“No,” Denys muttered, feeling sick. He remembered her declaration that she’d only been with two men, and he wondered if this was the other man, if her only other sexual experience had been an assault. “I don’t imagine he would.”
“He shoved me down on the floor,” she said, and Denys squeezed his eyes shut. “But I managed to grab the Erie on my way down, and I bashed it over his head.”
He felt a relief so great, it shook him down to his bones, and it was several moments before he could speak. “What’s an Erie?” he asked, opening his eyes, easing his death grip on the beer bottle in his hand.
“A cast-iron skillet. Knocked him out cold. He had ten dollars in his pocket, and I took it. I went straight to the train station, got a ticket on the first train out, thinking to go as far away from Kansas City as I could get. I got all the way to New York on that ten dollars. I was thinking I’d sing there, work in a music hall, or something. But my voice wasn’t good enough. So . . .” She paused and gave a shrug. “That’s how I ended up at the dockside taverns in Brooklyn. It started with waving an ankle, then a flirty little flip of the back of my skirt . . . it kept getting easier, to go a bit further. And it seemed harmless, I made money, I got an apartment in Flatbush and learned to keep a knife in my garter. Eventually, I got enough money to get to Paris.”
He expelled his breath in a deep sigh. Then he sat back and raked a hand through his hair. “Hell,” he muttered.
Unexpectedly, she smiled. “I know you asked, but that’s probably a lot more than you wanted to know.”
“No, I’m glad you told me. And I’m just glad you were all right. That no man . . .” He stopped, then tried again. “That no man ever forced you . . .”
In it was a question, and she answered it. “No, Denys,” she said quietly. “No man ever forced me.”
She looked down, and absently began turning the bottle on the table round and round. “Denys? May I ask you a question now?”
“Of course.”
“You mortgaged Arcady to finance that play for me, didn’t you?”
She phrased it like a question, but the certainty in her voice told him she already knew the answer. “Yes,” he admitted. “How did you find out? Henry told you, I suppose.”
“Yes, that night in Paris. Why did you do it?” She gave him no chance to answer. “Did you do it because you truly believed I had talent?” She stopped turning the bottle, and looked at him. “Or was it just because you wanted to sleep with me?”
Chapter 15
Denys did not want to be the one answering questions, especially not the question she’d just asked him. But he also knew trust and truth had to run both ways. “My initial motive was lust, yes,” he admitted. “But,” he hastened to add, hoping to soften the rather callous motives he’d possessed at the time, “it’s not that I didn’t think you had talent.”
She gave him a rueful look. “What you mean is that you didn’t think about my talent, or lack of it, at all.”
He gave a sigh. “No, I didn’t. Truth be told, I didn’t care. I wanted you, and I would have done anything to have you. That’s a . . .” He paused, swallowing hard. “That’s a rather frightening thing, when I think about it.”
“I’m sorry the play was such a disaster. I wish I’d been better.”
“That’s not your fault. You weren’t ready for the part. How could you be, with no preparation and no training? I suppose I knew, deep down, that you weren’t ready to take it on, but as I said, I didn’t dwell on it. I wanted you with me here in London, but every time I voiced the idea, you laughed and shrugged it off and said something about how a girl has to eat or how you weren’t about to risk losing a good place. In the end, it seemed the only way to get you to come to London was to toss what you wanted most right into your lap.”
“That wasn’t what I wanted most,” she objected, then bit her lip, as if regretting her words.
“No?” He shouldn’t ask, he told himself. He shouldn’t open old wounds this way. “What did you want?”
“You,” she said simply. “But I didn’t want to be your mistress.”
He would have liked to say that wasn’t what he’d been offering, that his intentions had been honorable from the start.
He slid his gaze away.
“You said the other night that I’m cynical,” she went on in the wake of his silence. “And maybe I am. My life before I met you wasn’t the sort that would make any girl believe in fairy tales. But when you came along, and I kept saying no, and you kept coming back, I started to think for the first time that maybe fairy tales could happen in real life. You told me you’d gotten me an audition for a play in London, and later, when I actually got the part, it seemed as if everything I’d ever wanted was being handed to me on a silver platter.” She paused and cleared her throat. “Denys, when I came to that audition, it was already a foregone conclusion I’d get the part, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” The admission felt torn out of him, those old wounds opening up.
“Looking back, I wonder that I didn’t see that at the time,” she said musingly. “It seems so obvious now. And it wasn’t as if I was some naïve innocent girl back then.” She shook her head as if in disbelief at her own lack of perspicacity. “It’s amazing how blind you can be when you’re happy. I’d begun to believe that you were my knight in shining armor, you see. That you’d love me and marry me, and I’d be a great and successful actress, and we’d live happily ever after. But life . . . isn’t like that.”
Denys shut his eyes. A couple of weeks ago, everything about their past had seemed so straightforward. In his version of events, she’d always been the one who’d wronged him. Many times, particularly right after her departure, he’d asked himself why she’d left him for Henry, but never had he been able to set aside his sense of betrayal, his broken heart, and his wounded pride long enough to see things from her side, or to admit that he had a great deal of culpability, too. Until now.
He opened his eyes, forcing a laugh. “I begin to appreciate why you don’t like talking about yourself. In doing so, the truth about oneself is laid bare, isn’t it? And it isn’t always a pretty picture. I was no knight in shining armor, Lola.”
He met her eyes across the table. “The truth is, the notion of marrying you never entered my head until after you’d returned to Paris. Only then, when I realized I was losing you, did I decide to propose marriage. You said the other night that I didn’t love you, and I can see now why you felt that way because even though I’d told you many times how much I was in love with you, that I was mad for you, that I couldn’t eat or sleep for wanting you, even I didn’t realize until you’d gone back to Paris that I loved you enough to marry you.”
He took a deep breath. “So, all those months and months I was pursing you, while you were thinking me some kind of heroic figure, my true intentions were actually quite unsavory.”
“Hmm.” She ate the rest of her sandwich, studying him as she did so, and he had no idea what she was thinking. But after a minute or two, she shook her head. “No, Denys,” she said. “It won’t work.”
He frowned, puzzled by this enigmatic reply. “What won’t work?”
“This attempt to paint yourself as some sort of cad. Sorry, but I don’t believe it. I never have, and I never will. So, to quote your own words back at you, put that in your pipe and smoke it.”