Chapter Five #3
“You didn’t come to my come out,” Miss Holly Ingram complained archly, adroitly edging Miss Rhonda and Miss Emma-Lou aside.
He looked down at the little gold and white lady before him.
John Ingram’s late-life daughter, his only baby girl.
Daddy ran a lot of cattle on his ranch, but made his money in railroads and silver, so he’d had to come to Denver to run it into some more.
A fair enough man, who knew cattle, but could talk money.
She was petite, with an extraordinarily full bosom for such a slim girl.
He’d known her family since forever, but she seemed to have grown up and out very nicely since he’d last seen her.
There wasn’t a spot left on her winsome face.
And since she was the prettiest girl he’d seen outside of a theater in a long while, he smiled down at her and said, “No, honey, I did not. And I’m purely sorry.
I didn’t see just how much you had come out, you see. ”
That would have got him the back of one pretty little shoulder in New York, if not worse.
When he noticed the way her gold hair was drawn up from the faint hollow at the nape of her white neck, he almost looked forward to following her when she left, and apologizing sincerely.
He was genuinely sorry when it turned out he didn’t have to.
“Oh you!” Miss Holly squeaked, tapping him with her fan. “You’re a right caution. Gray! But it isn’t too late to come visit with…us,” she added, more softly, managing to tilt her head down and yet her eyes up, so that she could look at him through a fan of eyelashes.
“Well, and I just might,” he said as he thought it, but the sudden triumph that sparked those deep blue eyes when she raised her head made him sorry he had.
But after all, it was sort of a competition, he thought fairly, noting the way those eyes could say things Miss Holly, for all her boldness, couldn’t.
It was the only way a girl like Holly Ingram could get herself a suitable husband.
She couldn’t go out and find a suitable man, the way he could find any kind of girls.
Though men outnumbered women five to one around here, few had enough money to match hers.
They hadn’t got the idea of looking for a title instead of money here yet, either.
But give them a few more years, Gray thought, and they’d be just as pleased to be marrying a pauper “Sir” this, or an indigent “Count” that, as their New York sisters were.
Their money was just too new to squander on pure show yet.
He couldn’t blame her for competing when she thought she found a fellow she liked.
She had to be twenty or so, by now. It wouldn’t be long, before her folks got antsy enough to demand she get married before she got much older, however coddled she was, and harder to suit.
Curved and scented, gold and white, and obviously interested in him, she was, he decided with a glow of pleasure that made the whole afternoon bearable to him, a distinct possibility.
He chatted her up for a while longer, stepping aside with her, turning his back slightly so as to definitely single her out, showing his preference for her until the other girls had no choice but to begin to drift disappointedly away from them.
They talked about weather and mutual acquaintances, and then about other things that didn’t matter, but that could be talked about long enough for him to have made his point: long enough to make her mama smile, and yet not quite long enough to get her daddy to go running for his financial statements or his rifle, and just long enough to be sure she’d keep until he next came to town.
He didn’t give himself airs, but knew he was a catch.
In the East, because of his name and fortune.
The fact that his father had been an English gentleman, actually a younger son of a viscount, added luster.
The further fact that his father had been more of a gentleman than a businessman, and though charming and wellintentioned, impoverished, didn’t matter to anyone but his sons any longer.
The most important fact was that he’d left nothing to his boys but a love of education, a sense of fair play, and an insatiable craving to make the fortune that he hadn’t— and they had.
Or rather, as Gray never forgot, his oldest son had.
Then there were his looks, which East or West, were always made much of by the girls, if not by their fathers or himself.
Whether or not the girls around here found him a treat didn’t matter as much as the fact that their daddies knew his history, and generally approved of it.
They knew he was sharp in business and soft on women; that he wasn’t afraid of work, but liked to kick up his heels now and then, and was smart enough to do it quietly.
And mostly, that he was rich enough to turn them down if he wanted to—in business or at the pleasure of marrying their daughters.
