Chapter Fourteen
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
T HOMAS SHOULD HAVE LET HER GO WHEN HE HAD THE CHANCE.
The proposition in her dressing room, the late-night negotiations, this morning over coffee—he had so many opportunities to be rid of her. Any one of those opportunities would have saved him from the dangers of being near her.
If I could ruin you, why am I here?
He’d convinced himself it was safer, keeping her close, but barricaded by their contract.
Now, he knew what a fool he was.
There was still nearly a month until the opening of The Empire. Nearly a month he would have to endure her persistent closeness and the brush of her honey perfume as it danced against his cheek and the delicious crumple of her gowns as they cinched over her river-bend hips.
Nearly a month to resist her. More like a lifetime. More like an eternity. More like an impossibility.
“So, Mr. Gallier. My place, or yours?”
“I beg your pardon?” he asked, pausing at the top of the spiral staircase leading them both away from The Empire’s executive offices and toward the main arcade.
“I’m sure we both have business matters to attend to,” Evelyn amended, fluttering those damn long lashes of hers as though she hadn’t just intentionally flirted. “Shall we attend to yours first, or my own?”
“You mean you didn’t have a reason for taking me from my office?”
“I didn’t have a specific reason for pulling you out of your second-story monastery, no. I don’t require one. Not according to our contract. The sun is up. The timecards have been punched. You and I are officially on the clock. We’ll conduct the day’s business together, as we agreed.”
Thomas bit the inside of his cheek. She was trying to fluster him. It was working.
“Besides,” she continued, flouncing down the steps, “I’ve never conducted my business affairs in an office, and I don’t intend to begin now.”
It took a full moment for him to recover from the shock of that particular quip before he was able to chase her down again.
She stood in the center of the Grand Arcade, staring at the magnificent scenery all around her. If he didn’t know better, he might have thought the sight took Miss Cross’s breath away. The way her soft, pink lower lip dropped ever so slightly instantly drew his entire attention.
He hated how his chest puffed at her approval.
“How about a tour?” she asked, at last.
“Of The Empire?”
“I’ll be working here, won’t I? Or are you too afraid of what I might think?”
A challenge. She made a sport out of riling him. This time, he didn’t retreat.
This was work. Business. He could handle that.
“No,” he said. “A tour is a capital idea. May I?”
“ Capital idea ,” she scoffed.
“It’s an expression. It means—”
“I know what it means. I also know that people haven’t used it since the last time you lobster backs went to war with the French.”
He smothered a smile. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re implying.”
“Just making an observation,” she mused. Yet the look on her face reminded him of a detective in a play, discovering a clue that unlocked a grander puzzle.
He offered her his arm. Merely the polite, gentlemanly thing to do.
Even the weight of her hand on him, the heat of it, the soft, gentle shift of her body against his, inspired spectacularly impolite, ungentlemanly thoughts.
At every turn, window painters applied gold leaf lettering to the shop windows. Muralists transferred their designs onto the half-moon relief gaps between the walls and ceiling. For the first time since embarking on this project, he was too distracted to find fault in their work or micromanage from over their shoulders.
Together, they carried on for a spell, with Thomas narrating the sights and pointing out the building’s wonders. When Evelyn slipped from his touch to bend over a wrought iron specialist—a Haitian artisan brought all the way from New Orleans—as he shaped metal for a nearby gate, Thomas shook his head.
She was purposefully bending over like that. Drawing attention to her fine—posterior.
“May I make an observation?” he asked.
“Certainly. So long as it’s thoroughly complimentary,” she replied idly.
“You scandalize on purpose, don’t you? I thought, perhaps, it was second nature. A product of your time in show business, so normalized it became almost a tic. But I’ve come to reconsider that. You actually enjoy making a man squirm, don’t you?”
She raised a flirtatious eyebrow. “You’re damned right I do—”
“I heard it as soon as I said it. Please disregard.”
She laughed—heartily and freely, a sound that made Thomas nearly weak with envy. “If you must know, Mr. Gallier,” she began, leaning on that singular ability she had to say his name like it was an invitation to take her clothes off, “I don’t enjoy making all men squirm. But you? I happen to enjoy making you squirm very much.”
“Even though there’s no need? Even though you’ve already gotten everything you could possibly want from me?”
“Oh, I haven’t gotten everything I want from you. Not yet.”
He didn’t have the strength to ask any follow-up questions. Instead, he nudged her forward on the tour. The Grand Arcade led to the vaudeville theater, which she’d already seen, so Thomas diverted to one of seven birdcage elevators that cut straight through the heart of the building. The marble staircases would have been good enough, but perhaps he was showing off.
Just a bit.
The elevator was forged by bars of pure decorated steel, and its floor was an elegant marble cut across by a handwoven carpet of countless imported threads. Traveling twelve stories high, it was a miracle of engineering and a feat of elegant design. He was proud of it and didn’t mind showing her so.
“An electric elevator,” he announced as he busied himself engaging the doors, locking them into the contraption together. “Have you ever ridden in one before?”
“I’ve never had the pleasure. The pleasure of riding in an elevator, anyway.”
“The first ride is always a thrill,” he said.
Leaning against the far wall, she licked her lips ever so slightly, giving no doubt of her scandalous train of thought. “I bet.”
Perhaps the stairs would have been better after all. The confines of the elevator now felt like a cage—too small to share with her. Her perfume clouded his senses.
He grasped the control lever firmly, as he’d been taught by the elevator’s designer upon its installation.
“You’ll want to hold on to the railing, Miss Cross. It’s not dangerous, but it can be discombobulating.”
