“You signed a contract, so you won't have much luck.”
“I signed a contract under false pretenses.”
“Bullshit. Nobody lied to you. And you can forget about any money until you're finished shooting.”
“I demand to be paid what you owe me!” She felt like some dreadful fishwife bargaining on a street corner. “You have to pay me for my travel. We had an agreement!”
“You're not getting a penny until you're done with your last scene tomorrow.” He raked his eyes over her unpleasantly. “That's the one Lloyd wants you to do nude. The deflowering of innocence, he calls it.”
“Lloyd will see me nude the same day he wins the Golden Palm!'” Turning on her heel, she began to storm away only to have one of the hateful pink flounces on her skirt catch on the corner of the metal table. She jerked it free, tearing it in the process.
Steiner leaped up from the table. “Hey, be careful with that costume! Those things cost me money!”
She yanked the mustard container from the table and squeezed a great glob of it down the front of the skirt. “How dreadful,” she scoffed. “It looks as if this one needs to be laundered!”
“You bitch!” he screamed after her as she stalked away. “You'll never work again! I'll see to it that no one hires you to empty out the garbage.”
“Super!” she called back. “Because I've had all the garbage I can stand!”
Grabbing two handfuls of ruffle, she hitched her skirts to her knees, cut across the lawn, and headed for the chicken coop. Never, absolutely never in her entire life had she been treated so shabbily. She'd make Miranda Gwynwyck pay for this humiliation if it was the last thing she did. She'd bloody well marry Nicholas Gwynwyck the day she got home!
When she reached her room, she was pale with rage, and the sight of the unmade bed fueled her fury. Snatching up an ugly green lamp from the dresser, she hurled it across the room, where it shattered against the wall. The destruction didn't help; she still felt as if someone had hit her in the stomach. Dragging her suitcase to the bed, she wadded in the few clothes she had bothered to unpack the night before, slammed down the lid, and sat on it. By the time she had forced the latches closed, her carefully arranged curls had come loose and her chest was damp with perspiration. Then she remembered she was still wearing the awful pink costume.
She nearly wailed with frustration as she opened the suitcase again. This was all Nicky's fault! When she got back to London, she'd make him take her to the Costa del Sol, and she'd lie on the bloody beach all day and do nothing except think up ways to make him miserable! Reaching behind her, she began struggling with the hooks that held the bodice together, but they had been set in a double row, and the material fit so tightly that she couldn't get a grip to loosen them. She twisted farther around, releasing a particularly foul curse, but the hooks wouldn't budge. Just as she'd reconciled herself to looking for someone to help her, she thought of the expression on Lew Steiner's fat, smug face when she'd squirted mustard on the skirt. She nearly laughed aloud. Let's see how smug he looks when he sees his precious costume disappearing from sight, she thought with a burst of malicious glee.
No one was around to help her, so she had to carry the suitcase herself. Lugging her Vuitton bag in one hand and her cosmetic case in the other, she struggled down the path that led to the vehicles, only to discover when she got there that absolutely no one would drive her into Gulfport.
“Sorry, Miss Day, but they told us they needed all the cars,” one of the men muttered, not quite looking her in the eye.
She didn't believe him for a moment. This was Lew Steiner's doing, his last petty attack on her!
Another crew member was more helpful. “There's a gas station not too far down the road.” He indicated the direction with a turn of his head. “You could make a phone call from there and get somebody to pick you up.”
The thought of walking down the driveway was daunting enough, let alone having to walk all the way to a petrol station. Just as she realized she'd have to swallow her pride and go back to the chicken coop to change her dress, Lew Steiner stepped out of one of the Airstream trailers and gave her a nasty smirk. She decided she'd die before she'd retreat an inch. Glaring back at him, she hitched up her suitcases and headed across the grass toward the driveway.
“Hey! Stop right there!” Steiner yelled, puffing up next to her. “Don't you take another step until I have that costume back!”
She rounded on him. “You so much as touch me, and I'll have you charged with assault!”
“I'll have you charged with theft! That dress belongs to me!”
