“ ‘Commend me to my kind lord,’ ” she said, her voice soft but pitched to carry perfectly to the very last row of the theater. “ ‘O, farewell.’ ”
She missed her best line, he thought, but then, her head lolled toward the seats, her eyes looked straight into his, and he realized he’d been mistaken.
“ ‘A guiltless death I die,’ ” she rasped, and the words hit him with the impact of a blow to the chest.
She hadn’t forgotten anything. She’d deliberately put Desdemona’s best line at the last, so that she could be looking at him, rather than at her fellow actor, when she made the heroine’s protestation of innocence her own.
He watched as her face relaxed, and her eyes closed, and in the moment of Desdemona’s death, she looked so lovely and so without guilt that he suddenly wanted to believe that last night in Paris had all been some horrible mistake.
But his rational mind knew no mistake was possible. Lola, wearing the sheer, intimate clothing a woman only donned for a lover, moving to sit beside Henry on the settee, her words in the face of his marriage proposal so clear and uncompromising that there had been no room for doubt.
Sorry, but Henry has made me a better offer.
A glimmer of the pain he’d felt that night, pain so long suppressed that he’d almost forgotten it, came roaring back with sudden force, violent enough that he jerked in his seat.
He wanted to tell her to go to hell and take Henry’s absurd notions of partnership with her. He wanted to say that, partner or not, he would never, ever, allow her to gain a part in any play he produced.
But it was too late for that.
He thought you would be fair.
Henry, it seemed, had known him better than he knew himself. Lola had been good today, damn it all, too good to be dismissed when the only reason for it would be that she’d wronged him years ago.
“Well, Denys,” Jacob murmured beside him, sounding far too pleased with himself. “I’m not sure Miss Valentine performed quite as you expected.”
Denys refused to be drawn. “Thank you, Miss Valentine,” he called to her as he gave the man beside him an impatient glance. “You may wait backstage with the others. Next, please?”
He beckoned to the rather reedy-looking young man waiting at the edge of the stage, but he wasn’t able to avoid offering an opinion of Lola’s audition quite as easily as he’d hoped.
“Denys?” Jacob prompted, when he said nothing. “Say something, man. What did you think of Miss Valentine’s performance?”
Denys sighed, grim resignation settling over him.
“I think,” he muttered, studying the seductive sway of Lola’s hips as she walked off the stage, “my life just became much more complicated.”
Chapter 6
Lola hadn’t been required to formally audition for a part in years, and as she lingered in the reception room backstage with her fellow actors, waiting to hear the final casting call, it came home to her just how nerve-racking the process was.
The success of her show in New York had ended the need for auditions, and the only readings she’d done had been for tutors or for Henry in the sitting room of her New York apartment, and any assessments they gave of her work, while keenly critical, had always been offered with suggestions how to improve.
Reading for Jacob Roth, with Denys beside him and dozens of curious peers watching from the wings, was a whole different matter, and she didn’t have a clue as to the caliber of her audition.
Thankfully, she hadn’t forgotten her lines or tripped over her skirt, or stuttered over Shakespeare’s tricky dialogue. But now, surrounded by actors probably far more experienced than she, those facts did not seem very reassuring.
Voices swirled around her, engaged in the usual self-deprecating conversation punctuated by nervous laughter, as actors greeted each other and speculated about their chances, but Lola did not attempt to join in.
After her disastrous performance in A Doll’s House, spiteful things had been said behind her back, lurid accounts of her affair with Denys had hit the scandal sheets, and within days, London’s theater coterie was treating her like a plague contagion, sure she was only in the play because it had been financed by her lover. And why shouldn’t they have thought it? It was the truth.
Don’t worry, Denys had said. I’ll take care of you.
He’d meant to console and reassure her, but Lola could still remember lying in bed with him at the house he’d leased for her in St. John’s Wood, those words echoing through her brain and a sick feeling knotting her guts as she realized just what she had become.
I’ll take care of you.
She’d never wanted that, but that was where she’d ended up, becoming a kept woman without even realizing it. Little by little, with every gift he’d given her that she couldn’t bear to give back and every offer to help her that she couldn’t seem to refuse, with every touch of his hand and kiss of his mouth, she’d belonged a bit less to herself and a bit more to him. And with her acting career over before it had really begun, she’d lain in his arms that last afternoon in London and wondered if being a kept woman was the inevitable path for a girl like her.
She had fought so hard to avoid that fate. Men had been pursuing her from the time she was old enough for a corset, and though her mother had gone back to her high-society set in Baltimore long before then, leaving Lola and her father far behind, Lola hadn’t needed a mother to explain the facts of life, not about men. Somehow, she’d always known that the sort of pursuit most men had in mind didn’t involve a church, a vow, and love everlasting.
Before Denys, she’d given in only once, back in New York the winter she was seventeen, and the result of her very brief, very stupid liaison with handsome man-about-town Robert Delacourt had been a hard, humiliating confirmation of the first lesson every girl on the boards had to learn: stage-door johnnies don’t marry dancing girls.
