by Carole Howey
Chapter Four
Missy wondered, staring around the fabulous ballroom at Filson's, how a roomful of richly attired women and men could be more intimidating to her than a corral of restless, unbroken stallions. These were society's elite, not only from Louisville, but from all over the country. The women seemed to wear their clothing like weapons. She stayed as close to a large potted palm in an alcove as she could without risking the impression that she was actually hiding.
Off to her right, she spied Allyn. Mrs. Joshua Manners chatted in an easy way with four women, each of whom wore satin gowns that looked like blue steel bayonets. The women had sharp, appraising looks on their otherwise lovely faces. Nearby, Joshua carried on a serious but spirited conversation with another gentleman and a lady Missy took to be the man's wife. She was wearing an exquisite, boldly striped gown of black and gold, giving her the appearance of a predatory jungle creature. And not far away, but attracting an almost vulgar amount of male attention, was a young woman clad in a velvet dream the exact shade of the burgundy wine Joshua had bade her sip for fortification before they'd left for Filson's.
The woman in red was young. She possessed the face of a lovely child, with a complexion that put fresh cream to shame. A fair-haired Persephone she was, and her azure eyes sparkled with youth and spirit. Missy was sure every man present felt her reckless power. The woman's smile was constant yet ever changing. She addressed each gentleman attending her as if he were a secret lover with whom she shared a most intimate confidence, a promise her womanly form appeared more than capable of delivering.
Missy had heard the expression ''holding court" somewhere, although she could not recall the association. Watching the breathtaking, unapologetically sensual woman cast her net about a wide sea of admirers, Missy realized at last what the phrase meant, for that was exactly what was happening before her eyes. She respected the woman's ability to command attention even as she felt a spasm of envy. Never in her life had she herself attracted those kinds of looks, even from so much as a single man, and here was this woman, little more than a child by the look of her, reigning over half a roomful of them.
Missy forced her chin up an inch: the goddess in wine red velvet probably did not know a Morgan from a mustang. She was about to turn away from the spectacle when the crowd of men suddenly parted, as if Moses stood upon the far bank with his staff held high. It was then that she saw there was a man on the woman's arm.
Flynn Muldaur.
His wheat-colored curls were trained back, giving her a clear view of the stark lines of his face. She remembered him as an angel, but he looked more like a suave Satan this evening, particularly with the young goddess on his arm. He was smiling, but Missy sensed a guarded quality about his expression, as if he knew he could not afford to unleash the fullness of his pleasure or pain. His elegant evening clothes were starched and flawless. They fit him as if his tall, lean form had been created by God for no other purpose than to show them off. Staring at him, Missy was certain that he would appear elegant even in rags.
He looked like the kind of man mothers warned their daughters about. The kind who never gave women like Missy Cannon a second look, unless possibly for amusement.
She shuddered.
A painful eternity passed in an instant. Flynn Muldaur's gaze met hers, and she saw in it a gleam of recognition that called to mind every shameful event of the afternoon in excruciating detail. Missy was helpless to do anything but watch as Muldaur murmured something to the paragon of feminine perfection on his arm, all the while keeping his gaze fixed on Missy as if he meant to hold a nail steady for hammering.
Muldaur's companion nodded without so much as a suggestion of petulance and withdrew her arm from his in a graceful, fluid motion, leaving him alone. A scant ten feet away, Muldaur took two steps toward her, obviously intent on exchanging words with her.
Missy panicked. Her legs played her false, and retreat was impossible. Desperate, she searched the room, hoping to attract either Allyn's or Joshua's attention so she would not be left to confront the devilish angel unprotected, or so her tongue would not make a further shambles of what her deportment had already wrecked.
But it was too late.” Miss Cannon."
Her name sounded like celestial music in his deep, lilting baritone. . . . God, she was about to make a public spectacle of herself over a man she did not even know, a man who no doubt already thought her quite the fool. She gathered her wits and forced her stare upward from his stiff collar to his hopelessly wonderful eyes. Her voice caught in her throat. He offered a slight, but not teasing, smile that hinted he was aware of her discomfiture.
"We were not formally introduced this afternoon," Muldaur continued, his tone smooth as a lazy river on a sultry summer afternoon. "But I expect we were both too, ah, indisposed for that to be of importance at the time. My name is Flynn Muldaur. Is your shoulder better?"
Missy's heart felt as if Muldaur had strapped tight metal restraints around it that prevented it from beating as it should. A spear of heat pierced her neck, and she realized that she was looking at his cummerbund. She did not even try to speak.
I suggest you stay away from her. Joshua's icy warning echoed in her memory.
"What a stupid question." Flynn Muldaur snapped his gloved fingers as if incensed at his own idiocy. "Of course it's better, or you would not be here this evening."
Flynn moved closer to Missy to accommodate a lady who was attempting to pass behind him. His cologne was simple, yet seductively spicy. She could not identify it, except to know that it was nothing at all like the scent Joshua sometimes wore. It wrapped itself around her like the warmth of a down comforter . . . or the deadly gossamer of a spider's web.
