Fancy Pants (Wynette, Texas #1)(40)

The hand was a mistake. He looked down at it as if she'd put a snake there. “I got to tell you, Francie—there's something about the way you go about doing things that pretty much rubs me the wrong way.”

She snatched away her hand. “Don't call me that! My name is Francesca. And don't imagine I'm exactly enamored with you, either.”

“I don't imagine you're exactly enamored with anybody except yourself.” He pulled a piece of bubble gum from his shirt pocket. “And Mr. Vee-tawn, of course.”

She gave him her most withering glare, went to the back door of the car, and pulled it open to extract her suitcase, because absolutely nothing—not abysmal poverty, Miranda's betrayal, or Dallie Beaudine's insolence—was going to make her stay in her torturous pink outfit a moment longer.

He slowly unwrapped his piece of bubble gum as he watched her struggling with the suitcase. “If you turn it on its side there, Francie, I think it'll be easier to get out.”

She clamped her teeth together to keep from calling him every vile name in her vocabulary and jerked on the suitcase, putting a long scratch in the leather as it banged into the door handle. I'll kill him, she thought, dragging the suitcase toward a rusted blue and white rest room sign. I'll kill him and then I'll stomp on his corpse. Grasping a chipped white porcelain knob that hung loose from its plate, she pushed on the door, but it refused to budge. She tried two more times before it finally swung inward, squealing on its hinges. And then she gulped.

The room was terrible. Dirty water lay in the recesses of the broken floor tiles revealed by a dim bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling by a cord. The toilet was encrusted with filth, its lid had disappeared, and the seat was broken in half. As she stood looking at the noisome room, the tears that had been threatening all day finally broke loose. She was hungry and thirsty, she had to use the toilet, she didn't have any money, and she wanted to go home. Dropping the suitcase outside in the dirt, she sat down on it and began to cry. How could this be happening to her? She was one of the ten most beautiful women in Great Britain!

A pair of cowboy boots appeared in the dust at her side. She began crying harder, burying her face in her hands and releasing great gulping sobs that seemed to come all the way from her toes. The boots took a few steps to the side, then tapped impatiently in the dirt.

“This kickup gonna take much longer, Francie? I want to fetch Skeet before the ‘gators get him.”

“I went out with the Prince of Wales,” she said with a sob, finally looking up at him. “He fell in love with me!”

“Uh-huh. Well, they say there's a lot of inbreeding—”

“I could have been queen!” The word was a wail as tears dripped off her cheeks and onto her breasts. “He adored me, everybody knew it. We went to balls and the opera—”

He squinted against the fading sun. “Do you think you could sorta skip through this part and get to the point?”

“I have to go to the loo!” she cried, pointing a shaky finger toward the rusty blue and white sign.

He left her side and then reappeared a moment later. “I see what you mean.” Digging two rumpled tissues from his pocket, he let them flutter down into her lap. “I think you'll be safer out back behind the building.”

She looked down at the tissues and then up at him and began sobbing again.

He took several chomps on his gum. “That domestic mascara of yours sure is falling down on the job.”

Leaping up from the suitcase, tissues dropping to the ground, she shouted at him, “You think all this is amusing, don't you? You find it hysterically funny that I'm trapped in this awful dress and I can't go home and Nicky's gone off with some dreadful mathematician Miranda says is glorious—”

“Uh-huh.” Her suitcase fell forward under the pressure of Dallie's boot toe. Before Francesca had a chance to protest, he had knelt down and flipped open the catches. “This is a god-awful mess,” he said when he saw the chaos inside. “You got any jeans in here?”

“Under the Zandra Rhodes.”

“What's a zanderoads? Never mind, I found the jeans. How about a T-shirt? You wear T-shirts, Francie?”

“There's a blouse,” she sniffed. “Greige with cocoa trim—a Halston. And a Hermès belt with an art deco buckle. And my Bottega Veneta sandals.”

He propped one arm across his knee and looked up at her. “You're startin’ to push me again, aren't you, darlin’?”

Dashing away her tears with the back of her hand, she stared down at him, not having the faintest idea what he was talking about. He sighed and got back up. “Maybe you'd better find what you want yourself. I'll amble back to the car and wait for you. And try not to take too long. Old Skeet's already gonna be hotter than a Texas tamale.”

As he turned to walk away, she sniffed and bit on her lip. “Mr. Beaudine?” He turned. She dug her fingernails into her palms. “Would it be possible—” Gracious, this was humiliating! “That is to say, perhaps you might— Actually, I seem to—” What was wrong with her? How had an ignorant hillbilly managed to intimidate her so badly that she couldn't seem to form the simplest sentence?

“Spit it out, honey. I got my heart set on findin’ a cure for cancer before the decade's over, or at least having a cold Lone Star and a chili dog by the time Landry's boys hit the Astroturf for the division championship.”