After Robert, she’d taken what little cash she had and moved to Paris, where she’d been quite happy to keep the stage-door johnnies at arm’s length. It had been easy as pie to refuse the dinners, the champagne, and the jewels, for she knew all those gifts came at a price.
But then, Denys had come along, with his affable charm, his dark good looks, and—most of all—his deep, genuine tenderness. Tenderness was something she’d had little of in her life, and her parched soul had taken it in the way a wilting plant took up water, and eighteen months later, she had somehow become what she’d promised herself she would never be: a kept woman.
She had also become a danger to Denys’s future. Earl Conyers had called at the house in St. John’s Wood, waved his checkbook in her face, and suggested with thinly veiled contempt that she should leave London before he was forced to disinherit his son.
She’d torn up the draft of a thousand pounds Conyers had written and thrown the shreds in his face, but she’d also known she could not allow Denys to keep supporting her. She’d returned to Paris, secured a position at yet another Montmartre establishment, and tried to accept the brutal reality that she’d be singing and dancing in the cabarets until her looks went and her legs gave out and the smoke of men’s cigars destroyed her voice.
And then Henry had come, arriving at her dressing-room door with champagne—not, he’d assured her at once, as any sort of romantic overture, but in celebration. Denys, he explained, was coming from England to make her an offer of marriage.
She could still remember what she’d felt in that moment—the burst of keen, clear joy at the prospect of marrying Denys, and the cold, harsh reality that had at once overshadowed it.
“So you’re here to congratulate me?” she’d asked, shoving down girlish idiocies. “That’s a bit premature, isn’t it?”
“Most women would be chomping at the bit to marry a lord. You don’t seem quite so eager.” He gave her a shrewd glance she feared saw far too much. “But then, you’re an unusual woman.”
“What is your real reason for coming here?”
Henry smiled
, the knowing smile of a man of the world. “I’m here to give you an alternative to saying yes.”
“What makes you think I’d want an alternative?”
“Call it a guess. You’ve always impressed me as a sensible girl, tough, practical, and hardheaded.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Conyers knows I’m here. He also knows Denys’s intention to make an honest woman of you. They had quite the epic battle about it yesterday. It was especially lurid, I understand, since Conyers had just discovered how Denys financed A Doll’s House.”
Lola frowned, uncomprehending. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t you know? He mortgaged his estate, Arcady, the one his father bequeathed to him when he came of age.”
Oh, Denys, she thought, heartsick, what have you done?
“Needless to say,” Henry went on, “the earl doesn’t much fancy the idea of you as his daughter-in-law.”
“So you’re here to try bribing me on his behalf?” She made a sound of derision. “When will he accept that I won’t take his money to give Denys up?”
“He already has, which is why I’m not here to offer it. And forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but it seems that you already have given Denys up. Otherwise . . .” He glanced around the dressing room. “You wouldn’t be working here.”
She didn’t much like being so transparent to a man she barely knew, but she gave a nonchalant shrug. “When I left London, I didn’t know a ring was in the offing.”
“If you had known, would you have stayed?”
“I don’t know,” she said truthfully.
“And if you were to marry Denys, could you make him happy?”
She felt cold suddenly, fear brushing over her the same way the chill winds of autumn brushed aside the languid, sultry days of summer. She didn’t reply to Henry’s question, but she didn’t have to. They both knew the answer.
Viscount Somerton, the son and heir of Earl Conyers, being happily married to a cabaret dancer was a glorious and impossible fantasy, akin to a sailor marrying a mermaid, or a butcher from Kansas City marrying a society girl from Baltimore by mail-order proxy. The chance of happiness for such unions was precisely nil. And yet . . . and yet . . .
Yearning welled up within her.
“I have to change,” she said, and started to close the door, but Henry flattened a palm against the door to stop her.
“May I wait?”
A man didn’t come into a girl’s dressing room, especially with champagne, unless he was an intimate acquaintance or she wanted him to become one. On the other hand, Henry Latham was a powerful man in theater circles, not one to be snubbed lightly.
“I’m not here to seduce you,” he said as she hesitated, “or to throw Conyers’s money in your face. I have an entirely different sort of offer to make. We can talk about it while you change.”
She wanted out of her costume. She was tired and sweaty, and her ribs ached, as they always did after dancing in a tight corset. Abruptly, she turned away. “Do as you like.”
Leaving him in the doorway, she crossed the room and stepped behind the dressing screen. Henry’s voice floated to her over the top as she slipped out of her dancing shoes.
“Shall I tell you what I have in mind?”
She was skeptical, but it never did any harm to listen. “Sure,” she answered, bending down to untie her garters and roll off the flesh-colored stockings that had helped make Lola Valentine so wickedly notorious. “Why not?”
“I want you to come with me to New York. As I said, this isn’t a romantic offer. I think you have enormous talent, and I can make you a star.”
She laughed, a cynical sound forged from years on the boards. How many times had men said those exact words to her? Still, Henry Latham at least had the bona fides to make such a claim credible. “Don’t you live in London?” she asked as she unhooked the bodice of her costume and slid the dress down. It landed in a pouf at her feet.
