Afterwards, they lay on the quilt on top of their bed, spent and exhausted. Roz had no idea how they’d made it to the bed, only that they had ended up there.

  Jack had been right. This had been an opportunity she would have regretted missing.

  “Who would have thought,” Jack said, his head tilted back, eyes closed, “that Norma Trager would have had five hundred dollars in gold on her person?”

  Roz blinked.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who carried that much money with them. Do you think she knew what Emmeline was about and planned to pay us off? Maybe she had more money. Maybe I settled too soon.”

  “Norma Trager?” Roz asked.

  “Oh, yes. She probably has more than she needs. After all—”

  “Norma Trager?” Roz’s voice rose. “You knew her name?”

  Jack propped himself on one elbow. “Didn’t you recognize her? You’re the one who specializes in the gossip columns.”

  He was lying. She could always tell when he was lying. His voice smoothed out and he got a slick little smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

  “No,” Roz said. “I didn’t recognize her, and neither did you. You knew who Emmeline was before she came into the studio. In fact, you planned this little scam, didn’t you?”

  “Roz, I would never plan anything without you.”

  Another lie, as they both knew. “This time you were scamming me, weren’t you?”

  He sat up. “Roz, it’s not like that.”

  “Oh?” she said. “Then why didn’t you tell me in advance?”

  He slipped off the bed, moving out of her reach.

  Roz pulled the quilt around her and took a deep breath. “All right,” she said. “Tell me everything, so I know just how much trouble we’re in.”

  “We’re not in trouble,” Jack said as he put his clothes back on. He wasn’t looking at Roz, and she knew which part of the sentence he had left out.

  They weren’t in trouble yet. But they would be. Roz wasn’t sure how, but she knew they would be.

  He didn’t say anything.

  Roz sighed. “Damn,” she said. “Now I’m going to have to destroy a whole day’s work. You could’ve told me before I saved the plates.”

  “Don’t destroy them,” Jack said.

  Emmeline had asked her not to destroy all of the wet plates either. Finally Roz was getting to the heart of the matter.

  “Why not?” Roz asked. “We can’t sell them. Norma Trager bought your silence for five hundred pieces of gold.”

  “She didn’t say we couldn’t sell them.” He looked innocent. “She just said we couldn’t talk about them.”

  That was true. Norma Trager had said that, thinking all of the portraits of her daughter were destroyed.

  “What’s the scam, Jack? Tell me now or I swear, I’ll find that little con artist and have her tell me herself.”

  “No.” He looked even more panicked at that thought. “Roz, believe me, this is a good thing.”

  She stood and went into the living room in search of her dress. This was not a conversation to have naked.

  “I do not believe,” she said as she picked up her shift, “that anything you call a good thing is, indeed, a good thing.”

  “Please, Roz.”

  She slipped on the shift and dropped the quilt, then grabbed her dress. It was fine, although the buttons from the waist down had fallen off. She was lucky she hadn’t stepped on any of them.

  “Roz.” He had come into the living room. His pants were buttoned, but he still hadn’t put on a shirt. His flat and muscular chest, lightly dusted with hair, made her want to touch him again.

  She turned her back on him and fingered the ruined dress.

  “All right,” he said. “I met Emmeline a few days ago—”

  “Oh?”

  “Don’t start, Roz. You know I don’t do that sort of thing.”

  She brought the dress up to her face to hide her smile. It was hard to be mad with him when he was being sincere.

  “Anyway,” he said, “she knew I was a photographer. She waited for me outside. She asked me if I took artistic photographs.”

  The girl had studied her subject. Roz picked up her stockings and her shoes, which had toppled together like drunken sailors.

  “I told her I did. Then she asked me if I knew of Robert Millard. Well, who hasn’t heard of Robert Millard, I said. She gave me a strange little smile and said that he was her father.”

  Roz set her shoes, stockings and ruined dress on the sofa, and walked past Jack into the bedroom. She made sure she didn’t brush against him. If she had, she would have had to touch him, and at this moment, that would have been wrong. He had to think she was mad at him.

  Jack turned and watched her, arms crossed, his muscles standing out in sharp relief against his naked skin. “I laughed. I said everybody knows that Millard has five sons and no daughters.”

  Roz raised her eyebrows. If Jack knew it, then indeed, everyone knew it. Jack was right; usually she was the one who read the gossip rags. He ignored them.

  Although, she supposed, he knew about Robert Millard because of his wealth. Jack always knew who the richest and most influential people were in any town.

  “She nodded. She said that her mother had been his mistress and when she got older, he cast her off like an old shoe. They still got money from him, but she wanted love.”

  “Love?” Roz grabbed her dove gray day dress out of the closet. “She expects love from her father because she poses in the nude? This is one sick family, Jack.”

