Her Leading Man

by Duncan, Alice

  The restaurant’s host, who appeared to be slightly gaga over the intrusion of the Peerless Studio folks into his small oven-like world, fairly groveled before Christina and Martin. Having met Gran before, he stood clear of her lest, Christina assumed, Gran swing her cane at him.

  “Right this way, Mr. Tafft, Miss Mayhew, Mrs. Mayhew,” he said in what he probably thought was a suave voice but which sounded affected to Christina. “I have a delightful corner table for you.”

  Delightful, in this instance, was rather an overstatement, Christina noted. She didn’t care, though. Frankly, she’d been surprised to find any accommodations at all in this revolting desert. That the Desert Palm Resort aspired to airs and graces above its station was a plus. The place would never do more than aspire, in her considered opinion, but at least it was comfortable. Except for the heat. And there wasn’t anything anyone could do about the heat.

  The waiter, after mentally negotiating with himself for a minute, took the safe route and held Christina’s chair for her. Martin did the same for Gran. Christina figured the poor waiter feared Gran would bop him one if he tried to assist her. And she might have. Gran was unpredictable sometimes, especially if she’d already pegged someone as contemptible. Anyone she could intimidate was contemptible in her eyes.

  With a soft sigh, Christina wondered if she’d be like Gran someday. She was already too darned opinionated and mouthy; she’d been told so over and over again by various people, from teachers to young men who hardly knew her. Men didn’t appreciate women with ideas of their own. Which meant she’d probably never have a man in her life—although both Gran and Christina’s mother had managed to snag one somehow.

  The notion of having to rope in a husband brought to her mind the last picture she had acted in, a cowboy epic in which the starring role had been played by a real cowboy. He’d roped and tied a steer on celluloid in no time at all, and his performance had been an astonishing thing to watch. She shook her head as she laid her napkin in her lap. Sometimes her mind wandered down most unproductive paths.

  When she glanced up again, she saw Martin Taft looking at her, a quizzical smile on his face. Her heart hitched again. Darn it, why should her heart, which had always been a reliable organ, be giving her trouble now? She was too young to have heart troubles.

  “Everything all right, Christina?” he asked.

  He had lovely eyes. Soft and brown, but with fire and a good deal of steel in them. They were framed by lush dark lashes and gently arched over by deep brown eyebrows. And his features were even and pleasant. He wasn’t exactly gorgeous in the mold of a Pablo Orozco, but he was ever so much more agreeable in appearance than Orozco, and was very good-looking. Better looking than most of the men Christina came across, in school or at work

  “Everything’s fine, thank you, Martin.”

  “Heh!” barked Gran.

  Both Martin and Christina turned their heads to look at her. She shared her best, most militant and eagle-eyed glare with them. “This place is a pit. It’s as if the fires of hell are burning day and night. When will anyone invent a way to cool air indoors, is what I want to know?”

  “I think they’re working on it, Gran,” Christina said, feeling a little deflated.

  “Balderdash!”

  “And the overhead electrical fan does help to a degree.” Just once, Christina’d like to be able to have a conversation with someone on a movie set without her grandmother running interference.

  She knew even as she thought it that she’d just been a victim of illogical thinking. Her grandmother came with her because Christina had no other protection. And as much as Christina prided herself on her own independence and ability to take care of herself, she also knew that women were both physically and politically weaker than men. It helped to have someone with a reputation for hardheadedness, not to say a nasty disposition, on her side.

  Christina loved Gran and appreciated her willingness to chaperone her. Gran might be small, and she might be old, but she was an expert at making people—particularly men—keep their distance. Men didn’t like being humiliated by little old ladies. And, while Christina understood their point of view in a way, she also considered the ones who ran away—and that included all of them so far—cowardly for not fighting back.

  Martin smiled winningly at her grandmother as he took the chair across from her. “At least this place does have a fair number of electrical fans, Mrs. Mayhew. They help stir the air.”

  “They don’t cool it,” Gran pointed out emphatically, as if Martin had just said something stupid.

