The room was terrible. Dirty water lay in the recesses of the broken floor tiles revealed by a dim bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling by a cord. The toilet was encrusted with filth, its lid had disappeared, and the seat was broken in half. As she stood looking at the noisome room, the tears that had been threatening all day finally broke loose. She was hungry and thirsty, she had to use the toilet, she didn't have any money, and she wanted to go home. Dropping the suitcase outside in the dirt, she sat down on it and began to cry. How could this be happening to her? She was one of the ten most beautiful women in Great Britain!
A pair of cowboy boots appeared in the dust at her side. She began crying harder, burying her face in her hands and releasing great gulping sobs that seemed to come all the way from her toes. The boots took a few steps to the side, then tapped impatiently in the dirt.
"This kickup gonna take much longer, Francie? I want to fetch Skeet before the 'gators get him."
"I went out with the Prince of Wales," she said with a sob, finally looking up at him. "He fell in love with me!"
"Uh-huh. Well, they say there's a lot of inbreeding-"
"I could have been queen!" The word was a wail as tears dripped off her cheeks and onto her breasts. "He adored me, everybody knew it. We went to balls and the opera-"
He squinted against the fading sun. "Do you think you could sorta skip through this part and get to the point?"
"I have to go to the loo!" she cried, pointing a shaky finger toward the rusty blue and white sign.
He left her side and then reappeared a moment later. "I see what you mean." Digging two rumpled tissues from his pocket, he let them flutter down into her lap. "I think you'll be safer out back behind the building."
She looked down at the tissues and then up at him and began sobbing again.
He took several chomps on his gum. "That domestic mascara of yours sure is falling down on the job."
Leaping up from the suitcase, tissues dropping to the ground, she shouted at him, "You think all this is amusing, don't you? You find it hysterically funny that I'm trapped in this awful dress and I can't go
home and Nicky's gone off with some dreadful mathematician Miranda says is glorious-"
"Uh-huh." Her suitcase fell forward under the pressure of Dallie's boot toe. Before Francesca had a chance to protest, he had knelt down and flipped open the catches. "This is a god-awful mess," he said when he saw the chaos inside. "You got any jeans in here?"
"Under the Zandra Rhodes."
"What's a zanderoads? Never mind, I found the jeans. How about a T-shirt? You wear T-shirts, Francie?"
"There's a blouse," she sniffed. "Greige with cocoa trim-a Halston. And a Hermes belt with an art deco buckle. And my Bottega Veneta sandals."
He propped one arm across his knee and looked up at her. "You're startin' to push me again, aren't you, darlin'?"
Dashing away her tears with the back of her hand, she stared down at him, not having the faintest idea what he was talking about. He sighed and got back up. "Maybe you'd better find what you want yourself. I'll amble back to the car and wait for you. And try not to take too long. Old Skeet's already gonna be hotter than a Texas tamale."
As he turned to walk away, she sniffed and bit on her lip. "Mr. Beaudine?" He turned. She dug her fingernails into her palms. "Would it be possible-" Gracious, this was humiliating! "That is to say, perhaps you might- Actually, I seem to-" What was wrong with her? How had an ignorant hillbilly managed to intimidate her so badly that she couldn't seem to form the simplest sentence?
"Spit it out, honey. I got my heart set on findin' a cure for cancer before the decade's over, or at least having a cold Lone Star and a chili dog by the time Landry's boys hit the Astroturf for the division championship."
"Stop it!" She stamped her foot in the dirt. "Just stop it! I don't have any idea what you're talking about, and even a blind idiot could see that I can't possibly get out of this dress by myself, and if you ask me,
the person who talks too much around here is you!"
He grinned, and she suddenly forgot her misery under the force of that devastating smile, crinkling the corners of his mouth and eyes. His amusement seemed to come from a place deep inside, and as she watched him she had the absurd feeling that an entire world of funniness had somehow managed to pass her by. The idea made her feel more out of sorts than ever. "Hurry up, will you?" she snapped. "I can barely breathe."
"Turn around, Francie. Undressing women is one of my particular talents. Even better than my bunker shot."
"You're not undressing me," she sputtered, as she turned her back to him. "Don't make it sound so sordid."
His hands paused on the hooks at the back of her dress. "What exactly would you call it?"
"Performing a helpful function."
"Sort of like a maid?" The row of hooks began to ease open.
"Rather like that, yes." She had the uneasy feeling that she'd just taken another giant step in the wrong direction. She heard a short, vaguely malevolent chuckle that confirmed her fears.
"Something about you is sort of growin' on me, Francie. It's not often life gives you the opportunity to meet living history."
"Living history?"
"Sure. French Revolution, old Marie Antoinette. All that let-them-eat-cake stuff."
"What," she asked, as the last of the hooks fell open, "would someone like you know about Marie Antoinette?"
"Until a little over an hour ago," he replied, "not much."
They picked Skeet up about two miles down the road, and as Dallie had predicted, he wasn't happy. Francesca found herself banished to the back seat, where she sipped from a bottle of something called Yahoo chocolate soda, which she'd taken from the Styrofoam cooler without waiting for an invitation. She drank and brooded, remaining silent, as requested, all the way into New Orleans. She wondered what Dallie would say if he knew that she didn't have a plane ticket, but she refused even to consider telling him the truth. Picking at the corner of the Yahoo label with her thumbnail, she contemplated the fact that she didn't have a mother, money, a home, or a fiance. All she had left was a small remnant of pride, and she desperately wanted the chance to wave it at least once before the day was over. For some reason, pride was becoming increasingly important to her when it came to Dallie Beaudine.
If only he weren't so impossibly gorgeous, and so obviously unimpressed with her. It was infuriating… and irresistible. She had never walked away from a challenge where a man was concerned, and it grated on her to be forced to walk away from this one. Common sense told her she had bigger problems to worry about, but something more visceral said that if she couldn't manage to attract the admiration of Dallie Beaudine she would have lost one more chunk of herself.
As she finished her chocolate soda, she figured out how to get the money she needed for her ticket home. Of course! The idea was so absurdly simple that she should have thought of it right away. She looked over at her suitcase and frowned at the scratch on the side. That suitcase had cost something like eighteen hundred pounds when she'd bought it less than a year before. Flipping open her cosmetic case, she riffled through the contents looking for a cake of eye shadow approximately the same butternut shade as the leather. When she found it, she unscrewed the lid and gently dabbed at the scratch. It was still faintly visible when she was done, but she felt satisfied that only a close inspection would reveal the flaw.
With that problem out of the way and the first airport sign in sight, she returned her thoughts to Dallie Beaudine, trying to understand his attitude toward her. The whole problem-the only reason everything was going so badly between them-was that she looked so awful. This had temporarily thrown him into the superior position. She let her eyelids drift shut and played out a fantasy in her mind in which she would appear before him well rested, hair freshly arranged in shining chestnut curls, makeup impeccable, clothes wonderful. She would have him on his knees in seconds.