Fancy Pants

Chapter 7

"Fangs!" Francesca screeched. "Why is Fletcher wearing fangs?"

Sally slapped the odious objects into the makeup matfs hand. "It's a vampire picture, sweetie. What do you expect him to wear-a G-string?"

Francesca felt as if she'd stumbled into some terrible nightmare. Jerking away from Fletcher Hall, she rounded on Byron. "You lied to me!" she shouted. "Why didn't you tell me this was a vampire picture? Of all the miserable, rotten- My God, I'll sue you for this; I'll sue you to within an inch of your ridiculous life. If you think for one moment I'll let my name appear on-on-" She couldn't say the word again, she absolutely couldn't! A vision of Marisa Berenson flicked into her mind, the exquisite Marisa hearing about what had happened to poor Francesca Day and laughing until rivulets of tears ran down her alabaster cheeks.

Clenching her fists, Francesca cried, "You tell me right this minute exactly what this odious film is about!"

Lloyd sniffed, clearly offended. "It's about life and death, the transfer of blood, the very essence of life passing from one person to another. Metaphysical events of which you apparently know nothing." He stalked away in a huff.

Sally stepped forward and crossed her arms, obviously enjoying herself. "The film's about a bunch of stewardesses who rent a mansion that's supposed to be haunted. One by one they get their blood sucked by the former owner-good old Fletcher, who's spent the last century or so pining for his lost love Lucinda. There's a subplot with a female vampire and a male stripper, but that's closer to the end."

Francesca didn't wait to hear any more. Shooting a furious glance at all of them, she swept from the set. Her hoopskirt rocked from side to side and the blood boiled in her veins as she dashed out of the mansion and toward the trailers in search of Lew Steiner. They'd made a fool of her! She had sold her clothes and traveled halfway around the world to play a minor part in a vampire movie!

Quivering with rage, she found Steiner sitting at a metal table under the trees near the food truck. Her hoopskirt tilted up in the back as she came to a sudden stop, banging against the table leg. "I accepted this job because I heard Mr. Byron had a reputation as a quality director!" she declared, stabbing the air with a harsh gesture directed roughly toward the plantation house.

He looked up from a half-eaten ham on rye. "Who told you that?"

An image of Miranda Gwynwyck's face, smug and self-satisfied, swam before her eyes, and everything became blindingly clear. Miranda, who was supposed to be a feminist, had sabotaged another woman in

a misguided attempt to protect her brother.

"He told me he was making a spiritual statement!" she exclaimed. "What does any of this have to do

with spiritual statements-or life force or Fellini, for God's sake!"

Steiner smirked. "Why do you think we call him Lord Byron? He makes crap sound like poetry. Of course, it's still crap when he's done with it, but we don't tell him that. He's cheap and he works fast."

Francesca searched for some misunderstanding, for the small ray of hope her optimistic soul demanded. "What about the Golden Palm?" she asked stiffly.

"The Golden what?"

"Palm." She felt like a fool. "The Cannes Film Festival."

Lew Steiner stared at her for a moment before he released a belly laugh that brought with it a small

chunk of ham. "Honey, the only 'can' Lord Byron's ever had anything to do with is the kind that flushes. The last picture he did for me was Co-ed Massacre, and the one before that was a little number called Arizona Prison Women. It did real good at the drive-ins."

Francesca could barely force the words from her mouth. "And he actually expected me to appear in a vampire picture?"

"You're here, aren't you?"

She made up her mind immediately. "Not for long! I'll be back with my suitcases in exactly ten minutes, and I expect you to have a draft waiting for me to cover my expenses as well as a driver to take me to

the airport. And if you use a single frame of that film you shot today, I'll bloody well sue you to within

an inch of your worthless life."

"You signed a contract, so you won't have much luck."

"I signed a contract under false pretenses."

"Bullshit. Nobody lied to you. And you can forget about any money until you're finished shooting."

"I demand to be paid what you owe me!" She felt like some dreadful fishwife bargaining on a street corner. "You have to pay me for my travel. We had an agreement!"

"You're not getting a penny until you're done with your last scene tomorrow." He raked his eyes over her unpleasantly. "That's the one Lloyd wants you to do nude. The deflowering of innocence, he calls it."

"Lioyd will see me nude the same day he wins the Golden Palm!" Turning on her heel, she began to storm away only to have one of the hateful pink flounces on her skirt catch on the corner of the metal table. She jerked it free, tearing it in the process.

Steiner leaped up from the table. "Hey, be careful with that costume! Those things cost me money!"

