She didn’t and he hadn’t, and they both knew that, but they were both enjoying the game they were playing. He turned her around and kissed her for a very long time, long enough to undo her robe, and almost undo her entirely. But, he noticed, when he opened his eyes to look for a place to be more comfortable with their sport, the room wasn’t big enough for them to lie down in, even if there’d been a bed in it. The wall was likely too thin to take the pounding it would get if they leaned up against it, and he doubted very much if she’d let him take her onto his lap even if the spindly chair in the room had been strong enough to support the two of them. In any event, he was sure she’d insist on the usual procedure: dinner and flirtation, offers, rejections, and more fervent offers, and then, and only then, when honor and illusion had both been satisfied, could he be. Because only then could there be a trip to a room and a bed. It had been, after all, weeks since they’d last met. Or months, he couldn’t quite remember. He sighed and drew back from her, glad that he’d at least been able to remember her from her name after the boy had told it to him.
“Where can we be alone, darling?” he asked.
It took her a moment to recover herself enough to answer. He always did that to her, that was almost the nicest thing about him.
“Dinner?” she asked.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Where are you staying?” he asked eagerly, because he doubted Henderson’s Touring Revue could afford his hotel, and didn’t want her there anyway because that would mean his room, and he wanted to get some sleep tonight, after.
She smiled coyly and turned, drawing her dressing gown up over her shoulder again, and peered at him over it. “Oh, but think of my reputation,” she breathed, using the exact words, tone, and stance of the ingenue inHer Atonement, before she asked slyly and in a more natural voice, “Where would you suggest?”
“Then never my place!” he exclaimed, with an almost believable show of horror. “Not if it’s your reputation at stake!”
She scowled at how ill her art had served her, and thought of how to get around the trap she’d set for herself. A night in his bed might lead to another, since she knew that a clever woman installed in a man’s bed might maneuver herself into becoming a permanent fixture there—or a semipermanent one—at least until the end of this run. And who knew what might happen after that?
“How about that handsome dining parlor up the street?” he volunteered enthusiastically.
Her eyes narrowed.
“How about Folgers?” she snapped, because that was the most expensive hotel in town, and she thought he was probably staying there, too.
“But I’m in all my dirt!” he protested.
She smiled in spite of her chagrin.
“How you do talk,” she said, shaking her head. When he looked at her curiously, she explained, “I know it’s only that your daddy was English, but sometimes when you say something like that I swear I think we’re doingRomeo and Juliet.”
He’d forgotten that he’d ever told her that, it had probably been at a moment when he wasn’t responsible for what he was saying. It bothered him, he wasn’tused to being intimate to women he was only intimate with, so he said quickly and in a deeper western accent, “I only meant that it’s a fancy place, honey, they’d never let me in dressed like I am. Let’s try that place up the street, I’m starved, I can’t wait…for dinner,” he said passionately, giving her a heated, all-encompassing look.
“My hotel’s got better food, and it’s not fancy,” she said curtly, giving it up because it was true. She was withal realistic, before she chided him by protesting, “It would never do to be seen just up the street with you so late at night,” because she was, even so, always an actress. “Now, scoot, I must dress,” she said on a teasing smile, giving him a gentle push to the door, because she knew that the getting into clothes was never so pretty a procedure as the getting out of them, especially since she’d have to lace herself up tightly if she wanted her new blue gown to look good. And she wanted to look very good to him.
He waited outside her door, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings. Which was more than could be said of those around him. One of the members of the chorus peeped out their dressing-room door to see if the gent she’d agreed, by note, to an assignation with, had arrived yet, and seeing Gray standing there, drew in her breath. Then she wilted. He couldn’t be her gent, of course, because he was no gentleman. But she couldn’t help staring.
He wore the everyday working garb of an ordinary ranch hand, the kind of man that filled all the theaters around here, the kind her more experienced friends told her to stay away from, since they didn’t have more than the clothes they wore. But the way he wore those clothes! His broad shoulders filled out his cowhide jacket, his lean hips and long legs made the common denim trousers he wore seem as elegant and graceful as if he were in evening dress; she caught a glimpse of an ivory handle at the wide belt that circled his narrow waist, so it might be that he wore a gun as well as boots and spurs. But it was difficult to fault any kind of clothes when they adorned such a form.
It was more than what he had on, his face was too tanned and scarred to be that of a gentleman. Although, she admitted on a stifled sigh, the white scar on his chin only called attention to its perfect shape, just as a longer, darker one on his cheek spoiled its symmetry but emphasized his high cheekbones. His nose was long and narrow, his lips, full and shapely, if he’d had a beard and burnside whiskers instead of only a mustache as flaxen as his thick overlong hair, she supposed hisscars would have been concealed, but then the clear, clean shape of his face wouldn’t be as visible either. And then, there were those sky-blue eyes.
There was too much character in that face for him to be a villain, even if there was too much experience in it for the young hero. He wasn’t quite an Adonis, although he looked quite a man: too hard-bitten forHamlet, she mused, staring at him from the concealment of the door, fascinated, too young and attractive forRip Van Winkle, but maybe anEnoch Arden, she decided, and certainly a swell Mr. Rochester forJane Eyre, and a peach of a boyfriend forThe Bride Forlorn.
But then she stopped casting him in her private play. Because Miss Joy Fenwick, their newest ingenue, stepped out of her dressing room and took the cowboy’s arm.
The chorus girl gasped, causing her bosom friend, Miss Daisy Denton, who was preparing to accompany her tonight with her own admirer—at least so far as dinner—to look at her curiously.
“Miss Joy’s taking a vacation, do you think?” she asked her friend, to cover over the way she’d been caught goggling at the fellow. “It isn’t like her to give up profit for a pair of blue eyes.”
Miss Denton squinted into the faint light of the corridor to watch the departing couple, and saw the slight hitch in the man’s gait as he dipped his fair head to hear something the woman said.
“Some vacation!” she said, as much in chagrin as admiration. “I’ll bet it’ll just feel like a week in the country, too! Trust her to know how to combine work and play. Only two years in the chorus, and her singing’s no better than her acting, if you can call it that—and she’s got her own dressing room. Now this. She was born lucky. And smart! Don’t be a dopey. That’s Gray Dylan.”
“Who?” her friend asked.
“He owns everything hereabouts,” Miss Denton said enviously.
“A dopey, am I?” her friend asked on a sniff. “Well, how should you know. Miss double-dopey, when we’ve only been here for a day. This is not New York, you know.”
“He owns everything there, too,” Miss Denton sighed.
“Oh,” her friend said sadly, though still not quite convinced, since in her experience, and it was considerable, a gentleman with money looked like one— which was to say, not very much like a gentleman, and not at all like a leading man of any sort, and so not in the least like Gray Dylan.
