Читать книгу Rebel with a Cause - Carol Arens - Страница 11

Missy leaned out of the dormer window, certain that she could not be seen from the lantern-lit street three stories down. A cold breeze prickled her skin but she didn’t dare pop back inside to get Zane’s coat. Something interesting might happen which she would not want to miss.

So far, a man had urinated in the alley across the street and a drunk had stumbled into a pole. Things couldn’t help but turn livelier.

In the very instant that a woman let out a lusty laugh from an unseen saloon, there was a tap at Missy’s door. She slid the window closed then plopped down into the chair.

While the key turned in the lock, she caught a messy curl in her finger, twirled it in a bored fashion and sighed like a proper captive.

“Sorry about the locked door. Maybelle is one for caution.” Emily stepped inside with a swirl of purple petticoats. She toted Muff in one arm, freshly groomed and smelling of roses. “Moe will be along with a bath in a bit.”

Emily set Muff on the floor then laid a sparkling crimson dress across the bed.

“Jolene left this behind last year when she went respectable. Maybelle thought it would be a fit for you.” Emily looked her over with narrow eyes. “It might be a little tight in the chest. Not that that ever hurt anything.”

Missy leaped up and nearly dashed to the bed. The fabric of the dress winked at her. She touched a ruffle of red feathers trimming the low-cut neckline. The tickle under her fingertips was a call to adventure. If she wore this gown in Boston she would be banned from polite society for years.

Muff hopped onto the chair then jumped to the dormer. He looked out the window, barking and waving his tail madly.

“That dog is as sweet as he can be now that he’s cleaned up.” Emily wrinkled her nose. “Those pretty drawers of yours are a mess. Here … let me have them. We’ll give them to Moe when he comes up. He can wash as good as a woman.”

Emily gave no indication that she had said anything shocking. Evidently, in Luminary, ladies stripped and handed their clothes to washermen every day. Since she’d been a toddler, the only one to see her in the all-together had been Suzie.

“Honey, you look positively scandalized. I purely forgot you were a lady for a minute, with you in your underwear.” Emily settled on the bed. Muff hopped down from the window and found a soft place on her lap. “I guess when you start whoring, modesty is the first thing you forget.”

Surely Emily had misread her expression. Missy Lenore Devlin had never been one to be scandalized! Why, ask anyone back home, she was the one creating a scandal.

She stepped out of her petticoat and let it fall in a heap about her feet. Undressing in front of a stranger was about as adventurous as one could get. Pray that she wasn’t blushing herself to embarrassment.

When the last of her garments hit the floor, she kicked them into a corner and sat in the chair with her legs crossed at the ankles and her hands folded on her knees. So what if she was naked in front of a semi-clad stranger? She lifted her gaze, determined to meet this challenge with a confident grin.

Emily was not looking in her direction. Instead, she fluffed Muff’s fur and spoke softly to him. She glanced up and smiled.

“What a sweet little fellow.”

“Yes … sweet. He’s been nothing but that for the entire trip. Why, back home that’s what everyone calls him, sweet little Muff.” Missy knew she was babbling, but what did one say in such a circumstance? My, isn’t it a lovely evening to be sitting in a whorehouse naked?

“I used to be like you.” Emily said.

“I suppose it’s all a part of your job.”

“What?” Confusion lifted Emily’s painted-on eyebrows.

“Bare as a jay?”

“Respectable.” She shrugged her shoulders, twirling her fingers in Muff’s fur and looking at something in her mind. “Once I had dreams. There was a day when I’d have turned as red as you are now.”

Missy would have protested her blushing condition, but that was not what this conversation was about. To outward appearances, Emily looked like a goddess in satin and feathers, with her breasts peeking through her sheer underwear and her bare calves showing. Somehow, though, she didn’t look a bit like the soiled doves of the novels, laughing and flirting and dancing the night away with glasses of something wicked and intoxicating gripped in their gay fingers.

Emily looked beaten-down. Her smile seemed distant … hopeless even.

“Still, if it hadn’t been for Zane, I’d probably be dead.” With that, her spirits appeared to rally.

“Me, too.” Missy pulled the pins from her dirty hair. She fluffed it about her shoulders then frowned at her fingers where grit had lodged under her fingernails. “He also saved a little girl in the flood.”

“A lot of folks are indebted to Zane.” When Emily looked at her, Missy was sure that she did not see nakedness. “Then too, a lot of folks don’t wish him well.”

“Why would you be dead?”

“My folks passed when I was sixteen,” she said.

“My father died in a buggy accident.” How interesting, Missy thought, that the pampered eastern darling and the scorned fallen woman had so much in common.

“Mine died of scarlet fever. We were homesteaders just outside of town. Some others died, too.”

“That’s a pure tragedy. Did you have someone to go to?” As much as Missy sought freedom from her restrictive family, she knew from some experience that they could be counted on in a crisis.

“Zane was the only one. We were close back then. Really, he’s all I had. I tried to support myself by doing laundry, but my hands bled with the lye. My eyes aren’t good enough for sewing. There’s only one way a woman can support herself around here when her folks are gone.”

“Dancing,” Missy said with a sigh.

“Sure … dancing. I was so hungry and lonely, it was easy to tell myself, ‘Okay, Emily, you can do it for a little while, till you get back on your feet.’ The thing is, this business keeps you mostly off your feet. It’s hard to get back up.”

“How did Zane save you?”

“I meant to go to Pete’s Palace, but Zane wouldn’t have it. He said if I meant to take up the … dancing … life it would have to be at Maybelle’s.”

“He might have taken you to another town. Maybe a better life.”

“Oh, he tried. Years back I was so young and proud. I was set on making my own way in the world. Maybelle’s was the best he could do for me. Besides, he grew up here, Maybelle was like an auntie to him, it didn’t seem so bad back then.”

“What about now? You’re a grown woman. You could leave the sporting life, surely?”

Emily studied her fingertips making whirls in Muff’s fur. “There is one way.” She shook her head, staring hard at Missy. “I don’t know that I’d feel right about it, though.”

A heavy knock beat on the door. The knob turned. Missy dove for Zane’s coat and wrapped herself up a second after Moe stepped into the room with two buckets of steaming water.

He didn’t seem to take note of her flash of skin, but by heavens, there were some adventures that she did not need to have.

Missy stared at Herman Meyer of Herman Meyer’s Mercantile over a display of canned goods on the counter. He seemed perplexed. Speechless, he stared at the red hat that had been a gift from Emily. His eyes scanned downward over the feathers that tickled her cleavage.

“I said,” Missy pronounced loudly in case the man’s problem was that he was hard of hearing, “I’m here about your help-wanted sign in the window.”