She yanked the mustard container from the table and squeezed a great glob of it down the front of the skirt. "How dreadful," she scoffed. "It looks as if this one needs to be laundered!"

"You bitch!" he screamed after her as she stalked away. "You'll never work again! I'll see to it that no

one hires you to empty out the garbage."

"Super!" she called back. "Because I've had all the garbage I can stand!"

Grabbing two handfuls of ruffle, she hitched her skirts to her knees, cut across the lawn, and headed for the chicken coop. Never, absolutely never in her entire life had she been treated so shabbily. She'd make Miranda Gwynwyck pay for this humiliation if it was the last thing she did. She'd bloody well marry Nicholas Gwynwyck the day she got home!

When she reached her room, she was pale with rage, and the sight of the unmade bed fueled her fury. Snatching up an ugly green lamp from the dresser, she hurled it across the room, where it shattered against the wall. The destruction didn't help; she still felt as if someone had hit her in the stomach. Dragging her suitcase to the bed, she wadded in the few clothes she had bothered to unpack the night before, slammed down the lid, and sat on it. By the time she had forced the latches closed, her carefully arranged curls had come loose and her chest was damp with perspiration. Then she remembered she was still wearing the awful pink costume.

She nearly wailed with frustration as she opened the suitcase again. This was all Nicky's fault! When she got back to London, she'd make him take her to the Costa del Sol, and she'd lie on the bloody beach all day and do nothing except think up ways to make him miserable! Reaching behind her, she began struggling with the hooks that held the bodice together, but they had been set in a double row, and the material fit so tightly that she couldn't get a grip to loosen them. She twisted farther around, releasing a particularly foul curse, but the hooks wouldn't budge. Just as she'd reconciled herself to looking for someone to help her, she thought of the expression on Lew Steiner's fat, smug face when she'd squirted mustard on the skirt. She nearly laughed aloud. Let's see how smug he looks when he sees his precious costume disappearing from sight, she thought with a burst of malicious glee.

No one was around to help her, so she had to carry the suitcase herself. Lugging her Vuitton bag in one hand and her cosmetic case in the other, she struggled down the path that led to the vehicles, only to discover when she got there that absolutely no one would drive her into Gulfport.

"Sorry, Miss Day, but they told us they needed all the cars," one of the men muttered, not quite looking her in the eye.

She didn't believe him for a moment. This was Lew Steiner's doing, his last petty attack on her!

Another crew member was more helpful. "There's a gas station not too far down the road." He indicated the direction with a turn of his head. "You could make a phone call from there and get somebody to pick you up."

The thought of walking down the driveway was daunting enough, let alone having to walk all the way to a petrol station. Just as she realized she'd have to swallow her pride and go back to the chicken coop to change her dress, Lew Steiner stepped out of one of the Airstream trailers and gave her a nasty smirk. She decided she'd die before she'd retreat an inch. Glaring back at him, she hitched up her suitcases and headed across the grass toward the driveway.

"Hey! Stop right there!" Steiner yelled, puffing up next to her. "Don't you take another step until I have that costume back!"

She rounded on him. "You so much as touch me, and I'll have you charged with assault!"

"I'll have you charged with theft! That dress belongs to me!"

"And I'm sure you'd look charming in it." She deliberately caught him in the knees with her cosmetic

case as she turned to walk away. He yelped with pain, and she smiled to herself, wishing she'd hit him harder.

It would be her last moment of satisfaction for a very long time to come.

"You missed the turnoff," Skeet chastised Dallie from the back seat of the Buick Riviera. "Route ninety-eight, I told you. Ninety-eight to fifty-five, fifty-five to twelve, then set the cruise control straight into Baton Rouge."

"Telling me an hour ago and then falling asleep doesn't help much," Dallie grumbled. He wore a new

cap, dark blue with an American flag on the front, but it wasn't doing the trick against the midafternoon sun, so he picked up a pair of mirrored sunglasses from the dashboard and put them on. Scrub pine stretched out on either side of the two-lane road.

He hadn't seen anything but a few rusted junk cars for miles, and his stomach had started rumbling. "Sometimes you're about worthless," he muttered.

"You got any Juicy Fruit?" Skeet asked.

A patch of color in the distance suddenly caught Dallie's attention, a swirl of bright pink wobbling slowly along the side of the road. As they drew closer, the shape gradually became more distinct.

He pulled his sunglasses off. "I don't believe it. Will you just look at that?"

Skeet leaned forward, his forearm resting on the back of the passenger seat, and shaded his eyes. "Now don't that just about beat all?" he chortled.

