He slowly unwrapped his piece of bubble gum as he watched her struggling with the suitcase. “If you turn it on its side there, Francie, I think it'll be easier to get out.”
She clamped her teeth together to keep from calling him every vile name in her vocabulary and jerked on the suitcase, putting a long scratch in the leather as it banged into the door handle. I'll kill him, she thought, dragging the suitcase toward a rusted blue and white rest room sign. I'll kill him and then I'll stomp on his corpse. Grasping a chipped white porcelain knob that hung loose from its plate, she pushed on the door, but it refused to budge. She tried two more times before it finally swung inward, squealing on its hinges. And then she gulped.
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 Hermès 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 fiancé. 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.
The current argument, in what seemed to be an ongoing series between Dallie and that horrid companion of his, distracted her from her reverie.
“I don't see why you're so hell-bent on making Baton Rouge tonight,” Skeet complained. “We've got all day tomorrow to get to Lake Charles in time for your round Monday morning. What difference does an extra hour make?”
“The difference is I don't want to spend any more time driving on Sunday than I have to.”
“I'll drive. It's only an extra hour, and there's that real nice motel where we stayed last year. Don't you have a dog or something to check on there?”
“Since when did you give a damn about any of my dogs?”
“A cute little mutt with a black spot over one eye, wasn't it? Had some kind of a bad leg.”
“That was in Vicksburg.”
“You sure?”
“Of course I'm sure. Listen, Skeet, if you want to spend tonight in New Orleans so you can go over to the Blue Choctaw and see that red-haired waitress, why don't you just come out and say it instead of beating around the bush like this, going on about dogs and bad legs like some kind of goddamn hypocrite.”
“I didn't say anything about a red-haired waitress or wanting to go to the Blue Choctaw.”
“Yeah. Well, I'm not going with you. That place is an invitation to a fight, especially on Saturday night. The women all look like mud wrestlers and the men are worse. I damn near busted a rib the last time I went there, and I've had enough aggravation for one day.”
“I told you to leave her with the guy at the filling station, but you wouldn't listen to me. You never listen to me. Just like last Thursday. I told you that shot from the rough was a hundred thirty-five yards; I'd paced it off, and I told you, but you ignored me and picked up that eight-iron just like I hadn't said a word.”
“Just be quiet about it, will you? I told you right then I was wrong, and I told you the next day that I was wrong, and I been telling you twice a day ever since, so shut up!”
“That's a rookie's trick, Dallie, not trusting your caddy for the yardage. Sometimes I think you're deliberately trying to lose tournaments.”
“Francie?” Dallie said over his shoulder. “You got any more of those fascinating stories about mascara you want to tell me right now?”
“Sorry,” she said sweetly. “I'm all out. Besides, I'm not supposed to chat. Remember?”
“Too late anyway, I guess,” Dallie sighed, pulling up to the airport's main terminal. With the ignition still running, he got out of the car and came around to open her door. “Well, Francie, I can't say it hasn't been interesting.” After she stepped out, he reached into the back seat, removed her cases, and set them next to her on the sidewalk. “Good luck with your fiancé and the prince and all those other high rollers you run around with.”
“Thank you,” she said stiffly.
He took a couple of quick chews on his bubble gum and grinned. “Good luck with those vampires, too.”
She met his amused gaze with icy dignity. “Good-bye, Mr. Beaudine.”
“Good-bye, Miss Francie Pants.”
He'd gotten the last word on her. She stood on the pavement in front of the terminal and faced the undeniable fact that the gorgeous hillbilly had scored the final point in a game she'd invented. An illiterate—probably illegitimate— backwoods bumpkin had outwitted, outtalked, and out-scored the incomparable Francesca Serritella Day.
What was left of her spirit staged a full-scale rebellion, and she gazed up at him with eyes that spoke volumes in the history of banned literature. “It's too bad we didn't meet under different circumstances.” Her pouty mouth curled into a wicked smile. “I'm absolutely certain we'd have tons in common.”
And then she stood on tiptoe, curled into his chest, and lifted her arms until they encircled his neck, never for a moment letting her gaze drop from his. She tilted up her perfect face and offered up her soft mouth like a jeweled chalice. Gently drawing his head down with the palms of her. hands, she placed her lips over his and then slowly parted them so that Dallie Beaudine could take a long, unforgettable drink.
