“Like me,” Royal said, turning at last to see that Gray’s flat voice was matched by the look in his eyes. “And so I guess you’re going fishing again tonight-like me.…Ah, but…” he added, with the first hint of a smile, “I ain’t angling for no dark, ah—’plump-lipped’ lady, myself.”
“Oh well, then,” Gray said, grinning widely, “you can have two shirts.”
“For a minute there I thought you were going to hand me a fistful of knuckles, not a shirt,” Royal commented as he ambled along in Gray’s wake, following him to his room, “but I can’t figure why. You got the looks that drive the ladies wild. I’m just an old cowhand.”
“There are things you’ve got to learn about ladies. So take a lesson from someone who, if not older or wiser, is at least more experienced with the breed,” Gray said with as much mischievousness in his eyes as there was pomposity in his voice. “For a start,” he said as he rooted in his wardrobe for a shirt, “…with all their airs and graces, there’s not much difference between what you’d call a lady and what you know as a woman—not if she’s worth getting to know at all. That being the case, there’s really not so much difference between them and us. After all, a gentleman’s just a man who knows when he has to hide the fact that he’s just a man. Same thing with ladies.
“Now, Number One,” he said, raising one finger, “there’s no accounting for what kind of man drives women wild, just like there’s no telling what makes a man hanker after any one woman. Remember Jake Jeffreys? The man never washed, never talked, and never earned a penny in all his days, but when he died, three widows showed up—all of them bawling for him at once.
“Two,” he went on as Royal laughed, remembering, “there’s something you have to learn about yourself; you can fit into my boots as well as my shirts, and if you didn’t spend most of your time with cattle, you’d see the ladies like you just fine. True, you’ve got a three-colored hide, like most cowboys,” he added, turning his head to smile as he stared at the contrasting tones of his friend’s arms, torso, and the margin of skin that showed at his navel where his towel was tied, “but it’sclear the ladies like what they can see. So you’ve got as good a chance as I do with any woman we meet, friend.
“And Number Three, and best of all for me: Miss Lottie said that my plump-lipped lady’s a man hater, and shrewd, mean as a rattler, and stuck-up, to boot. Which means,” Gray said, grinning as he handed a shirt to his perplexed friend, “that I’m in luck. Because if you understand the lingo of that particular breed, it means I can still pick them, even from across a crowded lobby. See,” he explained gleefully, “getting a recommendation like that from a woman like Miss Lottie, means that the lady I was asking after must be something really special!”
“No,” Hannah said firmly, because she knew her own mind. “Thank you,” she added, because she’d been brought up to be polite. “I don’t walk out with strange gentlemen,” she explained to the blond man, because he seemed to be waiting for her to say something more, and although he really didn’t deserve to be given a reason for her refusal, she was feeling generous. It was very flattering that he’d asked; he was, after all, extremely handsome and well dressed. And though she was as ashamed as pleased about it, it was even more gratifying that Lottie had seen him do so—before she’d walked off with a sniff and a swirl of her skirts.
But what she had to say was as honest as it was sadly true. Because she just didn’t go off with strange men that came calling backstage, and wouldn’t, even if she didn’t know that her handicap would make such encounters as eventually senseless as they’d be immediately immoral.
“I’m only asking for the pleasure of your company at dinner,” Gray said quietly. “In public, and in plain sight. I’m from Wyoming Territory, ma’am,” he added gently, looking as sincere and shy as a six-foot and some, fair-haired, tanned, tough, scarred, and superbly handsome male could. “Wyoming—where they invented lonely. But now I’m in town for the week, and so are you. So where’s the harm in it?”
The harm was obviously shining clear in those half-mocking, half-earnest bright blue eyes, and in the insidious smile that quirked that well-shaped mouth, Hannah thought with a trace of delicious panic such as she hadn’t felt for years, and he knew it as well as she did.
She blushed, lowering her lashes over her eyes as she hadn’t done since she was very young, and even as a scornful interior voice taunted her by giving her an unfavorable review as an overage and inept ingenue, she answered in just that breathless sort of voice, “We haven’t met. Not formally. Nor do we know each other. Nor will a dinner in plain sight make up for that oversight, you know. I’m so sorry, sir, but I’m not an actress, nor are all actresses available for such…arrangements, either.”
“I know that,” he said on a true smile. “M’ brother married an actress. Up in New York, where he lives now. And I swear there wasn’t a prissier lady between here and there than she was. Led him a fine dance, till she waltzed off to the preacher with him.”
“Ahh,that’swhere I know the face from. The dialogue was familiar, as was the presentation of the lonesome cowboy. Very effective, by the by,” Kyle commented, from where he stood lounging in the shadows of the backstage hall, watching the pair. “Although I do believe your brother did it better,” he added, sauntering toward them. “But he’d a broken nose to add verisimilitude to the character. You’ve a scar or two, but it doesn’t compare. But then you were a college boy when we last met, weren’t you? and I doubt you can completely cover over all that eastern polish you’ve gotten since. Graham Dylan, is it not?” Kyle asked, drawling the “Graham” as “Gram,” English style, as had been originally intended, not “Grayham,” which accounted for his nickname, as Americans said it.
