Chapter One #2
Pandering oughtn’t to pay more than hard work, Gray thought bemusedly, a bit shamed at the lesson he’d just taught the boy.
He was still thinking it when the guard at the stage door let him in at the mention of his name, while a few dozen other fellows were left clamoring for entry.
The coin he slipped the man was worth more than the one he’d flipped to the boy, and though the smile it was greeted with was not as wide, the coin disappeared just as fast.
He touched his hand to his hat, as he paused at the opened door to the crowded roomful of shockingly half-dressed girls, his quick glance netting him a deliciously bewildering display of pink flesh, sequins, and dark tights, along with the scents of competing perfumes and the glimpse of so many different smiles, shapes, and colors of hair and lips and…
“She’s next door. Cowboy,” the woman nearest to the door answered after she quickly looked him up, priced him, and turned him down, all with a regretful smile, and all in a moment, as a practiced member of the chorus had to learn to do.
“Well, but the last time we met, you shared a dressing room just like that one,” he explained when he turned and saw the small, voluptuous titian-haired woman standing in the doorway of her dressing room next door, watching him with a slight frown on her lovely painted face.
“Umm,” she said thoughtfully, trying to remember if that was so, and deciding it might well be, for though she’d never forgotten him, he’d a way of making her forget her circumstances every time they met.
She relented, put up her cheek for him to kiss, and deciding to challenge him just for the fun of it, murmured sweetly, “Yes? Was that in Denver? Or Leadville?”
He touched her proffered, powdered cheek with his lips, and grinned down at her before he took her into his arms and took her lips at the same moment as answer, because he didn’t remember, or care to.
Or need to. Because it was a long moment before she heard some of the girls from the adjoining room giggling and remembered where they were, even as she forgot all her anger at him.
She stepped back from his embrace, and pulled him into her room, closing the door behind them.
He took off his hat and held it in front of him, as though he were bashful and contrite, not just because the room was so small there was nowhere else he could put it.
“Your own room! You’re going places, Joy,” he said admiringly, letting his glance rove over the tiny room as though it were a palatial suite he was viewing. And then he stood and gazed down at her with such appreciation it was almost as sweet as applause to her.
She looked away from where he stood, his fair hair glowing in the lamplight, his lean face showing clear and clearly sensual appraisal.
“But…your clothes, Gray,” she said slowly, to pay him back for almost making her forget that she knew he could act as well as she could.
“What has happened, my dear?” she asked. “Are you coming down in the world?”
It almost didn’t matter if he was when he looked at her that way. He grinned, causing two lines to appear in the tanned cheek to the left of his quirked smile, and one to the right of it.
“Aw, honey, it’s so sweet of you to care.
But it’s only that I rode into town today with some cattle.
There’s a man I want to see about a bull—improving the breed, dull stuff to you, I know—and by the time I’d got them settled, and myself as well, there was no time to change and still see the performance.
But I didn’t want to miss you,” he said, staring down at her lips.
“But…I’m not mentioned on the bill. Gray,” she said softly, clutching her dressing gown closed at the neck, turning aside as though she were hurt and not just trying to show him her left profile, her best side.
“And I wasn’t with ‘Henderson’s Touring Revue’ when we last met, either,” she added with a little broken catch to her voice to cover the slight gasp she gave as she felt his large, warm hand come to rest lightly on her shoulder.
“Didn’t you think I’d ask?” he murmured, letting his lips brush the charming profile she showed him.
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 in Her 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 doing Romeo 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’t used 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.