Francesca pushed herself on, one plodding step at a time, struggling for every breath against the vise of her corset. Dust streaked her cheeks, the tops of her breasts glistened with perspiration, and not fifteen minutes earlier, she had lost a nipple. Just like a cork bobbing to the surface of a wave, it had popped out of the neckline of her dress. She had quickly set down her suitcase and shoved it back in, but the memory made her shudder. If she could take back just one thing in her life, she thought for the hundredth time in as many minutes, she'd take back the moment she had decided to walk away from the Wentworth plantation wearing this dress.

The hoopskirt now looked like a gravy boat, protruding in the front and back and squished in on the sides from the combined pressure of the suitcase in her right hand and the cosmetic case in her left, both of which felt as if they were tearing her arms from their shoulder sockets. With each step, she winced. Her tiny French-heeled shoes had rubbed blisters on her feet, and each wayward puff of hot air sent another wave of dust blowing up into her face.

She wanted to sit down on the side of the road and cry, but she wasn't absolutely certain she would be able to force herself to get back up again. If only she weren't so frightened, her physical discomforts would be easier to endure. How could this have happened to her? She'd walked for miles without coming to the petrol station. Either it didn't exist or she had mistaken the direction, but she had seen nothing except a blistered wooden sign advertising a vegetable stand that had never materialized. Soon it would

be dark, she was in a foreign country, and for all she knew a herd of horrid wild beasts lurked in those pines just off the side of the road. She forced herself to look straight ahead. The only thing that kept her from returning to the Went-worth plantation was the absolute certainty that she could never make it back that far.

Surely this road led to something, she told herself. Even in America they wouldn't build roads to nowhere, would they? The thought was so frightening she began playing small games in her head to keep herself moving forward. As she gritted her teeth against the pain in various parts of her body, she envisioned her favorite places, all of them light-years away from the dusty back roads of Mississippi. She envisioned Liberty's on Regent Street with its gnarled beams and wonderful Arabian jewelry, the perfumes at Sephora on the rue de Passy, and everything on Madison Avenue from Adolfo to Yves Saint Laurent.

An image sprang into her mind of an icy glass of Perrier with a small sliver of lime. It hung in the hot air in front of her, the picture so vivid she felt as if she could reach out and clasp the cold, wet glass in the palm of her hand. She was beginning to hallucinate, she told herself, but the image was so pleasant she didn't try to make it go away.

The Perrier suddenly vaporized into the hot Mississippi air as she became aware of the sound of an automobile approaching from behind and then the soft squeal of brakes. Before she could balance the weight of the suitcases in her hands to turn toward the noise, a soft drawl drifted toward her from the other side of the road.

"Hey, darlin', didn't anybody tell you that Lee surrendered?"

The suitcase slammed into the front of her knees and her hoop bounced up in the back as she twisted around toward the voice. She balanced her weight and then blinked twice, unable to believe the vision

that had materialized directly in front of her eyes.

Across the road, leaning out the window of a dark green automobile with his forearm resting across the top of the door panel, was a man so outrageously good-looking, so devastatingly handsome, that for a moment she thought she might actually have hallucinated him right along with the Perrier and the sliver of lime. As the handle of her suitcase dug into her palm, she took in the classic lines of his face, the molded cheekbones and lean jaw, the straight, perfect nose, and then his eyes, which were a brilliant Paul Newman blue and as thickly lashed as her own. How could a mortal man have eyes like that? How could a man have such an incredibly generous mouth and still look so masculine? Thick, dark blond hair curled up over the edges of a blue billed cap sporting an American flag. She could see the top of a formidable pair of shoulders, the well-formed muscles of his tanned forearm, and for one irrational moment she felt a crazy stab of panic.

She had finally met someone as beautiful as she was.

"You carryin' any Confederate secrets underneath those skirts?" the man said with a grin that revealed the kind of teeth that belonged on magazine pages and made people count back guiltily to the last time they'd flossed.

"I think the Yankees cut out her tongue, Dallie."

For the first time, Francesca became aware of another man, this one leaning out the back window. As she took in his sinister face and ominously slitted eyes, warning bells clanged in her head.

"Either that or she's a spy from the North," he went on. "Never knew a southern woman to keep quiet for so long."

"You a Yankee spy, darlin'?" Mr. Gorgeous asked, flashing those incredible teeth. "Pryin' out Confederate secrets with those pretty green eyes?"

