“On the contrary, they’ve both settled down quite happily to matrimony. But when he was courting her, Nick had to prove to Belinda he wasn’t a lily of the field, so he decided to form a brewing company and make beer. His estate, Honeywood, grows hops, you see. My estate, Arcady, does the same, which is why he pulled me in to be his partner. We manage it together.”
“I see.” She lifted the bottle to her lips, took a swallow, made a face, and set the bottle aside.
He laughed. “Is it so terrible?”
Her answering look was apologetic. “I don’t much care for beer, so I’m not a fair judge. But it must be good.”
“If you don’t like beer, then how do you know?”
“She married Nick, didn’t she? So I’m assuming you two must have made a success of this brewery.”
“We have, actually. Nick wasn’t the only one whose life changed. So did mine. The brewery enabled me to pay off my debts. In addition, I started taking responsibility for my life. My father saw that I was serious about turning over a new leaf, and he began handing over management of the family’s investments to me, one by one. Along the way, I discovered—much to my surprise—that I had a genuine talent for business. Most peers don’t, my father included. He was happy and relieved to be able to hand all the family investments over to me. He’s quite proud of how I turned my life around, I think.”
“I don’t doubt it. You’re the apple of his eye.”
“No, I’m afraid my sister, Susan, holds that honor.” He leaned back with his beer and his sandwich, studied her for a moment, and decided to try again to satisfy his curiosity. “But don’t think I haven’t noticed this latest attempt to divert me, Miss Valinsky,” he said gently. “We were discussing you.”
“I suppose you want to know how I came to such a pass,” she murmured. “Taking my clothes off, I mean.”
“Only if you want to tell me.”
“I did it for the same reason most girls do. I needed money.”
“What about your family?” he asked and resumed eating.
“My family.” She smiled a little. “My father was a Lithuanian immigrant, a butcher by trade. He went west, and he ended up in Kansas City, where he set up his shop.”
This was the first time she’d ever mentioned a thing about her family—another topic she’d always been adept at avoiding. “And he met your mother there?”
“Not exactly. My mother was from Baltimore. Miss Elizabeth Breckenridge, of the Baltimore Breckenridges. Very wealthy and very high-society.”
He couldn’t help being a bit surprised, perhaps because Lola had been so positive in her assurance that marriages across class lines didn’t work. “A girl of good society married a butcher? She must have been very much in love.”
“Love?” Lola laughed, but she didn’t seem amused. “She married him before ever meeting him. He wanted a wife, you see, and in the frontier towns, there wasn’t much of a selection. So he did what many other men did. He advertised for a wife in the Eastern papers. My mother answered his advertisement. They corresponded for a few months, then she married him by proxy and came west to join him.”
“You read about such things in penny dreadfuls,” he murmured. “I didn’t think they happened in real life. Why did she do it?”
“She was very young, not even sixteen. When I try to imagine her motives, I think she must have been very romantic, very idealistic, and probably a reader of those penny dreadfuls you mention. Her own life must have seemed terribly boring by comparison to the wild western frontier.”
“In other words, she ran away from home?”
“I think she must have done, but I don’t know for sure. The truth is, I don’t remember her very well. She left when I was five.”
“Left?”
“She went back to her people.”
“What? She abandoned you?”
“I suppose reality wasn’t as romantic as the penny dreadfuls.” She shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “Anyway, her father was a very powerful man, and somehow, he got the marriage annulled, very discreetly, of course. Which means that I . . .” She paused and looked at him. “I’m a bastard child. Legally, anyway.”
“If you ever feared I’d judge you for that, your fear was misplaced,” he said gently. “I couldn’t care two pins.”
“Yes, well, my mother remarried, a very wealthy man of her own class, a Mr. Angus Hutchison, and she had five sons with him.”
“I’m sorry.” Such easy words to say, and so inadequate.
“I went to see her once. When I was living in New York, before I went to Paris, I took the train down to Baltimore. She wouldn’t see me. She told her butler to tell me she didn’t have a daughter, she didn’t know who I was or what I was talking about. She wiped me out of her life, you see. Like wiping a slate clean.”
Denys’s anger, banked for a short while, came roaring back, and he vowed that if he ever returned to America, he would pay a call upon Mrs. Angus Hutchison of Baltimore.
“In America, one can do that, you see,” Lola said, breaking into his thoughts. “Start over, change your name, become someone else. It’s different here—at least, it is for people like you. If I had married you, there wouldn’t have been any way out of it, for either of us.”
“You think I would have wanted a way out,” he said slowly. “You think I would have abandoned you?”
“I . . .” She frowned, staring down at the bottle of beer on the table. “I don’t know. But either way, I couldn’t have made you happy.”
He tilted his head, studying. “I’m beginning to see why you think so.”
She roused herself, shaking her head. “Anyway, my father was shattered when my mother left. He took to drink. He stopped working, lost his butcher shop, he even sold his knives. He wanted to die. He finally succeeded. He drank himself to death when I fifteen.”
“Is that why you had no money?”
She nodded. “I’d been taking in laundry, singing in the local saloon, trying to make enough to keep body and soul together, and my father hadn’t been much help. After he died, and the rent came due, I didn’t have quite enough to pay it. I knew the girls who served the whiskey in the saloon got tips if they . . . smiled pretty, if they flirted. So that night, when I sang, I lifted up my skirt a bit—not much, just enough to show an ankle, and one of the cowboys tossed me two bits.”
He frowned. “Two bits?”
“A twenty-five-cent piece. That’s when I really began to understand how it’s done.”
“How what is done?”
She met his eyes across the table. “Making men want you.”
His chest hurt, like a fist squeezing his heart. One heard about girls going down the road to ruin, but even in his salad days, he’d never thought much about how, precisely, that happened. Now he knew.
“The next morning,” she went on, “I learned making men want you had consequences.”
“What happened?” he asked, his voice a harsh whisper to his own ears, his fingers gripping the beer in his hand so tightly, they ached.
“One of the cowboys who’d seen me waving my ankles around came to my place. He told me he knew I was all alone in the world, and he offered to help me out. ‘Take care of me,’ was how he put it.”
I’ll take care of you.
His own words came echoing back to him, and his dismay deepened, bringing a sense of shame he’d never felt before. “And what was your answer?”
“I told him no. He didn’t take it kindly.”