  “True enough. Maybe by the time the pictures start to talk, somebody will have invented a way to cool air, even in the summertime.”

  “I doubt it,” Gran said bitterly.

  Christina looked at Martin in frank curiosity.. “Do you really think the pictures will ever talk, Martin? Honestly?”

  “Yes, I do. One of these days, one of the great minds who works on such things will invent a quiet camera and a way to project sound.” He shrugged. “Actually, the Edison group has already invented a way to project sound. We only have to be able to hear it above the cranking of the cameras. But since I started working in the business, cameras have come a long way, too. We’re using a close-up camera for some of the scenes in this picture, in fact. I’m sure sound is right around the corner.”

  Made sense to Christina. She smiled at him in appreciation because he hadn’t yet been cowed into keeping his opinions to himself by Gran.

  After eyeing him sharply in what might or might not have been disapproval—it was sometimes hard to tell with her—Gran said “Heh” again.

  Christina watched her with interest. Her grandmother seldom fell back on one of her “hehs” unless she felt she’d lost an argument. Transferring her gaze from Gran to Martin, she noted that his benign smile hadn’t wavered.

  Good heavens, he reminded her of her father! Could Martin Tafft be such a one as Benjamin Armstrong Mayhew, the most perfect human male in the entire world? She told herself not to be silly. She’d only just met Martin. She couldn’t yet know if he was worth getting her hopes up for or not.

  Not to mention the fact that this wasn’t the time for her to be entertaining hopes of any sort, no matter how marvelous or disgusting Martin Tafft turned out to be.

  An internal compulsion seemed to be guiding her today, however, and she couldn’t seem to help herself. She cleared her throat. “I read somewhere that people are experimenting with ice-cooled air. It seems that it’s possible to keep ice frozen for a long time using some sort of electrical process and some sort of gas, and that air fanned across ice can cool air quite well.”

  “I read about that, too,” Martin said.

  He’d been scanning the menu, which was a piece of paper on which had been written, in very bad calligraphy, some dining selections. It looked to Christina as if the Desert Palm Resort was trying perhaps too hard to appear stylish. They’d probably have to do a lot more than make up a fancy menu in order to impress Martin Tafft.

  Even as she thought it, however, she took note of Martin’s cordial expression. He evidently wasn’t one to disparage the local populace, no matter how rich and important he was.

  Interesting. Especially when she compared Martin’s behavior to Pablo Orozco’s. Orozco walked around looking as if he’d had his sneer permanently affixed to his face and watching the locals as if he considered them vermin.

  She told herself not to get too encouraged. For all she knew, Martin Tafft had terrible flaws that would overwhelm his good qualities. After all, anyone could present a pleasant facade to the world for however long it took to eat a meal.

  A glance at her grandmother made her revise her prior thought. Almost anyone could present a pleasant façade to the world. Other people didn’t want to do even that much. At present, Gran was scowling at the menu as if it had affronted her on purpose. “See anything you want to eat, Gran?”

  Martin, she noticed, had an amused glint in his sensitive b
rown eyes.

  Her own choice of descriptive words gave her pause. Now why, she wondered, had she decided Martin’s brown eyes were sensitive? Was she falling victim to some sort of physiological imperative that had somehow been triggered in her body, and that had judged Martin Tafft’s body an appropriate mate for itself?

  Christina, no shrinking violet when it came to matters of human bodily functions, including those of a sexual nature, considered this possibility seriously. She was, after all, twenty-one years old. Most young women her age were at least thinking about getting married and producing offshoots, if they weren’t already in full spawn. While Christina knew that human physiology wasn’t so entrenched in animal instinct as that of most mammals, she also knew that instinct was a strong motivating force in most human activities.

  It was, therefore, possible that her body was telling her it was time to mate. Maybe it, in its instinctive way, had even chosen Martin Tafft as a likely candidate for matehood.

  Fascinating. She’d have to think about this further. Study her reaction to Martin more closely. See if she could affect it by using the force of her formidable brain.