“Yes, but I’ve decided to return home. Come with me, and I’ll give you your own show and make you famous. And I’ll pay you a generous percentage, far more than you’re getting here.”
Lola peeked around the side of the dressing screen. “I’m not sure I want to go back to New York. I’ve . . . danced there already.”
“What do you want?”
She ducked back behind the screen and hung her dress on one of the pegs on the wall and didn’t answer.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he said, as she began loosening her corset laces. “I can guess. You want to be an actress.”
Lola paused, her arms falling to her sides.
“You want to thrill audiences, hold them spellbound. You want to hear them gasp and sigh, and you want to know they’ll be talking about you long after show is over and the lights are out. You want what all performers want. You want to be loved.”
Was he mocking her? She couldn’t tell. “That’s not it,” she answered as she unhooked her corset busk. “I already have all that. Men love watching Lola Valentine strut around, kicking off hats with her foot and singing bawdy songs.” She could hear the tinge of bitterness in her voice as she spoke. “Men love seeing Lola pout her lips and show off her legs and shimmy her bosom. They adore Lola. Were you in the audience tonight? Three curtain calls. Lola’s famous here in Montmartre. Or, maybe I should say she’s notorious.”
“Ah, now we’re getting the truth,” he murmured. “You want to act because you want to be taken seriously. You want respect.”
She gave a harsh laugh. “Well, if that’s what I want, I’m doomed to disappointment.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Did you read the reviews for A Doll’s House?” she asked as she hung her corset over the top of the screen and began stripping out of her sweaty underclothes. “According to the Times, my performance was ‘reminiscent of a drunken butterfly, brilliantly colorful, but also awkward, graceless, and infinitely pathetic.’ ”
“You don’t have to quote your reviews, honey. I read them. I also saw the play.” He paused. “Denys thought you could act.”
“Denys is . . .” She paused and swallowed painfully. “Blinded by passion.”
“I’m not, and I agree with him.”
The words were like lighting a match to a stick of dynamite. “Don’t,” she ordered fiercely, peeking around the screen again to glare at him through narrowed eyes. “Don’t butter me up, Mr. Latham, and tell me what you think I want to hear. It won’t get me to come to New York with you.”
“What about training? Would that persuade you?”
“Training?” Intrigued, she started to step out from behind the screen but stopped just in time, remembering she was naked. “What do you mean? What kind of training?”
“Truly good acting isn’t something where you just step out onto a stage and start giving brilliant performances. It takes rigorous training. It takes practice and criticism and direction. You, I assume, haven’t had much of that.”
“I haven’t had any of that. Well, not until I started rehearsals for A Doll’s House.”
“So I’ll train you. I’ll pay for lessons. You can perform for me, and I’ll critique you, offer direction. I was quite an actor in my day, you know. I’ll see you learn your craft the right way. And when I think you’re ready to give drama another try, I’ll back a serious play for you. I’ll even make it Shakespeare. As far as serious acting goes, he’s the top of the tree. And if you’re good, I’ll back your career. Maybe we’ll even open our own theater in New York, and you can put on your own plays.”
“This is all really nice of you.” She paused, tilting her head as she looked at him. “And what do you get?”
“At least three years of Lola Valentine performing her one-woman show in Madison Square.”
Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “And that’s all?”
“I don’t want to sleep with you, honey,” he said bluntly. “I’m getting too old for girls like you. I’ve got a mistress already, one my o
wn age who suits me just fine. I met her here, but she lives in New York. That’s why I’m going back.”
Lola ducked back behind the screen, excitement rising inside her like fireworks. To learn the craft, to do it properly, to perform Shakespeare. To be more than just a great pair of legs and a sultry voice. To be respected for her work rather than ogled for her body.
She wanted that. Lola took a deep breath. She wanted it so badly, she ached. And yet . . .
What about Denys?
Agonized, Lola stifled a groan and lifted her head to stare at the garments on hooks before her: the austere dress of plum velvet she preferred to wear for supper after shows, the spangled silver dance costume she’d don tomorrow night, the delicate, luxurious peignoir of white silk chiffon that she liked to wear here in her dressing room while applying and removing her cosmetics. These gowns were the tight compartments of her dancer’s life. But she couldn’t dance forever. Eight years, maybe ten, and her body would start to give out. What would happen to her then? If she didn’t take Latham up on his offer, what other choices would she have?
Denys, a little voice whispered. If you married him, he’d take care of you.
But at what cost? He’d already alienated his family because of her. Hell, he’d mortgaged his estate. And those were nothing compared to the sacrifices he’d have to make if he married her.
His family would never accept the match. The earl was the only one who had ever met her, but she was aware that all of them loathed her to the core and thought her a gold-digging tramp. If Denys married her, Conyers would surely follow through with his threat and disown his son.
Society wouldn’t accept the marriage, either. They’d freeze her out, and, eventually, Denys as well. His titled friends, pressured by their families, would turn on him, too. Nick, Jack, James, Stuart—they all liked her well enough when she was kicking up her legs and making them laugh, but surely not as Denys’s wife. Losing their friendship, losing his family, being ostracized and disgraced—these sacrifices would break him apart.
No Mistress of Mine Page 7