She was suddenly conscious of her vulnerability-the deserted road, the failing sunlight, two strange men, the fact that she was in America, not safe at home in England. In America people packed loaded guns on their way to church, and criminals roamed the streets at will. She glanced nervously at the man in the back seat. He looked like someone who would torture small animals just for fun. What should she do? No one would hear her if she screamed, and she had no way to protect herself.

"Shoot, Skeet, you're scaring her. Pull that ugly head of yours in, will you?"

Skeet's head retracted, and the gorgeous man with the strange name she hadn't quite caught lifted one perfect eyebrow, waiting for her to say something. She decided to brave it out-to be brisk, matter-of-fact, and under no circumstances let them see how desperate she actually was.

"I'm awfully afraid I've gotten myself into a bit of a muddle," she said, setting down her suitcase.

"I seem to have lost my way. Frightful nuisance, of course."

Skeet poked his head back out the window. Mr. Gorgeous grinned.

She kept going doggedly. "Perhaps you could tell me how far it is to the next petrol station. Or anywhere

I might find a telephone, actually."

"You're from England, aren't you?" Skeet asked. "Dallie, do you hear the funny way she talks? She's a English lady, is what she is."

Francesca watched as Mr. Gorgeous-could someone really be named Dallie?-swept his gaze down over the pink and white ruffles of her gown. "I'll bet you got one hell of a story to tell, honey. Come on and hop in. We'll give you a lift to the next telephone."

She hesitated. Getting into a car with two strange men didn't strike her as the absolute wisest course to take, but she couldn't seem to think of an alternative. She stood in the road, ruffles dragging in the dust and suitcases at her feet, while an unfamiliar combination of fear and uncertainty made her feel queasy.

Skeet leaned all the way out the window and tilted his head to look at Dallie. "She's afraid you're rapist scum gettin' ready to ruin her." He turned back to her. "You take a good hard look at Dallie's pretty

face, ma'am, and then tell me if you think a man with a face like that has to resort to violatin' unwilling women."

He definitely had a point, but somehow Francesca didn't feel comforted. The man named Dallie wasn't actually the person she was most worried about.

Dallie seemed to read her mind, which, considering the circumstances, probably wasn't all that difficult a thing to do. "Don't worry about Skeet, honey," he said. "Skeet's a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist, is what he is."

That word, coming from the mouth of someone who, despite his incredible good looks, had the accent and manner of a functional illiterate, surprised her. She was still hesitating when the door of the car opened and a pair of dusty cowboy boots hit the road. Dear God… She swallowed hard and looked up-way up.

His body was as perfect as his face.

He wore a navy blue T-shirt that skimmed the muscles of his chest, outlining biceps and triceps and all sorts of other incredible things, and a pair of jeans faded almost to white everywhere except at the frayed seams. His stomach was flat, his hips narrow; he was lean and leggy, several inches over six feet tall, and he absolutely took her breath away. It must be true, she thought wildly, what everyone said about Americans and vitamin pills.

"The trunk's full, so I'm gonna have to throw your cases in the back seat with Skeet there."

"That's fine. Anywhere will do." As he walked toward her, she turned the full force of her smile on him. She couldn't help it; the response was automatic, programmed into her Serritella genes. Not appearing at her best before a man this spectacular, even if he was a backwoods bumpkin, suddenly seemed more painful than the blisters on her feet. At that moment she would have given anything she owned for half an hour in front of a mirror with the contents of her cosmetic case and the white linen Mary McFadden that was hanging in a Piccadilly resale shop right next to her periwinkle blue evening pajamas.

He stopped where he was and stared down at her.

For the first time since she'd left London, she felt as if she'd arrived in home territory. The expression

on his face confirmed a fact she had discovered long ago-men were men the world over. She peered upward with innocent, radiant eyes. "Something the matter?"

"Do you always do that?"

"Do what?" The dimple in her cheek deepened.

"Proposition a man less than five minutes after you meet him."

"Proposition!" She couldn't believe she'd heard him correctly, and she exclaimed indignantly, "I was most certainly not propositioning you."

"Honey, if that smile wasn't a proposition, I don't know what one is." He picked up her cases and carried them to the other side of the car. "Normally I wouldn't mind, you understand, but it strikes me as just short of foolhardy to be hanging out your advertising when you're in the middle of nowhere with two strange men who might be pervert scum, for all you know."

"My advertising!" She stomped her foot on the road. "Put those suitcases down this minute! I wouldn't

go anywhere with you if my life depended on it."

He glanced around at the scrub pine and the deserted road. "From the looks of things, it's getting mighty close."