  Christina had great faith in herself. She believed that no matter how much her body might urge her to fulfill her function as a reproductive member of the species, she was strong-minded enough to keep herself from knuckling under to its pressure. She had goals. Aims in life. She was going to be a doctor, and her body could just hold its horses until she decided it was time to unleash them.

  As far as her heart, which kept giving these disturbing twinges whenever she was in Martin Tafft’s company. . . Well, Christina wasn’t sure what that meant, but she had trust in herself. She wasn’t going to let herself get distracted. She was going to be a doctor, and that was that. Everything else could just wait.

  Having cleared up that issue in her mind, she felt better about life until she realized both her grandmother and Martin were gazing at her, as if they expected her to say something. Fiddle. She’d been so engrossed in her own thoughts, she must have missed a question. She arched her eyebrows in a gesture she knew to be quelling. She’d learned it from her grandmother. “I beg your pardon?”

  Martin, apparently taken aback by her abrupt question, tilted his head and lifted his eyebrows, although he didn’t appear to be particularly quelled.

  Gran wasn’t so circumspect. “Pay attention, girl. That man asked you what you want for dinner.” She pointed at Martin to make sure Christina knew who “that man” was.

  “Oh. I see.” Christina felt foolish.

  Gran grumbled, “I’ve never known you to go off in a fog, girl. I think this picture-making nonsense is warping your character.”

  “Fiddle,” Christina said, feeling heat creep up the back of her neck. “I was merely thinking about something.”

  “Heh,” said Gran. “You were woolgathering, and you’ve never done that before. Get a hold of yourself, girl.”

  “Care to share?”

  When she glanced at him, Martin gave her one of his lovely, warm smiles. That smile of his fairly begged to be allowed access to her most intimate secrets. Darn it, every time he smiled at her that way, her heart did its nonsensical hitching maneuver. Christina didn’t approve of her heart doing undisciplined things. Christina was not given to frivolity. She smiled back, hoping her smile looked better than it felt. “Maybe later,” she murmured.

  “Well?” Gran snapped. “What do you want to eat? I’d avoid the fish, if I were you. Can’t imagine where they’d get fish that’s fit to eat in this hellish place.”

  “No,” Christina agreed. “Not unless they use refrigerated cars to ship it in.”

  “Actually,” Martin said, causing both women to glance up at him, “I think they do.” He smiled apologetically. “Have refrigerated boxcars on some of the trains nowadays, I mean. So maybe the fish isn’t bad. Although I think I’ll have something else myself. No sense taking chances on the possibility of bad fish.”

  Gran snorted as if she’d never heard anything more ludicrous in her life. Christina noted that Martin’s serene smile didn’t waver. Good heavens, except for her father she’d never met a man who reacted so little to Gran’s obnoxiousness. She wondered if he’d be able to keep it up, or if he’d prove to have feet of clay like everyone else in the world.

  Except her. While Christina was often irked by Gran’s insistence upon playing the role of sore thumb, she never ever let Gran know it. Once Gran knew she’d got someone’s goat, the game was over, and she’d won. Christina admired Martin’s ability to slough off Gran’s slings and arrows this far into their relationship, which had lasted—Christina looked to see if there was a clock on a wall somewhere and didn’t find one—well, it had lasted around twenty whole minutes so far. Folks generally gave up after only a few seconds of trying to deflect Gran’s missiles.

  “Don’t pay any attention to my grandmother, Martin. She enjoys making people feel stupid.”

  “Heh,” said Gran—but her eyes shone like little black beads, and Christina knew she’d scored a point with the old lady.

  Martin, eyeing Gran with some amusement, nodded. “I figured as much. I’ve got an uncle you might like to meet one day, Mrs. Mayhew. You could probably amuse yourselves for years dodging verbal darts.”

  Christina chuckled. Gran squinted at Martin.

  “Don’t you go getting sassy, young man. I don’t take to sassy young people.”

  “Don’t lie, Gran,” Christina shot at her immediately. “Sassy people are the only people you like, young or not.”

  “Heh.”

