Fancy Pants (Wynette, Texas #1)(51)

“Don't sound too interesting, Dallie. The play I liked was that Oh! Calcutta! we saw in St. Louis. Now that was real good.”

“I know you liked that play, Skeet. I liked it, too, but you see it's not generally regarded as a great piece of literature. It doesn't have a lot to say about the human condition, if you follow me. Pygmalion, on the other hand, says that people can change... that they can get better with a little direction.” He threw the car into reverse and backed out of the parking place. “It also says that the person directing that change doesn't get anything for his trouble but a load of grief.”

Francesca, her eyes wide and stricken, stood in the open door of the motel room clutching her case to her chest like a teddy bear and watched the Riviera pull out of the parking place. Dallie was really going to do it. He was going to drive away and leave her all by herself, even though he'd admitted he'd thought about going to bed with her. Until now, that had always been enough to hold any man to her side, but suddenly it wasn't. How could that be? What was happening to her world? Bewilderment underscored her fear. She felt like a child who'd learned her colors wrong and just found out that red was really yellow, blue was really green—only now that she knew what was wrong, she couldn't imagine what to do about it.

The Riviera swung around to the exit, waited for a break in the traffic, and then began to move out onto the wet road. The tips of her fingers had gone numb, and her legs felt weak, as if all the muscles had lost their strength. Drizzle dampened her T-shirt, a lock of hair fell forward over her cheek. “Dallie!” She started to run as fast as she could.

“The thing of it is,” Dallie said, looking up into his rearview mirror, “she doesn't think about anybody but herself.”

“Most self-centered woman I ever encountered in my life,” Skeet agreed.

“And she doesn't know how to do a damn thing except maybe put on makeup.”

“She sure as hell can't swim.”

“She doesn't have even one lick of common sense.”

“Not a lick.”

Dallie uttered a particularly offensive oath and slammed on the brakes.

Francesca reached the car, gasping for breath in small sobs. “Don't! Don't leave me alone!”

The strength of Dallie's anger took her by surprise. He vaulted out of the door, tore the case from her hands, and then backed her up against the side of the car so that the door handle jabbed into her hip.

“Now you listen to me, and you listen good!” he shouted. “I'm taking you under duress, and you stop that goddamn sniveling right now!”

She sobbed, blinking against the drizzle. “But I'm—”

“I said to stop it! I don't want to do this—I got a real bad feeling about it—so from this minute on, you'd better do exactly what I say. Everything I say. You don't ask me any questions; you don't make any comments. And if you give me one minute of that fancy horseshit of yours, you'll be out on your skinny ass.”

“All right,” she cried, her pride hanging in tatters, her voice strangling on her humiliation. “All right!”

He looked at her with a contempt he made no effort to disguise, then jerked open the back door. She turned to scramble inside, but just as she bent forward, he drew back his hand and cracked her hard across her bottom. “There's more where that came from,” he said, “and my hand's just itching for the next shot.”

Every mile of the ride to Lake Charles felt like a hundred. She turned her face to the window and tried to pretend she was invisible, but when occupants of other cars looked idly over at her as the Riviera sped past, she couldn't suppress the illogical feeling that they knew what had happened, that they could actually see how she had been reduced to begging for help, see that she had been struck for the first time in her life. I won't think about it, she told herself as they sped past flooded rice fields and swampland covered with slimy green algae. I'll think about it tomorrow, next week, any time but now when I might start crying again and he might stop the car and set me out on the highway. But she couldn't help thinking about it, and she bit a raw place on the inside of her already battered bottom lip to keep from making the smallest sound.

She saw a sign that said Lake Charles, and then they crossed a great curved bridge. In the front seat, Skeet and Dallie talked on and off, neither of them paying any attention to her.

“The motel's right up there,” Skeet finally remarked to Dallie. “Remember when Holly Grace showed up here last year with that Chevy dealer from Tulsa?”

Dallie grunted something Francesca didn't quite catch as he pulled into the parking lot, which didn't look all that different from the one they'd left less than four hours earlier, and swung around toward the office. Francesca's stomach growled, and she realized she hadn't had anything to eat since the evening before when she'd grabbed a hamburger after pawning her suitcase. Nothing to eat... and no money to buy anything with. And then she wondered who Holly Grace might be, but she was too demoralized to feel more than a passing curiosity.

“Francie, I'd already pushed my credit card limit pretty close to the edge before I met you, and that little romp of yours just about finished the job. You're going to have to share a room with Skeet.”

“No!”

“No!”