"Well, I had intended to ask you to dance, but perhaps your shoulder is not up to such an endeavor. In deed, I'm amazed to find you here at all, after the injury you suffered."
He called you a damn fool at the time, and he was right. Now he's going to smile, nod, say "good evening," and return to his lady in red, Missy thought. And you will never see him again. Tears of disappointment threaded her eyelashes.
She had to speak to him, or she knew she would regret it for the rest of her life. Which might not be that long if, as she half expected, she expired from mortification right here in front of him.
"I might not be here at all, had you not come to my aid."
That had not been nearly so difficult as she'd imagined. Encouraged, even emboldened, she dared to continue. "As I recall, you yourself suffered an injury on my behalf. How is your head?"
She had the perfect excuse to look at his face again, and was able to keep her blush at bay by telling herself she was merely inspecting the wound for which she was indirectly responsible. Flynn Muldaur pressed his lips together in a rueful but pleasant expression and glanced about the crowded ballroom.
"Oh, it's fine," he told her, seeming reluctant to elaborate. "There's but a small bump. Just here." He caught her fingers and began to raise them to his head.
"Oh, but of course you're wearing gloves. You'll never even feel it. Here."
As if it were the most natural thing in the world, Flynn Muldaur proceeded to strip Missy of the glove on her right hand by tugging ever so gently on the ends of the fingers. Missy felt the soft kid slide away from her hand and her arm. Oh dear, my calluses! She remembered the state of her work-worn hands with renewed horror. But he did not seem to notice. In any case, the wonder of being touched by Flynn Muldaur quickly seduced her into a dreamy, bewitched condition, as if it were not her glove he was stripping from her, but her shift.
Skin brushed skin. He took hold of her bared fingers with his and Missy watched in mesmerized silence as Flynn Muldaur raised her hand until the pads of her fingertips grazed a swelling at his hairline, above his left ear. "Feel it?"
She swallowed hard. She felt it. His honey-colored hair was soft as a baby's, and she found she wanted to play in it, to explore it more fully with her fingers and her hands.
"Flynn, cheri, you are making a spectacle." The girl-woman's voice was not so much annoyed as it was playful. Without turning around, Missy knew it was the gorgeous creature in the red velvet extravaganza. Instantly she felt dowdy and awkward. She pulled her hand away from Muldaur's and fumbled to cram her fingers back into her glove.
"But I enjoy making a spectacle, Antoinette; you know that." Muldaur was convivial. Missy envied him and his escort their poise. She began to wish again for Allyn or Joshua, or both, to arrive and save her from this increasingly uncomfortable situation.
"Miss Cannon, may I present my niece, Miss Antoinette Deauville? Her mother has charged me with her care here in Louisville, and I fear I am not the most scrupulous chaperon, as witnessed by the scores of gentlemen at her feet."
His niece? Missy frowned. Accepting Miss Deauville's gloved fingertips in her own in a perfunctory, ladylike gesture Allyn had taught her, Missy murmured a greeting. She found herself searching the younger woman's face for a family resemblance to the tall, handsome Muldaur. She surprised herself by finding two obvious similarities, and several more subtle ones.
Antoinette Deauville's luxuriant hair was the identical hue of sun-ripened wheat as Muldaur's, and her almond-shaped eyes were a like shade of blue, more topaz than sapphire. But that glimmer they sported, as if the world were but a trinket for their amusement, was entirely a Muldaur trait, Missy guessed. She felt more awkward by the moment.
"Ah . . . Antoinette, will you excuse us for a short while, please?" Flynn's tone became serious, although still pleasant, but he offered no further comment or explanation to his niece. Antoinette did not ask for either. She bestowed a smile on them both, and Missy noted with amazement that the expression was devoid of any condescension when it touched her.
Indeed, it was devoid of anything. As if she were made of glass.
Flynn Muldaur captured her elbow and gently guided her to one of several sets of mirrored doors that lined the vast room.
Oh. Oh dear. He's taking me aside, apart from the party, she thought, assailed by a sweet but gut-gripping panic. She knew what occurred between a man and a woman who purposely isolated themselves from the mainstream of activity; Allyn had seen to it that she was schooled on all matters politic between gentlemen and ladies at such affairs. What she could not credit was that a man, especially one so attractive as Flynn Muldaur, seemed actually to be propelling her toward just such an assignation. Thinking she should offer some protest, however halfhearted, Missy tugged away from him.
"Mr. Muldaur, we scarcely know one another. I don't think"
"That is precisely what I intend to correct," Muldaur whispered at her ear, eradicating more than a little of her doubt and nearly all of her fear as he took hold of her elbow once more. "I have studied you, Miss Can non. I learned a lot about you, and I intend that I shall learn still more."
They were the words of a man with a mission. A lover, perhaps? Missy felt her face charge with heat. I'm 27 years old, she reminded herself, sternly, even as her slippered feet followed Muldaur's guidance. I'm an incurably romantic old maid, and my imagination is making far more over this than reality warrants.
