"Porno flick?" Dallie inquired.
"Certainly not!" she exclaimed. Didn't these rural Americans take even the briefest moment to examine a thought before they passed it on to their mouths? "Actually, it was one of those horrid films about"-she felt ill even saying the word-"vampires."
"No kidding!" Skeet's admiration was evident. "Do you know Vincent Price?"
Francesca pressed her eyes closed for a moment and then reopened them. "I haven't had the pleasure."
Skeet tapped Dallie on the shoulder. "Remember old Vincent when he used to be on 'Hollywood Squares'?
Sometimes his wife was on with him. What's her name? She's one of those fancy English actresses, too. Maybe Francie knows her."
"Francesca," she snapped. "I detest being called anything else."
Skeet sank back into the seat and she realized she had offended him, but she didn't care. Her name was her name, and no one had the right to alter it, especially not today when her hold on the world seemed so precarious.
"So, what are your plans now?" Dallie asked.
"To return to London as soon as possible." She thought of Miranda Gwynwyck, of Nicky, of the impossibility of continuing as she was. "And then I'm getting married." Without realizing it, she had made her decision, made it because she could see no alternative. After what she had endured during the past twenty-four hours, being married to a wealthy brewer no longer seemed like such a terrible fate. But now that the words had been spoken, she felt depressed instead of relieved. Another hairpin fell out; this one tumbled down her front and stuck in a ruffle. She distracted herself from her glum thoughts by asking Skeet for her cosmetic case. He passed it forward without a word. She pushed it deep into the folds of her skirt and flipped open the lid.
"My God…" She almost wept when she saw her face. Her heavy eye makeup looked grotesque in natural light, she had eaten off her lipstick, her hair was falling every which way, and she was dirty! Never in all her twenty-one years had she primped in front of a man other than her hairdresser, but she had to get herself hack, the person she recognized!
Grabbing a bottle of cleansing lotion, she set to work repairing the mess. As the heavy makeup came off, she felt a need to distance herself from the two men, to make them understand that she belonged to a different world. "Honestly, I look a fright. This entire trip has been an absolute nightmare." She pulled off her false eyelashes, moisturized her eyelids, and applied a light dusting of highlighter along with taupe shadow and a dab of mascara. "Normally I use this wonderful German mascara called Ecarte, but Cissy
Kavendish's maid-a really impossible woman from the West Indies-forgot to pack it, so I'm slumming with an English brand."
She knew she was talking too much, but she didn't seem to be able to stop herself. She swept a Kent brush over a cake of toffee blusher and shaded the area just beneath her cheekbones. "I'd give almost anything for a really good facial right now. There's this wonderful place in Mayfair that uses thermal
heat and all sorts of other incredibly miraculous things they combine with massage. Lizzy Arden does
the same thing." She quickly outlined her lips with a pencil, filled them in from a pot of rosy beige
gloss, and checked the overall effect. Not terrific, but at least she almost looked like herself again.
The growing silence in the car was making her increasingly uneasy, so she kept talking to fill it. "It's always difficult when you're in New York trying to decide between Arden's and Janet Sartin. Naturally, I'm talking about Janet Sartin on Madison Avenue. I mean, one can go to her salon on Park, but it isn't quite the same, is it?"
Everything was quiet for a moment.
Finally, Skeet spoke. "Dallie?"
"Uh-huh?"
"Do you think she's done yet?"
Dallie pulled off his sunglasses and set them back on the dashboard. "I have a feeling she's just warming up."
She looked over at him, embarrassed by her own behavior and angry with his. Couldn't he see that she was having the most miserable day of her life, and try to make things a bit easier for her? She hated the fact that he didn't seem impressed by her, hated the fact that he wasn't trying to impress her himself. In some strange way that she couldn't quite define, his lack of interest seemed more disorienting than anything else that had happened to her.
She returned her attention to the mirror and began snatching the pins from her hair, silently admonishing herself to stop worrying about Dallas Beaudine's opinion. Any moment now they'd stumble on civilization. She'd call a taxi to take her to the airport in Gulfport and then book herself on the next flight to London. Suddenly she remembered her embarrassing financial problem and then, just as quickly, found the solution. She would simply call Nicholas and have him wire her the money for her air fare.
Her throat felt scratchy and dry, and she coughed. "Could you roll up the windows? This dust is dreadful. And I'd really like something to drink." She eyed a small Styrofoam cooler in the back. "I don't suppose there's an off chance that you might have a bottle of Perrier stashed away in there?"
A moment of pregnant silence filled the interior of the Riviera.
"Shoot, ma'am, we're fresh out," Dallie said finally. "I'm afraid old Skeet finished the last bottle right
after we pulled that liquor store holdup over in Meridian."
Chapter 8
Dallie was the first to admit that he didn't always treat women well. Part of it was him, but part of it was them, too. He liked down-home women, good-time women, low-down women. He liked women he could drink with, women who could tell dirty jokes without lowering their voices, who'd boom out that old punch line right across the sweating beer pitchers, wadded-up cocktail napkins, and Waylon Jennings on the jukebox-never wasting a moment's thought on how some blue-haired club lady in the next town might be listening in. He liked women who didn't fuss around with tears and arguments because he was spending all his time hitting a couple hundred balls with his three-wood at the driving range instead of taking them to a restaurant that served snails. He liked women, in fact, who were pretty much like men. Except beautiful. Because, most of all, Dailie liked beautiful women. Not phony fashion-model beautiful, with all that makeup and those bony boys' bodies that gave him the creeps, but sexy beautiful. He liked breasts and hips, eyes that laughed and teeth that sparkled, lips that parted wide. He liked women he could love and leave. That's the way he was, and that's what made him pretty much turn mean on every woman he had ever cared about. But Francesca Day was going to be the exception. She made him turn mean just by being there.
"Is that a filling station?" Skeet asked, sounding happy for the first time in miles.
Francesca peered ahead and breathed a silent prayer of thanksgiving as Dallie slowed the car. Not that she'd actually believed that story about the liquor store holdup, but she had to be careful. They pulled up in front of a ramshackle wooden building with flaking paint and a hand-lettered "Live Bate" sign leaning against a rusted pump. A cloud of dust drifted in through the car window as the tires crunched on the gravel. Francesca felt as if she'd been traveling for aeons; she was perishing of thirst, dying of starvation, and she had to use the lavatory.
"End of the line," Dallie said, turning off the ignition. "There'll be a phone inside. You can call one of your friends from there."
"Oh, I'm not going to call a friend," she replied, extracting a small calfskin handbag from her cosmetic case. "I'm calling a taxi to take me to the airport in Gulfport."