“And I'm sure you'd look charming in it.” She deliberately caught him in the knees with her cosmetic case as she turned to walk away. He yelped with pain, and she smiled to herself, wishing she'd hit him harder.
It would be her last moment of satisfaction for a very long time to come.
“You missed the turnoff,” Skeet chastised Dallie from the back seat of the Buick Riviera. “Route ninety-eight, I told you. Ninety-eight to fifty-five, fifty-five to twelve, then set the cruise control straight into Baton Rouge.”
“Telling me an hour ago and then falling asleep doesn't help much,” Dallie grumbled. He wore a new cap, dark blue with an American flag on the front, but it wasn't doing the trick against the midafternoon sun, so he picked up a pair of mirrored sunglasses from the dashboard and put them on. Scrub pine stretched out on either side of the two-lane road. He hadn't seen anything but a few rusted junk cars for miles, and his stomach had started rumbling. “Sometimes you're about worthless,” he muttered.
“You got any Juicy Fruit?” Skeet asked.
A patch of color in the distance suddenly caught Dallie's attention, a swirl of bright pink wobbling slowly along the side of the road. As they drew closer, the shape gradually became more distinct.
He pulled his sunglasses off. “I don't believe it. Will you just look at that?”
Skeet leaned forward, his forearm resting on the back of the passenger seat, and shaded his eyes. “Now don't that just about beat all?” he chortled.
Francesca pushed herself on, one plodding step at a time, struggling for every breath against the vise of her corset. Dust streaked her cheeks, the tops of her breasts glistened with perspiration, and not fifteen minutes earlier, she had lost a nipple. Just like a cork bobbing to the surface of a wave, it had popped out of the neckline of her dress. She had quickly set down her suitcase and shoved it back in, but the memory made her shudder. If she could take back just one thing in her life, she thought for the hundredth time in as many minutes, she'd take back the moment she had decided to walk away from the Wentworth plantation wearing this dress.
The hoopskirt now looked like a gravy boat, protruding in the front and back and squished in on the sides from the combined pressure of the suitcase in her right hand and the cosmetic case in her left, both of which felt as if they were tearing her arms from their shoulder sockets. With each step, she winced. Her tiny French-heeled shoes had rubbed blisters on her feet, and each wayward puff of hot air sent another wave of dust blowing up into her face.
She wanted to sit down on the side of the road and cry, but she wasn't absolutely certain she would be able to force herself to get back up again. If only she weren't so frightened, her physical discomforts would be easier to endure. How could this have happened to her? She'd walked for miles without coming to the petrol station. Either it didn't exist or she had mistaken the direction, but she had seen nothing except a blistered wooden sign advertising a vegetable stand that had never materialized. Soon it would be dark, she was in a foreign country, and for all she knew a herd of horrid wild beasts lurked in those pines just off the side of the road. She forced herself to look straight ahead. The only thing that kept her from returning to the Went-worth plantation was the absolute certainty that she could never make it back that far.
Surely this road led to something, she told herself. Even in America they wouldn't build roads to nowhere, wo
uld they? The thought was so frightening she began playing small games in her head to keep herself moving forward. As she gritted her teeth against the pain in various parts of her body, she envisioned her favorite places, all of them light-years away from the dusty back roads of Mississippi. She envisioned Liberty's on Regent Street with its gnarled beams and wonderful Arabian jewelry, the perfumes at Sephora on the rue de Passy, and everything on Madison Avenue from Adolfo to Yves Saint Laurent. An image sprang into her mind of an icy glass of Perrier with a small sliver of lime. It hung in the hot air in front of her, the picture so vivid she felt as if she could reach out and clasp the cold, wet glass in the palm of her hand. She was beginning to hallucinate, she told herself, but the image was so pleasant she didn't try to make it go away.
The Perrier suddenly vaporized into the hot Mississippi air as she became aware of the sound of an automobile approaching from behind and then the soft squeal of brakes. Before she could balance the weight of the suitcases in her hands to turn toward the noise, a soft drawl drifted toward her from the other side of the road.
“Hey, darlin', didn't anybody tell you that Lee surrendered?”
