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 you'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. Vee-tawn 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.
"I'm Dallas Beaudine," the man behind the wheel announced. "Folks call me Dallie. That's Skeet Cooper in the back."
"Francesca Day," she replied, permitting her voice to thaw ever so slightly. She had to remember that Americans were notoriously informal. What was considered boorish on the part of an Englishman was regarded as normal behavior in the States. Besides, she couldn't resist bringing this gorgeous country bumpkin at least partway to his knees. This was something she was good at, something that couldn't possibly go wrong on this day when everything else had fallen apart. "I'm grateful to you for rescuing me," she said, smiling at him over the top of her skirts. "I'm afraid I've had an absolutely beastly few days."
"You mind telling us about it?" Dallie inquired. "Skeet and I've been traveling a lot of miles lately, and we're getting tired of each other's conversation."
"Well, it's all quite ridiculous, really. Miranda Gwynwyck, this perfectly odious woman-the brewery family, you know-persuaded me to leave London and accept a part in a film being shot at the Wentworth plantation."
Skeet's head popped up just behind her left shoulder, and his eyes were alive with curiosity. "You a movie star?" he inquired. "There's something about you that's been lookin' familiar to me, but I can't
quite place it."
"Not actually." She thought about mentioning Vivien Leigh to him and then decided not to bother.
"I got it!" Skeet exclaimed. "I knew I'd seen you before. Dallie, you'll never guess who this is."
Francesca looked back at him warily.
"This here's 'Bereft Francesca'!" Skeet declared with a hoot of laughter. "I knew I recognized her. You remember, Dallie. The one goin' out with all those movie stars."
"No kidding," Dallie said.
"How on earth-" Francesca began, but Skeet interrupted her.
"Say, I was real sorry to hear about your mama and that taxicab."
Francesca stared at him speechlessly.
"Skeet's a fan of the tabloids," Dallie explained. "I don't much like them myself, but they do make you think about the power of mass communications. When I was a kid, we used to have this old blue geography book, and the first chapter was called 'Our Shrinking World.' That just about says it, doesn't it? Did you have geography books like that in England?"
"I-I don't think so," she replied weakly. A moment of silence passed and she had the horrifying feeling that they might be waiting for her to supply the details of Chloe's death. Even the thought of sharing something so intimate with strangers appalled her, so she quickly returned to the subject at hand as if she'd never been interrupted. "I flew halfway across the world, spent an absolutely miserable night in the most horrible accommodations you could imagine, and was forced to wear this absolutely hideous dress. Then I discovered that the picture had been misrepresented to me."