Kyle offered his hand as another man might offer a thrown gauntlet, “I don’t forget names once a face gives me a clue. Yours, I’ll confess, escaped me at first. But it’s been a decade or more. And you’ve changed in most things but your tastes. When last we met, you were canvassing the backstages for dancers and bit actresses. Now you’ve escalated to trying to induce my assistants to come play with you after the play. Your taste has improved,” he said with a mocking smile.
“Why, thanks,” Gray said with an air of amused calm that didn’t match the look in his eyes. “And Lucy’s doing fine, thanks for asking. The last time you saw her she was a blushing bride. Now she’s got four kids, one smarter than the other. Can you believe it? four. They sing and dance and herd dogs and ponies at their Long Island home, because nothing else but sea gulls roam there. They live in New York City the other half of the year. My sister-in-law used to be a star in Mr. Harper’s company,” he explained to Hannah. Then he looked to Kyle and smiling,said, “I’ll tell Lucy you were asking after her when I write next time. She’ll be so pleased. Why, I guess she thought you’d forgotten her entirely since you never wrote or called. So you see,” he said, turning to Hannah again, as Kyle for once seemed bereft of an easy retort, “now you know my name, my family—Lord, ma’am, you’ve got a full reference—the only reason to refuse me now would be pure cruelty.”
Or common sense, both Hannah and Kyle thought, as Kyle recovered and told Hannah quickly, “Oh, but I thought you and I and Frank would go over that bit of his and Lottie’s tonight,” before he fell still, instantly ashamed of himself for such a clumsy, awkward ruse.
But Hannah thought it protective and endearing of him. And as she’d been searching for a reason to deny herself the exquisite pain-pleasure of a new acquaintance that could only lead to an old familiar pain, she said brightly, “Oh yes. I’d almost forgot. Sorry, Mr. Dylan, but my previous promise comes first.”
“I understand,” Gray said, and a glance at his face showed he did, and more, as he added, “tomorrow light, then?”
“We’re leaving tomorrow—early, for Aspen,” Kyle said triumphantly.
“Why so am I!” Gray said with a wonderful display of pleased amazement.
“Via Central City,” Kyle said.
“My route exactly,” Gray said with pleasure.
“And Leadville, a most circuitous path, you will agree,” Kyle said.
“Most,” Gray agreed pleasantly. “Lucky thing I’ve business there, too.”
And before Kyle could ask where, or Hannah could give way to the laughter that was welling up in her, he added, “So I guess I’ll see you there, ma’am…Mr. Harper.”
And on that deliciously ambiguous note, touched his hand to his hat, turned, and strolled away, leaving Kyle to simmer with the knowledge that he’d just mouthed a perfect exit line. Then, Kyle noted with chagrin, he made an even more dramatic exit because of the slight limp that had gone unnoticed before. As she noted it now, Hannah’s laughter was quelled, although her expression held no pity at all. No, Kyle thought gloomily, it held something far worse: interest.
Kyle hadn’t made a move toward Mrs. Hannah Darling-Roberts since she’d told him it would be unwelcome. It wasn’t her words that discouraged him so much as all her unvoiced body language, the way she behaved when they were alone and working together the way she edged away from a seemingly accidental elbow touched to the side of her breast, the way she backed off from a conversation that grew too close the way she stepped aside when a whisper became too confidential. A man who read faces and movements ai well as other men read books, Kyle hadn’t needed words to deter him. But now, this look of longing when she looked after Graham Dylan…
Kyle hadn’t lost many women to other men. It wasn’t because of his looks, he knew, and certainly not his money, no matter how he wished that could be the case. Nor was it even his personality so much as it was how well he knew the women he wanted. A man who wished to succeed in the theater had to know art and artifice and over all, human nature. That, he did. Though a dreamer, he’d a strong streak of rationality, so he never set his sights higher than he knew he could achieve. But he was only a mortal man. He’d miscalculated and misjudged sometimes, and so lost some women he’d tried to keep. One, in particular, to that man’s brother. He hadn’t loved her, but then he’d never loved any woman in the way that the plays he presented, presented that human emotion. Nor had he regretted it; from what he could see, true love involved self-sacrifice and self-denial. Very good subjects for theater, of course, but hideous in real life he had thought, and real life was a thing he avoided if he could.
That long lost young woman Graham Dylan had reminded Kyle of had been a professional more than a personal loss to him. Because she’d been a stepping stone, one he’d badly needed to cross the abyss between obscurity and success. Hannah was another such; he needed her now, and that need was a kind of love in itself. And as for other kinds of love, why, she was certainly lovely enough for any man…
