Fancy Pants (Wynette, Texas #1)(49)

She let out a strangled cry of despair.

If she'd had more sleep, she might have handled the shock better, but as it was, she could barely comprehend what she saw. Her beautiful hair hung in tangled mats around her face, a long scratch marred the graceful curve of her neck, bruises had popped out on her flesh, and her bottom lip—her perfect bottom lip—was puffed up like a pastry shell.

Panic-stricken, she rushed to her case and inventoried her remaining possessions: a travel-size bottle of René Garraud bath gel, toothpaste (no sign of a toothbrush), three lipsticks, her peach eye shadow, and the useless dispenser of birth control pills Cissy's maid had packed. Her handbag yielded up two shades of blusher, her lizard-skin wallet, and an atomizer of Femme. Those, along with the faded navy T-shirt Dallie had thrown at her the night before and the small pile of soggy clothes on the floor, were her possessions... all she had left in the world.

The enormity of her losses was too devastating to comprehend, so she rushed to the shower where she did as much as she could with a brown bottle of motel shampoo. She then used the few cosmetics she had left to try to reconstruct the person she'd been. After pulling on her uncomfortably soggy jeans and struggling into her wet sandals, she spritzed Femme under her arms and then slid on Dallie's T-shirt. She looked down at the word written in white on her left breast and wondered what an AGGIES was. Another mystery, another unknown to make her feel like an intruder in a strange land. Why had she never felt like this in New York? Without shutting her eyes, she could see herself rushing along Fifth Avenue, dining at La Caravelle, walking through the lobby of the Pierre, and the more she thought about the world she'd left behind, the more disconnected she felt from the world she'd entered. A knock sounded, and she quickly combed her hair with her fingers, not quite daring to risk another peek in the mirror.

Dallie stood leaning against the door frame wearing a sky blue windbreaker beaded with rainwater and bleached-out jeans that had a frayed hole at the side of one knee. His hair was damp and curled up at the ends. Dishwater blond, she thought disparagingly, not true blond. And he needed a really good cut. He also needed a new wardrobe. His shoulders pulled at the seams of his jacket; his jeans would have disgraced a Calcutta beggar.

It was no use. No matter how clearly she saw his flaws, no matter how much she needed to reduce him to the ordinary in her own eyes, he was still the most impossibly gorgeous man she had ever seen.

He leaned one hand against the door frame and looked down at her. “Francie, ever since last night, I've been trying to make it obvious to you in as many ways as I could that I don't want to hear your story, but since you're hell-bent on telling it and since I'm getting pretty close to desperate to get rid of you, let's do it right now.” With that, he walked into her room, slumped down in a straight-backed chair, and put his boots up on the edge of the desk. “You owe me someplace in the neighborhood of two hundred bucks.”

“Two hundred—”

“You pretty well trashed that room last night.” He leaned back in the chair until only the rear legs were on the floor. “A television, two lamps, a few craters in the Sheetrock, a five-by-four picture window. The total came to five hundred sixty dollars, and that was only because I promised the manager I'd play eighteen holes with him the next time I come through. There only seemed to be a little over three hundred in your wallet—not enough to take care of all that.”

“My wallet?” She tore at the latches of her case. “You got into my wallet! How could you do something like that? That's my property. You should never have—” By the time she'd pulled her wallet from her purse, the palms of her hands were as clammy as her jeans. She opened it and gazed inside. When she could finally speak, her voice was barely a whisper. “It's empty. You've taken all my money.”

“Bills like that have to be settled real quick unless you want to catch the attention of the local gendarmes. “

She sagged down on the end of the bed, her sense of loss so overwhelming that her body seemed to have gone numb. She had hit bottom. Right at this moment. Right now. Everything was gone—cosmetics, clothes, the last of her money. She had nothing left. The disaster that had been picking up speed like a runaway train ever since Chloe's death had finally jumped the track.

Dallie tapped a motel pen on the top of the desk. “Francie, I couldn't help but notice that you didn't have any credit cards tucked away in that purse of yours... or any plane ticket either. Now, I want to hear you tell me real quick that you've got that ticket to London put away somewhere inside Mr. Vee-tawn, and that Mr. Vee-tawn is closed up in one of those twenty-five-cent lockers at the airport.”

She hugged her chest and stared at the wall. “I don't know what to do,” she choked out.

“You're a big girl, and you'd better come up with something real fast.”

“I need help.” She turned to him, pleading for understanding. “I can't handle this by myself.”

The front legs of his chair banged to the floor. “Oh, no you don't! This is your problem, lady, and you're not going to push it off on me.” His voice sounded hard and rough, not like the laughing Dallie who'd picked her up at the side of the road, or the knight in shining armor who'd saved her from certain death at the Blue Choctaw.

“If you didn't want to help me,” she cried out, “you shouldn't have offered me that ride. You should have left me, like everyone else.”