She didn't know what to do. She needed help, yet his behavior was insufferable, and she hated the idea

of demeaning herself by getting in the car. He took the choice away from her when he pulled open the back door and unceremoniously shoved the luggage at Skeet.

"Be careful with those," she cried, racing up to the car. "They're Louis Vuitton!"

"You picked a real live one this time, Dallie," Skeet muttered from the back.

"Don't I just know it," Dallie replied. He climbed behind the wheel, slammed the door, and then leaned out the window to look at her. "If you want to retain possession of your luggage, honey, you'd better

get inside real quick, because in exactly ten seconds, I'm slipping the old Riviera into gear and me and

Mr. Vee-tawn won't be anything to you but a distant memory."

She limped around the back of the car to the passenger door on the other side, tears struggling to reach the surface. She felt humiliated, frightened, and-worst of all- helpless. A hairpin slid down the back

of her neck and fell into the dirt.

Unfortunately, her discomfiture was just beginning. Hoopskirts, she quickly discovered, had not been designed to fit into a modern automobile. Refusing to look at either of her rescuers to see how they were reacting to her difficulties, she finally eased onto the seat backside first and then gathered the unwieldy volume of material into her lap as best she could.

Dallie freed the gearshift from a spillover of crinolines. "You always dress for comfort like this?"

She glared at him, opening her mouth to deliver one of her famous snappy rejoinders only to discover

that nothing sprang to mind. They rode for some time in silence while she stared doggedly ahead, her

eyes barely making it over the top of her mountain of skirts, the stays in the bodice digging into her

waist. As grateful as she was to be off her feet, her position made the constriction of the corset even

more unbearable. She tried to take a deep breath, but her breasts rose so alarmingly that she settled for shallow breaths instead. One sneeze, she realized, and she was a centerfold.

"I'm Dallas Beaudine," the man behind the wheel announced. "Folks call me Dallie. That's Skeet Cooper in the back."

"Francesca Day," she replied, permitting her voice to thaw ever so slightly. She had to remember that Americans were notoriously informal. What was considered boorish on the part of an Englishman was regarded as normal behavior in the States. Besides, she couldn't resist bringing this gorgeous country bumpkin at least partway to his knees. This was something she was good at, something that couldn't possibly go wrong on this day when everything else had fallen apart. "I'm grateful to you for rescuing me," she said, smiling at him over the top of her skirts. "I'm afraid I've had an absolutely beastly few days."

"You mind telling us about it?" Dallie inquired. "Skeet and I've been traveling a lot of miles lately, and we're getting tired of each other's conversation."

"Well, it's all quite ridiculous, really. Miranda Gwynwyck, this perfectly odious woman-the brewery family, you know-persuaded me to leave London and accept a part in a film being shot at the Wentworth plantation."

Skeet's head popped up just behind her left shoulder, and his eyes were alive with curiosity. "You a movie star?" he inquired. "There's something about you that's been lookin' familiar to me, but I can't

quite place it."

"Not actually." She thought about mentioning Vivien Leigh to him and then decided not to bother.

"I got it!" Skeet exclaimed. "I knew I'd seen you before. Dallie, you'll never guess who this is."

Francesca looked back at him warily.

"This here's 'Bereft Francesca'!" Skeet declared with a hoot of laughter. "I knew I recognized her. You remember, Dallie. The one goin' out with all those movie stars."

"No kidding," Dallie said.

"How on earth-" Francesca began, but Skeet interrupted her.

"Say, I was real sorry to hear about your mama and that taxicab."

Francesca stared at him speechlessly.

"Skeet's a fan of the tabloids," Dallie explained. "I don't much like them myself, but they do make you think about the power of mass communications. When I was a kid, we used to have this old blue geography book, and the first chapter was called 'Our Shrinking World.' That just about says it, doesn't it? Did you have geography books like that in England?"

"I-I don't think so," she replied weakly. A moment of silence passed and she had the horrifying feeling that they might be waiting for her to supply the details of Chloe's death. Even the thought of sharing something so intimate with strangers appalled her, so she quickly returned to the subject at hand as if she'd never been interrupted. "I flew halfway across the world, spent an absolutely miserable night in the most horrible accommodations you could imagine, and was forced to wear this absolutely hideous dress. Then I discovered that the picture had been misrepresented to me."

"Porno flick?" Dallie inquired.

"Certainly not!" she exclaimed. Didn't these rural Americans take even the briefest moment to examine a thought before they passed it on to their mouths? "Actually, it was one of those horrid films about"-she felt ill even saying the word-"vampires."