  The waiter showed up, steering clear of Gran and her cane, and stood beside Martin’s shoulder. “Have you decided, sir?” he asked in a snooty voice he’d assumed, Christina figured, for the sake of the picture people.

  Martin glanced from Gran to Christina, where his gaze stuck. “Ladies?”

  Never in her life, until this minute, had Christina ever allowed herself to be flustered by a gentleman looking at her. What was it about Martin Tafft that made her act like an idiot?

  She didn’t know, and it wasn’t something she’d better think about here, as she sat at the dinner table with him. “I’ll have the chicken en casserole,” she said in her cool, rich voice, the one she’d cultivated for social purposes.

  “Chicken.” Gran snorted. “I wouldn’t trust these people with a chicken, either. I’ll take the steak.” She thrust the paper menu at the waiter, who took it and seemed startled.

  Smiling, Martin said, “I’ll have the chicken en casserole, too, please. I’m sure your chef can cook a chicken just fine.”

  “Chef?” Gran grumbled. “They’ve probably got some old grandmother in an apron back there.”

  “Er, yes, sir,” the waiter mumbled at Martin, clearly trying to avoid acknowledging Gran’s sarcasm. “And would you care for something to drink?”

  Martin lifted his left eyebrow in a gesture of inquiry, which shouldn’t have made Christina’s blasted heart speed up, but did. “Would you care, to share a bottle of wine, ladies? I don’t know what the Desert Palm Resort offers, but I’m sure it’s palatable.”

  “Wine?” Gran barked out. “Give me a whiskey and soda, young man, and make it snappy.”

  Christina sighed. “Gran, you’re impossible.” Turning to Martin, she said, “What do you suggest, Martin? I’m not much of a wine drinker.”

  He grinned. “I’m not, either. Why don’t we try something white. I think white goes with chicken.” He glanced up at the waiter. “Do you have some kind of white wine lying about in a cellar somewhere?”

  “Er, yes, sir.” The waiter had been keeping a wary eye on Gran, but at Martin’s question he turned his attention away from her. It was a mistake, as he learned at once, when Gran smacked him on the arm with her cane, a feat which forced her to lean across the table.

  The waiter jumped and let out a small scream.

  “No need to holler, young man. I asked you for a whiskey and soda. Did you hear me?”<
br />
  “Yes, ma’am,” the waiter stammered. “Yes, ma’am. Coming right up.”

  Gran sat back, satisfied that she’d managed to intimidate someone. Christina knew she’d have been upset if the waiter had been impervious to her, as Martin was, so she guessed it was just as well that she’d succeeded with one of them. Sometimes she wasn’t sure how her grandmother got away with some of the outlandish things she did. One of these days, somebody would strangle her, and then where would they all be?

  Martin gazed at Gran for a moment, then at Christina. “Is she always like this?” He said it with a grin and loudly enough for Gran to hear, but Christina sensed he was honestly curious.

  She nodded. “Oh, yes. Sometimes she’s worse.”

  “Don’t you dare talk about me as if I weren’t here, girl. And you”—she poked Martin’s arm with a bony forefinger—“I come along with Christina to these idiotic picture things because I’m not about to let anyone take advantage of her. I’ve read about the lousy morals you people have. But you’re not going to get the chance to corrupt my girl, and you’d better know it from the first.”

  “Corrupt her?” Martin blinked at the old woman as if her words astonished him. “Why do you think anyone wants to corrupt her?”

  “Oh, don’t give me that,” Gran said in a voice so disparaging it could have withered spring leaves. “I read the newspapers. Why, just yesterday another stupid young woman threw herself off the roof of a building in Los Angeles. You’re a nest of vipers, is what you are. If you didn’t pay so well, I wouldn’t let Christina get within ten miles of any of you.”

  “Oh.” Martin appeared nonplussed.

  Made sense to Christina. One of Gran’s diatribes was enough to nonplus anyone. She turned to her grandmother and said mildly, “I’m sure Mr. Tafft isn’t one of the immoral picture types, Gran. I’ve only ever heard good things about him “ She shot Martin a smile to make him feel better about being discussed like this.