  “She gave up on love a long time ago,” Jack said. “She really just wanted him to acknowledge that she was his daughter. She figured that if she forced the issue, he’d have to acknowledge her.”

  “She was going to blackmail him?” Roz asked.

  “I think so. Acknowledge me or I’ll tell everyone who I am.” He waved a hand. “Or maybe she’s just going to ask him for money. I don’t know.”

  Roz shook her head. People did not know how to run a proper scam any more. “She’s impulsive and dumb. This plan is guaranteed to get him to ignore her. Why would he acknowledge a daughter who acts like that?”

  “That’s why she wants me to sell the remaining photographs. I’m her leverage,” Jack said. “You did make one more portrait, right?”

  “Yes.” Roz slipped the dress over her head, then mentally cursed the choice. It buttoned in back.

  Jack came over to help her. His deft fingers brushed her shift.

  “Well, I’m s
upposed to make sure he gets a photograph and knows who it is.”

  Roz slapped his hand away. “You won’t do any such thing.”

  She turned. He was frowning at her.

  “Some day you’re going to have to acknowledge that I’m the brains of this operation,” she said. “If you go in there with that portrait, he’ll have you arrested on some kind of charge. Pandering or something. Forcing women into prostitution. You can’t do her dirty work.”

  “Well, she can’t,” he said. “He won’t even let her near his bank. She’s tried. He’s thrown her out before.”

  In spite of herself, Roz was thinking about this. Dammit, Jack always did this to her. He gave her a puzzle and, if she caught him in time, she got to solve it in ways that benefited both of them.

  “Jack,” she said, turning her back on him again so that he could finish buttoning her. “How do you feel about the City of Kansas?”

  “It’s a nice city.” He’d been saying that from the beginning. But he never sounded thrilled. Jack was a rover. He had only settled because of her and her studio.

  “Would you be broken-hearted if we left?”

  “I always want to be with you, Roz.” He patted her back, his signal that he was done buttoning her up.

  “I mean it.” She turned again, and found herself trapped between his arms. “What if we left Missouri altogether?”

  “And go where?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. New Orleans, maybe. We have a lot of artistic photographs that we haven’t sold. And if we pack up our equipment, we might be able to start anew somewhere else.”

  His eyes lit up. “But you like it here.”

  “Not really,” she said. “The locals aren’t that interesting. Everyone else is just passing through. Besides, I’m getting tired of taking portraits of matrons and their broods. I’m not cut out for the working life.”

  “I could have told you that, babe,” he said, brushing her lips with his.

  “I had to learn it for myself,” she said.

  “I trust you have a new plan?”

  “No,” she said, “but I’ll have one soon.”

  ***

  Roz wasn’t a crusader, and she really hadn’t liked Norma Trager. The woman pretended at morality when in reality she had been some man’s mistress and borne him a child out of wedlock. Of course, Roz might have misjudged her. A woman usually didn’t want her daughter to make the same mistakes she did—and Emmeline Trager was on the road to making if not the same mistakes, then some that were even worse.

  But there was one thing that Roz really liked in a man and it was the one thing that Jack had. Loyalty. He loved her, he respected her, and even though his eye wandered, his heart didn’t. She was the center of his life.

  As it should be.

  Obviously, Richard Millard had no center to his life. Casting off a mistress was one thing (and not really one that Roz approved of), but casting off a child was another thing altogether.

  If Roz could get him to acknowledge his daughter, then her work was done. If she made a small profit in the bargain, she wouldn’t complain.

  So that was how she found herself outside the First Pioneer Bank of Missouri, wearing a new gray morning dress and a hated corset beneath it. Her hair was in a bun at the back of her skull, and that bun was hidden beneath a black lace net. She wore gray gloves on her hands and gray boots on her feet.

  She looked as prim and proper as she could, considering that inside the thick embroidered bag she carried was a portrait of Emmeline Trager in the nude—a portrait that Roz had carefully constructed to be as…artistic as possible.

  She took a deep breath, knowing that anyone watching would think her nervous. What she was trying to do was work herself into a state and time her blush so that she looked angrier and more grief stricken than she was.

  Since the third man in a row held the large oak door open for her, Roz decided it was time to go inside. She nodded at the man, thanked him in a tone that perfectly imitated Norma Trager’s sounds of indignation, as she stalked through the door.

  Men seemed to have a finely tuned sense of when to avoid a woman. The bank’s customers moved out of her way as if she were Moses and they were the Red Sea. The town’s newspaper editor watched her from his position near the polished table. Two cattle ranchers hurried out the door. A third settled into a chair near the back as if getting ready to watch a show.