When he judged the time was ripe, Gray made a teasingly ambiguous farewell to Holly, and then went and collected Royal. He separated him from his admirers with a deft excuse that no one listened to because they were imploring them to stay, and hauled him off out the door.
“Better get yourself a pair of dancing slippers. Beau,” Gray said. “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a belle of the ball here.”
“Never,” Royal said through tightly clenched teeth as he strode down the hall. “Ain’t never going to go to such a thing again.”
“But they purely loved you,” Gray said, trying not to smile.
“In the first place, they don’t know me. In the second, Gray, I don’t have that kind of money.”
“But you do now. Royal,” Gray said seriously. “I know that, if you don’t. You’ve invested right along with us, small but steady, for years. It’s a considerable sum now, trust me. You just haven’t done anything with it.”
“Well, I’m surely not going to do the kind of things they expect with it,” Royal said, striding onward toward the long turning grand staircase that would take them back to the hotel lobby.
“Mansions and gowns and whatall and parties and soirees—damn, Gray, I was invited to soirees today. Me! I want a house and some land and the kind of wife who won’t mind if I take off my boots at night.
Don’t laugh, God knows what these kinds of girls expect of a man! ”
“What do you expect of them? They can’t read minds, and you were about as chatty as a rock back there, weren’t you?
You haven’t given them a chance yet,” Gray said, following his fleeing friend so closely that he couldn’t conceal his slight halt step.
Royal glanced back, then slowed his pace and looked more thoughtful as Gray added, “Knowing you. I’d think that when you meet the girl you want, you’d give her mansions and whatall, and even soirees, if it made her happy.
After all, a little evening dinner party ain’t much to give a girl, is it? ”
“That all?” Royal asked, grinning. “Sounded worse.”
“Well, it’s bad enough,” Gray said, matching his grin.
“I’m glad you didn’t accept. That’s not where I want to go tonight.
Let’s see,” he said, as they took the stairs, “the girls said that Bob Ford’s in town, giving a lecture on ‘How I shot Jesse James.’ They’re all atwitter about that, and are killed to go, but their daddies won’t let them. ”
“Afraid of riffraff in the audience?” Royal asked.
“Hell no, they were all riffraff themselves and not so long ago. No, it’s revenge in the audience they’re scared of.”
“That’s dumb,” Royal said as they reached the bottom of the stair. “Boys are saying Jesse’s alive and well and living good somewhere. Bob’s his cousin, you know, and they’re thinking he’s spreading the word too far and too wide for a sane man to do if he’d really killed old Jesse.”
“Oh, I know that,” Gray said, “though it’s healthier not to. So I guess we can write off old Bob, even though there’s no danger of discovering any of the ladies in the audience? Now then, where else can we go where we can’t find them?”
Royal looked uncomfortable.
“Hell, Gray,” he said, “pay no mind to me. I saw you’d got yourself a pretty little girl to talk to today, and if you want to go where she’s going, it’s okay with me,” he said with forced nobility.
“Holly Ingram?” Gray asked. “She is a little white and gold honey, isn’t she?
But she’ll keep. She’ll have to. If I see her again too soon.
I’ll have to start shopping for rice. Daddy’s a strict man.
You approach the Ingrams like you would an Indian camp, slow and easy and with your hands in the air.
No,” he said, as he paused in the same spot where they’d stood hours before they’d gone to the tea, “better for both of us if we avoid the elegant ladies tonight.
“Ah,” he said musingly, looking in the same direction of the lobby as he had those hours earlier, “that let’s the legitimate theater out, doesn’t it?
No Shakespeare at the Tabor then, or any other elegant opera house—if we want to avoid the ladies.
There’s always other amusements, of course, the ballet, or a parlor house, or a wild West show, maybe?
” he said, staring pointedly at the empty spot in the lobby that hadn’t been empty those hours before.
“Blondes,” Royal said, finally laughing as he remembered who’d stood there then. “Is that all you can think of? Miss ‘gold and white’ and that other yellow-headed charmer, too? That actress? Pretty enough, sure, but you might as well make love to a mirror.”