Missy found herself in a deserted, vaulted corridor, where crystal chandeliers burned a low gas flame. There was enough light to see, and to transform everything into the burnished gold of a hidden hoard of treasure. Flynn Muldaur pulled the doors closed behind him, and the levers clicked the bolt into place with a surprisingly cold sound, like the engaging of the trigger of a gun.
"Here we are," he announced breathlessly, wearing a smile she found most devastating.
Why, oh why did she think then of a predatory beast that separates its prey from the herd before closing for the kill?
She pulled herself together, no easy task, and clasped her arms about her for protection.
"Yes, here we are," she parroted. She was painfully aware of the quiet that surrounded them. She desperately wanted to fill it with something. Anything. Even idiotic babble.
"I'm sorry II mean, I'm sure I ruined your shirt this afternoon. I'd be happy to compensate you for the cost of replacing it, or for laundering. . . ."
Muldaur waved his hand, and she thought he grimaced at her blundering suggestion, but she could not maintain her gaze long enough to be certain. She fell silent, waiting for the next thing to happen, having no idea what it might be.
Muldaur did not speak right away. He stood but three feet in front of her, close enough for Missy to feel his
heat, yet far enough that she sensed an even greater, invisible distance between them. As if he were guarding a guilty secret.
Silly, romantic fool! she scolded herself with a chiding laugh.
"I beg your pardon?"
"What? Oh, I Nothing. I said nothing."
Allyn was right: she had spent far too much time alone. At home, on the ranch, she often carried on conversations with herself, sometimes even lively debates, and she never had need to concern herself about who might overhear her monologues. Missy gripped her arms until her shoulder ached again.
"Miss Cannon may I call you Melissa?" His whisper was the intimate plea of a hopeful lover.
Oh, dear. Missy felt herself falling. She clutched her arms about her, as if by so doing she could keep her heart where it belonged.
"Missy," she murmured, knowing she shouldn't.
"Missy," he echoed on a breath, sounding, to her amazement, suddenly, appealingly uncertain of himself. "And you must call me Flynn."
She dared a look at him, only to discover that he quickly looked away. Her heart did a clumsy but enthusiastic dance.
"You have a successful and very promising stud farm and ranch outside of Rapid City, South Dakota," he recited, as if telling a child a favorite bedtime tale. "And you live alone, training all of the horses yourself. You work your spread with adequate help, but you keep yourself apart, even from the people in town. It's a lonely life you've chosen, Missy Cannon. Although I sometimes wonder if perhaps it was the life that chose you."
Missy said nothing. It troubled her that this man, this stranger, no matter how attractive, had taken the time to
learn such intimate details about her life, even if only through hearsay. Even more troubling, though, was the way his plain remarks had reduced her existence to a few basic facts that, in and of themselves, were about as interesting and as colorful as old bread.
She wanted to protest his assessment. She wanted to leave him. She waited for him to say more, half dreading what painful new truths his words might reveal.
She didn't know what she wanted.
"You've been mostly alone there for three years," he told her, and in the plaintive sound of his rich baritone she felt every day of them like the turn of an old grinding wheel. "You're an attractive woman no, don't look away! and you have a lot to offer. Don't you ever wish for more out of your life?"
Her breath caught with a small sound like a hiccup. She took a step backward in response to a nameless terror that gripped her.
"Missy, I don't know what you may have heard about me," he said in a surer tone, pursing his mouth as he clasped his hands behind him and gazed at the carpet. "But not many people truly know me. I've heard it said that I'm a womanizer, that I can't be trusted, that I've made and lost more fortunes than three men could make in a lifetime. While I can't say for certain if any of that's true, I do know that I've had my share of luck, bad and good, in my life. And you know from experience, I'm sure, that talk is, more often than not, just talk.
"As you can see, I'm not a young man. I'm not old, either, but I'm sure I have a good deal more experience than you, in a lot of things. A lot of ways. Ways you would perhaps blush to think of."
Missy's panic redoubled. This was sounding more and more like a seduction, and she was utterly out of her element. Why, she'd never so much as been kissed! Yet here was handsome, appealingly earnest Flynn Muldaur, whom she'd never seen before this afternoon, about to declare himself to her. And all she'd done was throw up on hi
s shirt!
"I'm not doing this very well," he admitted. He sounded more than a little awkward, which might have been an act on his part, but it nevertheless made her warm to him all the more. "It's been a very long time since II mean"
Flynn made a sound of disgust and turned away from her, shaking his head. Despite her terror and her confusion, Missy wanted to hear the words he was having such difficulty uttering. She'd never put much credence in the notion of love at first sight, but she'd known the instant she saw him in the stable, when he'd called her a damn fool, that she could easily lose her heart to this man. Could he was it possible that he had felt those same strong feelings and was even now struggling to understand them himself? An experienced man of the world like Flynn Muldaur? She dared not hope so much, yet her mouth went dry at the possibility.
"What, Flynn?" She found her voice at the bottom of some deep place where it had been hiding. There was a distant roaring in her ears, as if they knew the words Flynn Muldaur was about to utter and they ached to hear them. She dared to touch his sleeve.