The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba(24)

He laughs. “You have a delightful way of deflecting questions and turning them right back around so the focus is on the questioner and not yourself. Is that a prerequisite to becoming a journalist or a particular skill you’ve cultivated?”

“I suppose I could ask you the same thing, considering you do it as often as I do.”

“Touché. I wasn’t born with the same advantages Will was. I’m not sure polite society would have me if they truly knew where I come from. My money—now that’s another matter entirely.”

“I’m surprised you say that. In my experience, money gives people the ability to reshape the world as they see fit.”

“The world perhaps. Not Caroline Astor and her Four Hundred.”

“I wouldn’t think you’d give a fig about all that.” I lean in closer to him, my voice dropping to a whisper, not quite unconvinced Caroline Astor doesn’t have ears in every corner of New York. “They’re not that fun, really. The parties, I mean.” I pause for a moment, anticipating a bolt of lightning to come down from the heavens. In this insular world, Mrs. Astor might as well be a god.

“I’m beginning to see that.” His gaze sweeps across the ballroom once more. “Although, I suppose it’s more a matter of wanting what you cannot have.”

“It can be frustrating to have doors closed to you, to always have to prove yourself, to never have a chance to be judged on your own merits,” I agree.

“I thought you might be able to understand, given the way you handled yourself in Will’s office. You aren’t afraid to push the doors open.” He smiles. “See, you’re already an excellent journalist. You’ve mastered the skill of getting your interview subject to spill their secrets.”

“The sort of secrets you possess would likely make a lady blush.”

“Perhaps. I’d imagine it depends on the lady, though. You don’t seem one for blushing. Not in a job like this.”

“You do realize, when you say ‘job like this,’ you sound positively like Mrs. Astor.”

His laugh fills the air. “You’ve got me. I’ve never been one for reporters.”

“And yet you’re friends with a publisher. And not just any publisher, the most notorious one in the city.”

“True. I suppose there is an exception to every rule. And if you’re going to break a rule, you really should do so thoroughly.”

“Why the aversion to newspapers?”

“It seems a bit like vultures picking over the bones of people’s lives. Think about the stories that litter the front page. They’re hardly testaments to the best and brightest parts of people’s affairs.”

“‘Best and brightest’? Now you sound like a romantic.”

“Whereas you are what, a cynic?”

“You think someone so young—and let me guess, female—shouldn’t be a cynic?”

“I don’t actually. I’ve seen plenty of women—young and old—carrying their families on their backs. That’s the difference between people like you and people like me. Maybe your people shelter women as the ‘fairer sex,’ but on the dirty streets of New York and in the tenements piled on top of one another like the layers of human sweat that fill the air, the working class in this country doesn’t have that luxury.”

My gaze narrows speculatively. It’s another facet to him that I wouldn’t have predicted. Despite his wealth, he wears his disdain for money as well as his impeccably tailored clothes.

“Is it odd being part of a society that you hate?” I ask.

Now it’s his turn to look surprised. “Pardon me?”

“You’re one of the wealthiest men in New York.”

I’ve done my research, too.

“Perhaps your origins aren’t up to Mrs. Astor’s standards,” I add, “but you cannot pretend you don’t rub elbows with some of the same people you decry in the same breath.”

“Yes, but rubbing elbows with them is not the same as being part of their little world.”

“So, you seek to create change from within?”

“Is that a note of censure I hear, Miss Harrington? You have this delightfully prim way of making one feel entirely put in their place when you open your lips.”

I flush at the intimate description. It’s not so much that he lacks the manners necessary to navigate polite society, for there are certainly moments when his bearing is flawless; it is more that he sometimes clearly doesn’t give a fig about deploying them.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you? You remind me of a schoolmistress. I half expect you to take a ruler in hand. How did you end up in the newspaper business, anyway?”

For some reason, giving him the same explanation I shared with Pulitzer in his office—about Nellie Bly and feeling as though I was seen in her writing—feels too intimate, as though I am providing him with a deep insight into my personality I’d rather he not have. He’s already too perceptive by half.

“I suppose I just saw enough around me that made me angry, that made me want to do something to make things better. My father was like that. It annoyed my mother tremendously. He could never let things go like she wanted. He believed if you saw something you didn’t like in the world, you should do what you could to change it.”