  She clutched the embroidered bag to her chest and approached one of the gilded cages. The teller leaned backwards as if he could avoid her

  “I would like to see Robert Millard,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” the teller said. “Mr. Millard sees people only by appointment.”

  Behind the teller, another man—this one rotund and officious—watched with ill-disguised interest.

  “He’ll see me,” Roz said.

  “Ma’am—”

  “Tell him it’s about his daughter.” She said that last loud enough for the entire bank to hear it.

  The teller frowned at her and was about to tell her what everyone knew: that Mr. Millard didn’t have a daughter. But the officious man in the back understood a problem when he saw it.

  “Come with me, ma’am,” he said as he let himself out of the cage.

  He led her through a carpeted hallway, past oak doorways with names emblazoned in gold letters. She had to work to keep the smile off her face; the buzz of conversation behind her convinced her that the first part of her ploy worked. The bank’s customers hadn’t been aware that Millard had a daughter, but they were now. Even if they thought the daughter was hers.

  The man stopped at the last door, held up a finger, then disappeared inside the room. She heard a faint shout, a word that most men would have considered imprudent when spoken around a lady (fortunately for Millard, she was no lady) and then the officious man appeared again.

  “He’ll see you now.”

  No announcing of her name, no asking of her name. Just a simple invitation inside. The officious man held the door for her, then left the room so quickly that she wouldn’t have been surprised to see a foot on his nether regions, propelling him forward.

  The man behind the desk was standing. He was tall and imposing, with a shock of gray hair and bushy gray eyebrows. He glowered at her and she resisted the urge to grin at him. But she had a role to play.

  “Mr. Millard?” Again, she used the tone she had learned from his former mistress. Deep, formidable, and disapproving.

  “What is this about?”

  “Mr. Millard,” she said, “my name is Rosalind Donnelly. My husband owns the photography studio on A Street.”

  “I have never been to that studio,” Millard said, making it very clear what he thought of photography and her Irish last name.

  “No, sir, you haven’t, but your daughter has.”

  “I don’t have a daughter.”

  There it was. The hypocrisy she had been hoping to avoid. She felt the outrage she had been pretending only a moment before. Roz reached into her bag, grabbed the portrait, which she had had the forethought to frame and slammed it on his desk.

  “My husband tells me this is your daughter. Is that true?”

  Millard looked down and his face flamed red. “Where did you get this?”

  “I found my husband developing it.” She crossed her arms. “Mr. Millard, we both understand that men will be men, particularly when provoked. I want you to keep your daughter away from my husband. If you do not, I’m sure I can find other portraits of her. My husband said she was quite eager to be photographed—as he puts it—artistically.”

  Millard grew redder as she spoke. Sweat ran down the side of his face. He continued to stare at the portrait as if he couldn’t believe it existed.

  “My husband is a God-fearing man, Mr. Millard. He has sworn off this practice before. It is the reason we moved to the City of Kansas which, we were assured, was a moral and decent place to make our home. Instead, we discover that young women
prefer to be photographed in a state of undress.”

  Millard’s mouth worked, but he said nothing.

  “I have it on good authority that your daughter approached my husband. He did not approach her. She has led him back down a path of sin, which is between him and his God. But between you and me, Mr. Millard, is this young woman yours? Because if she is—”

  “What do you want?” He forced the words out as he reached for the portrait and turned it over.

  “Only your assurance that this girl will not venture near our studio again.” Roz took a step forward, looming close to him, as his former mistress had done to Jack. “You do have control of your daughter, do you not?”

  “She, um. She…” He reached into his breast pocket, removed a carefully folded linen handkerchief, and dabbed at his forehead. “She lives with her mother.”

  Roz froze as if she were in shock. “You and your wife no longer share a home?”

  “My wife and I are quite happily—blast, woman! You’ve put me in a delicate position.”

  Roz’s chin went up. Her entire body straightened and she forced the flush into her own face. “Are you telling me, sir, that your daughter is illegitimate?”

  Maybe Roz had pushed that statement too far. But she couldn’t take it back. Besides, all the morally righteous women she’d ever met were given to melodramatic turns of phrase.

  “Ma’am, it was a youthful indiscretion and she—”

  “Are you telling me you have had no hand in raising that child?”

  “My wife knows nothing of her,” he said and she could actually hear pleading in his voice.

  “Well, I can assure you, Mr. Millard, that will change.” Roz grabbed the portrait. She made her hand shake. “This girl is a menace to decent society. Someone must control her before she does even more damage.”

  She shoved the portrait into the bag and headed toward the door. He wasn’t stopping her.

  Dammit. He was supposed to stop her. Now what was she going to do? She couldn’t very well go back to the studio. Jack had sold it just that morning.

  “What do you expect me to do?” Millard’s voice was soft. She almost didn’t hear it.