With that, he threw the lever and the elevator buzzed to life, pulling them downward at a racing speed of twenty feet per minute. It was at this point in the proceedings that he usually gave a speech about how he acquired the elevators, but when the elevator jolted—
“Miss Cross!”
A body, warm and welcoming, stumbled into him, pinning him against the elevator door. Arms wrapped around his shoulders for stability. And when he blinked, Evelyn Cross’s lips hovered just over his. She was on tiptoe, curving into him. Tantalizingly close.
She didn’t even have the decency to pretend it was a mistake.
“You’ve been in an elevator before, haven’t you?” he asked, careful not to let his mouth move too animatedly—if he did, there was no doubt they would kiss. That’s how close they were.
Evelyn only hummed her reply. Smug. “Mm-hm.”
They were alone. They were close. He wanted her. The math worked out to one simple conclusion.
Kiss her .
Instead, their world rattled as the elevator reached its terminus. This time, the force was enough to genuinely knock Evelyn—away from him this time, rather than toward him. He took advantage of the distance and continued with the tour as though nothing had happened.
The basement aquacade was designed with the stampeding horse fountain of Versailles in mind, and he repeated his usual precis of the design’s architectural inspiration with practiced coolness. If she noticed the occasional waver in his voice or how he tripped over his own feet not once, but twice upon exiting the elevator, she had the decency not to say.
He was determined to let their brush with the carnal pass by unremarked. But as she leaned down to brush her bare fingers along the furnace-warmed water, his resolve gave way and he foolishly mused:
“I don’t understand you.”
“What’s there to understand? I’m a fairly simple creature, all things considered. I like fine clothes and applause and money and my friends and you. Or, at least, I think I would like you if you took those clothes off long enough for me to judge fairly.”
“See, that’s what it is. You insist on making a spectacle of yourself. It baffles me.”
With a tap of her fingertips in the smooth surface of the water, she muddied her reflection.
“At the risk of scandalizing you even further, attention is currency for women. Particularly women like me. If I’m not a spectacle, I’m invisible. And invisible women can’t earn a living.”
“You’re not invisible,” he said. “You never could be.”
Realizing how that sounded— almost like a compliment —he hastily added, “Because sometimes, it doesn’t feel like you’re doing all of this to promote yourself. Sometimes, it feels as though you’re using yourself as a weapon.”
She flinched. He’d struck true. With a small, secret gesture, Evelyn raised one wet finger to her barely smiling mouth— shhhh . When her hand dropped to her side, she licked the droplets from her lips. Another one of those gimmicks to distract him. “A lady never tells.”
As they made their way through the rest of the building, Evelyn had the good sense to ask so many questions that he had barely any time to further plumb the depths of her inner life. How do you intend to secure the aerialist’s rigging in the acrobatics pavilion? The boxing ring—will medical staff be on hand in case of predictable emergency? The hall of wonders and oddities—how often will exhibitions be changed to encourage repeat visits? Were nine restaurants of international flavors from Italian to Chinese really necessary? The Racket Hall—will gentlemen be required to pay extra for admission and will ladies need a chaperone? The moving picture show—isn’t that just a fad? The racing car course on the roof—the view is fine, but that seemed like a poor bit of planning, didn’t it, considering the cars will need to be lifted by crane to reach the track?
On and on the questions went, partly fueled by genuine interest and partly, he suspected, by her desire to avoid any more of his questions. Thomas allowed them because they flattered his vanity—and kept her mouth busy far away from his own.
However, Thomas realized, he hadn’t put much thought into the conclusion of his tour. As a result, it proved quite anticlimactic.
They stopped in a great empty hall that occupied two full stories of the palace.
“What is this?” Evelyn asked, tilting her head in such a way that a curl slipped free of her sensible bun. Thomas fought the urge to tuck it back into place.
“The zoo—sorry. The menagerie. That’s the proper word.”
“I don’t know a single person who knows what the word menagerie means.”
“You know Andrew and me,” he pointed out. “And yourself.”
“You spent so much time earlier asking me about why I make a spectacle of myself, and here you are doing the same thing.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lied, his throat tightening.
Despite the room’s emptiness, Evelyn took a turn around it. So casual, and then—“That accent of yours. It’s fake, isn’t it?”
“I beg your pardon?”
His throat wasn’t tight now. It was properly closed. She’d destroyed him with a single question.
A single, very astute, very dangerous question.
“I’ve been in the business a long time,” she said, shrugging. “I’ve heard every faker the good Lord ever put on this earth. In the early days of my career, in fact, I traveled with Lady Prudence Evergale, whose entire act consisted of nothing more than being a 100 percent bona fide English lady—at least, that’s what the marquee called her. In reality, she was just a girl from Sweet Water with a mouth of straight teeth, a fantastic accent, and a country of rubes happy to buy her lies. Accents are sort of a specialty of mine, you might say. Is yours real? And if it’s not, who are you trying to fool?”
Thomas’s cheeks burned, but he adopted a teasing smile that he hoped reached his eyes. Evade. Don’t let her see you sweat. “What was it you said earlier? A lady never tells ?”
She tutted. “If you’d been any kind of clever, you would have replied, But neither of us are ladies here .”
“I have nothing to hide, Miss Cross.”
Evelyn searched his face. Then, her lips curled into a smile—soft and sweet.
“I nearly believed you there. But you should know one thing about going into business with show people, sir. We can always spot one of our own.”
She whispered that last bit, taunting him. Thomas offered her his arm, deliberately turning the conversation back to work.
“Shall we return to the tour?”