The suitcase slammed into the front of her knees and her hoop bounced up in the back as she twisted around toward the voice. She balanced her weight and then blinked twice, unable to believe the vision that had materialized directly in front of her eyes.
Across the road, leaning out the window of a dark green automobile with his forearm resting across the top of the door panel, was a man so outrageously good-looking, so devastatingly handsome, that for a moment she thought she might actually have hallucinated him right along with the Perrier and the sliver of lime. As the handle of her suitcase dug into her palm, she took in the classic lines of his face, the molded cheekbones and lean jaw, the straight, perfect nose, and then his eyes, which were a brilliant Paul Newman blue and as thickly lashed as her own. How could a mortal man have eyes like that? How could a man have such an incredibly generous mouth and still look so masculine? Thick, dark blond hair curled up over the edges of a blue billed cap sporting an American flag. She could see the top of a formidable pair of shoulders, the well-formed muscles of his tanned forearm, and for one irrational moment she felt a crazy stab of panic.
She had finally met someone as beautiful as she was.
“You carryin’ any Confederate secrets underneath those skirts?” the man said with a grin that revealed the kind of teeth that belonged on magazine pages and made people count back guiltily to the last time they'd flossed.
“I think the Yankees cut out her tongue, Dallie.”
For the first time, Francesca became aware of another man, this one leaning out the back window. As she took in his sinister face and ominously slitted eyes, warning bells clanged in her head.
“Either that or she's a spy from the North,” he went on. “Never knew a southern woman to keep quiet for so long.”
“You a Yankee spy, darlin'?” Mr. Gorgeous asked, flashing those incredible teeth. “Pryin' out Confederate secrets with those pretty green eyes?”
She was suddenly conscious of her vulnerability—the deserted road, the failing sunlight, two strange men, the fact that she was in America, not safe at home in England. In America people packed loaded guns on their way to church, and criminals roamed the streets at will. She glanced nervously at the man in the back seat. He looked like someone who would torture small animals just for fun. What should she do? No one would hear her if she screamed, and she had no way to protect herself.
“Shoot, Skeet, you're scaring her. Pull that ugly head of yours in, will you?”
Skeet's head retracted, and the gorgeous man with the strange name she hadn't quite caught lifted one perfect eyebrow, waiting for her to say something. She decided to brave it out—to be brisk, matter-of-fact, and under no circumstances let them see how desperate she actually was.
“I'm awfully afraid I've gotten myself into a bit of a muddle,” she said, setting down her suitcase. “I seem to have lost my way. Frightful nuisance, of course.”
Skeet poked his head back out the window.
Mr. Gorgeous grinned.
She kept going doggedly. “Perhaps you could tell me how far it is to the next petrol station. Or anywhere I might find a telephone, actually.”
“You're from England, aren't you?” Skeet asked. “Dallie, do you hear the funny way she talks? She's a English lady, is what she is.”
Francesca watched as Mr. Gorgeous—could someone really be named Dallie?—swept his gaze down over the pink and white ruffles of her gown. “I'll bet you got one hell of a story to tell, honey. Come on and hop in. We'll give you a lift to the next telephone.”
She hesitated. Getting into a car with two strange men didn't strike her as the absolute wisest course to take, but she couldn't seem to think of an alternative. She stood in the road, ruffles dragging in the dust and suitcases at her feet, while an unfamiliar combination of fear and uncertainty made her feel queasy.
Skeet leaned all the way out the window and tilted his head to look at Dallie. “She's afraid you're rapist scum gettin’ ready to ruin her.” He turned back to her. “You take a good hard look at Dallie's pretty face, ma'am, and then tell me if you think a man with a face like that has to resort to violatin’ unwilling women.”
He definitely had a point, but somehow Francesca didn't feel comforted. The man named Dallie wasn't actually the person she was most worried about.
Dallie seemed to read her mind, which, considering the circumstances, probably wasn't all that difficult a thing to do. “Don't worry about Skeet, honey,” he said. “Skeet's a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist, is what he is.”