He didn't even hesitate. He jumped right in just as if he'd been there before, bringing with him all the expertise he'd gained over the years to meet and mingle with all of hers. Their kiss was perfect—hot and sexy—two pros doing what they did best, a tingler right down to the toes. They were both too experienced to bump teeth or mash noses or do any of those other awkward things less practiced men and women are apt to do. The Mistress of Seduction had met the Master, and to Francesca the experience was as close to perfect as anything she'd ever felt, complete with goose bumps and a lovely weakness in her knees, a spectacularly perfect kiss made even more perfect by the knowledge that she didn't have to give a moment's thought to the awkward aftermath of having implicitly promised something she had no intention of delivering.
The pressure of the kiss eased, and she slid the tip of her tongue along his bottom lip. Then she slowly pulled away. “Good-bye, Dallie,” she said softly, her cat's eyes slanting up at him with a mischievous glitter. “Look me up the next time you're in Cap Ferret.”
Just before she turned away, she had the pleasure of seeing a slightly bemused expression take over his gorgeous face.
“I should be used to it by now,” Skeet was saying as Dallie climbed back behind the wheel. “I should be used to it, but I'm not. They just fall all over you. Rich ones, poor ones, ugly ones, fancy ones. Don't make no difference. It's like they're all a bunch of homing pigeons circling in to roost. You got lipstick on you.”
Dallie wiped the back of his hand over his mouth and then looked down at the pale smear. “Definitely imported,” he muttered.
From just inside the door of the terminal, Francesca watched the Buick pull away and suppressed an absurd pang of regret. As soon as the car was out of sight, she picked up her cases and walked back outside until she came to a taxi stand with a single yellow cab. The driver got out and loaded her cases into the trunk while she settled in the back. As he got behind the wheel, he turned to her. “Where to, ma'am?”
“I know it's late,” she said, “but do you think you could find a resale shop that's still open?”
“Resale shop?”
“Yes. Someplace that buys designer labels... and a really extraordinary suitcase.”
Chapter
9
New Orleans—the city of “Stella, Stella, Stella for star,” of lacy ironwork and Old Man River, Confederate jasmine and sweet olive, hot nights, hot jazz, hot women—lay at the bottom of the Mississippi like a tarnished piece of jewelry. In a city noted for its individuality, the Blue Choctaw managed to remain common. Gray and dingy, with a pair of neon beer signs that flickered painfully in a window dulled by exhaust fumes, the Blue Choctaw could have been located near the seediest part of any American city—near the docks, the mills, the river, skirting the ghetto. It bumped up to the bad side, the never-after-dark, littered sidewalks, broken street lamps, no-good-girls-allowed part of town.
The Blue Choctaw had a particular aversion to good girls. Even the women the men had left at home weren't all that good, and the men sure as hell didn't want to find better ones sitting on the red vinyl bar stool
s next to them. They wanted to find girls like Bonni and Cleo, semi-hookers who wore strong perfume and red lipstick, who talked tough and thought tough and helped a man forget that Jimmy Asshole Carter was sure enough going to get himself elected President and give all the good jobs to the niggers.
Bonni twirled the yellow plastic sword in her mai-tai and peered through the noisy crowd at her friend and rival Cleo Reznyak, who was shoving her tits up against Tony Grasso as he pushed a quarter in the jukebox and punched in C-24. There was a mean mood in the smoky air of the Blue Choctaw that night, meaner than usual, although Bonni didn't try to put her finger on its source. Maybe it was the sticky heat that wouldn't let go; maybe it was the fact that Bonni had turned thirty the week before and the last of her illusions had just about disappeared. She knew she wasn't smart, wasn't pretty enough to get by on her looks, and she didn't have the energy to improve herself. She was living in a broken-down trailer park, answering the telephone at Gloria's Hair Beautiful, and it wasn't going to get any better.
For a girl like Bonni, the Blue Choctaw represented a shot at the good times, a few laughs, the occasional big spender who would pick up the tab for her mai-tais, take her to bed, and leave a fifty-dollar bill on the dresser next morning. One of those big spenders was sitting at the other end of the bar... with his eye on Cleo.
She and Cleo had an agreement. They stood together against any newcomers who tried to sink their butts too comfortably onto the Blue Choctaw's bar stools, and they didn't poach on each other's territory. Still, the spender at the bar tempted Bonni. He had a big belly and arms strong enough to show that he held a steady job, maybe working on one of the offshore drilling rigs—a man out for a good time. Cleo had been getting more than her fair share of men lately, including Tony Grasso, and Bonni was tired of it.
“Hi,” she said, wandering over and sliding up on the stool next to him. “You're new around here, aren't you?”
He looked her over, taking in her carefully arranged helmet of sprayed blond hair, her plum eye shadow, and deep, full breasts. As he nodded, Bonni could see him forgetting about Cleo.