"No kidding!" Skeet's admiration was evident. "Do you know Vincent Price?"

Francesca pressed her eyes closed for a moment and then reopened them. "I haven't had the pleasure."

Skeet tapped Dallie on the shoulder. "Remember old Vincent when he used to be on 'Hollywood Squares'?

Sometimes his wife was on with him. What's her name? She's one of those fancy English actresses, too. Maybe Francie knows her."

"Francesca," she snapped. "I detest being called anything else."

Skeet sank back into the seat and she realized she had offended him, but she didn't care. Her name was her name, and no one had the right to alter it, especially not today when her hold on the world seemed so precarious.

"So, what are your plans now?" Dallie asked.

"To return to London as soon as possible." She thought of Miranda Gwynwyck, of Nicky, of the impossibility of continuing as she was. "And then I'm getting married." Without realizing it, she had made her decision, made it because she could see no alternative. After what she had endured during the past twenty-four hours, being married to a wealthy brewer no longer seemed like such a terrible fate. But now that the words had been spoken, she felt depressed instead of relieved. Another hairpin fell out; this one tumbled down her front and stuck in a ruffle. She distracted herself from her glum thoughts by asking Skeet for her cosmetic case. He passed it forward without a word. She pushed it deep into the folds of her skirt and flipped open the lid.

"My God…" She almost wept when she saw her face. Her heavy eye makeup looked grotesque in natural light, she had eaten off her lipstick, her hair was falling every which way, and she was dirty! Never in all her twenty-one years had she primped in front of a man other than her hairdresser, but she had to get herself hack, the person she recognized!

Grabbing a bottle of cleansing lotion, she set to work repairing the mess. As the heavy makeup came off, she felt a need to distance herself from the two men, to make them understand that she belonged to a different world. "Honestly, I look a fright. This entire trip has been an absolute nightmare." She pulled off her false eyelashes, moisturized her eyelids, and applied a light dusting of highlighter along with taupe shadow and a dab of mascara. "Normally I use this wonderful German mascara called Ecarte, but Cissy

Kavendish's maid-a really impossible woman from the West Indies-forgot to pack it, so I'm slumming with an English brand."

She knew she was talking too much, but she didn't seem to be able to stop herself. She swept a Kent brush over a cake of toffee blusher and shaded the area just beneath her cheekbones. "I'd give almost anything for a really good facial right now. There's this wonderful place in Mayfair that uses thermal

heat and all sorts of other incredibly miraculous things they combine with massage. Lizzy Arden does

the same thing." She quickly outlined her lips with a pencil, filled them in from a pot of rosy beige

gloss, and checked the overall effect. Not terrific, but at least she almost looked like herself again.

The growing silence in the car was making her increasingly uneasy, so she kept talking to fill it. "It's always difficult when you're in New York trying to decide between Arden's and Janet Sartin. Naturally, I'm talking about Janet Sartin on Madison Avenue. I mean, one can go to her salon on Park, but it isn't quite the same, is it?"

Everything was quiet for a moment.

Finally, Skeet spoke. "Dallie?"

"Uh-huh?"

"Do you think she's done yet?"

Dallie pulled off his sunglasses and set them back on the dashboard. "I have a feeling she's just warming up."

She looked over at him, embarrassed by her own behavior and angry with his. Couldn't he see that she was having the most miserable day of her life, and try to make things a bit easier for her? She hated the fact that he didn't seem impressed by her, hated the fact that he wasn't trying to impress her himself. In some strange way that she couldn't quite define, his lack of interest seemed more disorienting than anything else that had happened to her.

She returned her attention to the mirror and began snatching the pins from her hair, silently admonishing herself to stop worrying about Dallas Beaudine's opinion. Any moment now they'd stumble on civilization. She'd call a taxi to take her to the airport in Gulfport and then book herself on the next flight to London. Suddenly she remembered her embarrassing financial problem and then, just as quickly, found the solution. She would simply call Nicholas and have him wire her the money for her air fare.

Her throat felt scratchy and dry, and she coughed. "Could you roll up the windows? This dust is dreadful. And I'd really like something to drink." She eyed a small Styrofoam cooler in the back. "I don't suppose there's an off chance that you might have a bottle of Perrier stashed away in there?"

A moment of pregnant silence filled the interior of the Riviera.

"Shoot, ma'am, we're fresh out," Dallie said finally. "I'm afraid old Skeet finished the last bottle right

after we pulled that liquor store holdup over in Meridian."