That word, coming from the mouth of someone who, despite his incredible good looks, had the accent and manner of a functional illiterate, surprised her. She was still hesitating when the door of the car opened and a pair of dusty cowboy boots hit the road. Dear God... She swallowed hard and looked up—way up.
His body was as perfect as his face.
He wore a navy blue T-shirt that skimmed the muscles of his chest, outlining biceps and triceps and all sorts of other incredible things, and a pair of jeans faded almost to white everywhere except at the frayed seams. His stomach was flat, his hips narrow; he was lean and leggy, several inches over six feet tall, and he absolutely took her breath away. It must be true, she thought wildly, what everyone said about Americans and vitamin pills.
“The trunk's full, so I'm gonna have to throw your cases in the back seat with Skeet there.”
“That's fine. Anywhere will do.” As he walked toward her, she turned the full force of her smile on him. She couldn't help it; the response was automatic, programmed into her Serritella genes. Not appearing at her best before a man this spectacular, even if he was a backwoods bumpkin, suddenly seemed more painful than the blisters on her feet. At that moment she would have given anything she owned for half an hour in front of a mirror with the contents of her cosmetic case and the white linen Mary McFadden that was hanging in a Piccadilly resale shop right next to her periwinkle blue evening pajamas.
He stopped where he was and stared down at her.
For the first time since she'd left London, she felt as if she'd arrived in home territory. The expression on his face confirmed a fact she had discovered long ago—men were men the world over. She peered upward with innocent, radiant eyes. “Something the matter?”
“Do you always do that?”
“Do what?” The dimple in her cheek deepened.
“Proposition a man less than five minutes after you meet him.”
“Proposition!” She couldn't believe she'd heard him correctly, and she exclaimed indignantly, “I was most certainly not propositioning you.”
“Honey, if that smile wasn't a proposition, I don't know what one is.” He picked up her cases and carried them to the other side of the car. “Normally I wouldn't mind, you understand, but it strikes me as just short of foolhardy to be hanging out your advertising when yo
u're in the middle of nowhere with two strange men who might be pervert scum, for all you know.”
“My advertising!” She stomped her foot on the road. “Put those suitcases down this minute! I wouldn't go anywhere with you if my life depended on it.”
He glanced around at the scrub pine and the deserted road. “From the looks of things, it's getting mighty close.”
She didn't know what to do. She needed help, yet his behavior was insufferable, and she hated the idea of demeaning herself by getting in the car. He took the choice away from her when he pulled open the back door and unceremoniously shoved the luggage at Skeet.
“Be careful with those,” she cried, racing up to the car. “They're Louis Vuitton!”
“You picked a real live one this time, Dallie,” Skeet muttered from the back.
“Don't I just know it,” Dallie replied. He climbed behind the wheel, slammed the door, and then leaned out the window to look at her. “If you want to retain possession of your luggage, honey, you'd better get inside real quick, because in exactly ten seconds, I'm slipping the old Riviera into gear and me and Mr. Veetawn won't be anything to you but a distant memory.”
She limped around the back of the car to the passenger door on the other side, tears struggling to reach the surface. She felt humiliated, frightened, and—worst of all— helpless. A hairpin slid down the back of her neck and fell into the dirt.
Unfortunately, her discomfiture was just beginning. Hoopskirts, she quickly discovered, had not been designed to fit into a modern automobile. Refusing to look at either of her rescuers to see how they were reacting to her difficulties, she finally eased onto the seat backside first and then gathered the unwieldy volume of material into her lap as best she could.
Dallie freed the gearshift from a spillover of crinolines. “You always dress for comfort like this?”
She glared at him, opening her mouth to deliver one of her famous snappy rejoinders only to discover that nothing sprang to mind. They rode for some time in silence while she stared doggedly ahead, her eyes barely making it over the top of her mountain of skirts, the stays in the bodice digging into her waist. As grateful as she was to be off her feet, her position made the constriction of the corset even more unbearable. She tried to take a deep breath, but her breasts rose so alarmingly that she settled for shallow breaths instead. One sneeze, she realized, and she was a centerfold.
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