Steiner leaped up from the table. 'Hey, be careful with that costume! Those things cost me money!'
She yanked the mustard container from the table and squeezed a great glob of it down the front of the skirt. 'How dreadful,' she scoffed. 'It looks as if this one needs to be laundered!'
'You bitch!' he screamed after her as she stalked away. 'You'll never work again! I'll see to it that no
one hires you to empty out the garbage.'
'Super!' she called back. 'Because I've had all the garbage I can stand!'
Grabbing two handfuls of ruffle, she hitched her skirts to her knees, cut across the lawn, and headed for the chicken coop. Never, absolutely never in her entire life had she been treated so shabbily. She'd make Miranda Gwynwyck pay for this humiliation if it was the last thing she did. She'd bloody well marry Nicholas Gwynwyck the day she got home!
When she reached her room, she was pale with rage, and the sight of the unmade bed fueled her fury. Snatching up an ugly green lamp from the dresser, she hurled it across the room, where it shattered against the wall. The destruction didn't help; she still felt as if someone had hit her in the stomach. Dragging her suitcase to the bed, she wadded in the few clothes she had bothered to unpack the night before, slammed down the lid, and sat on it. By the time she had forced the latches closed, her carefully arranged curls had come loose and her chest was damp with perspiration. Then she remembered she was still wearing the awful pink costume.
She nearly wailed with frustration as she opened the suitcase again. This was all Nicky's fault! When she got back to London, she'd make him take her to the Costa del Sol, and she'd lie on the bloody beach all day and do nothing except think up ways to make him miserable! Reaching behind her, she began struggling with the hooks that held the bodice together, but they had been set in a double row, and the material fit so tightly that she couldn't get a grip to loosen them. She twisted farther around, releasing a particularly foul curse, but the hooks wouldn't budge. Just as she'd reconciled herself to looking for someone to help her, she thought of the expression on Lew Steiner's fat, smug face when she'd squirted mustard on the skirt. She nearly laughed aloud. Let's see how smug he looks when he sees his precious costume disappearing from sight, she thought with a burst of malicious glee.
No one was around to help her, so she had to carry the suitcase herself. Lugging her Vuitton bag in one hand and her cosmetic case in the other, she struggled down the path that led to the vehicles, only to discover when she got there that absolutely no one would drive her into Gulfport.
'Sorry, Miss Day, but they told us they needed all the cars,' one of the men muttered, not quite looking her in the eye.
She didn't believe him for a moment. This was Lew Steiner's doing, his last petty attack on her!
Another crew member was more helpful. 'There's a gas station not too far down the road.' He indicated the direction with a turn of his head. 'You could make a phone call from there and get somebody to pick you up.'
The thought of walking down the driveway was daunting enough, let alone having to walk all the way to a petrol station. Just as she realized she'd have to swallow her pride and go back to the chicken coop to change her dress, Lew Steiner stepped out of one of the Airstream trailers and gave her a nasty smirk. She decided she'd die before she'd retreat an inch. Glaring back at him, she hitched up her suitcases and headed across the grass toward the driveway.
'Hey! Stop right there!' Steiner yelled, puffing up next to her. 'Don't you take another step until I have that costume back!'
She rounded on him. 'You so much as touch me, and I'll have you charged with assault!'
'I'll have you charged with theft! That dress belongs to me!'
'And I'm sure you'd look charming in it.' She deliberately caught him in the knees with her cosmetic
case as she turned to walk away. He yelped with pain, and she smiled to herself, wishing she'd hit him harder.
It would be her last moment of satisfaction for a very long time to come.
'You missed the turnoff,' Skeet chastised Dallie from the back seat of the Buick Riviera. 'Route ninety-eight, I told you. Ninety-eight to fifty-five, fifty-five to twelve, then set the cruise control straight into Baton Rouge.'
'Telling me an hour ago and then falling asleep doesn't help much,' Dallie grumbled. He wore a new
cap, dark blue with an American flag on the front, but it wasn't doing the trick against the midafternoon sun, so he picked up a pair of mirrored sunglasses from the dashboard and put them on. Scrub pine stretched out on either side of the two-lane road.
He hadn't seen anything but a few rusted junk cars for miles, and his stomach had started rumbling. 'Sometimes you're about worthless,' he muttered.
'You got any Juicy Fruit?' Skeet asked.
A patch of color in the distance suddenly caught Dallie's attention, a swirl of bright pink wobbling slowly along the side of the road. As they drew closer, the shape gradually became more distinct.
He pulled his sunglasses off. 'I don't believe it. Will you just look at that?'
Skeet leaned forward, his forearm resting on the back of the passenger seat, and shaded his eyes. 'Now don't that just about beat all?' he chortled.
Francesca pushed herself on, one plodding step at a time, struggling for every breath against the vise of her corset. Dust streaked her cheeks, the tops of her breasts glistened with perspiration, and not fifteen minutes earlier, she had lost a nipple. Just like a cork bobbing to the surface of a wave, it had popped out of the neckline of her dress. She had quickly set down her suitcase and shoved it back in, but the memory made her shudder. If she could take back just one thing in her life, she thought for the hundredth time in as many minutes, she'd take back the moment she had decided to walk away from the Wentworth plantation wearing this dress.
The hoopskirt now looked like a gravy boat, protruding in the front and back and squished in on the sides from the combined pressure of the suitcase in her right hand and the cosmetic case in her left, both of which felt as if they were tearing her arms from their shoulder sockets. With each step, she winced. Her tiny French-heeled shoes had rubbed blisters on her feet, and each wayward puff of hot air sent another wave of dust blowing up into her face.
She wanted to sit down on the side of the road and cry, but she wasn't absolutely certain she would be able to force herself to get back up again. If only she weren't so frightened, her physical discomforts would be easier to endure. How could this have happened to her? She'd walked for miles without coming to the petrol station. Either it didn't exist or she had mistaken the direction, but she had seen nothing except a blistered wooden sign advertising a vegetable stand that had never materialized. Soon it would
be dark, she was in a foreign country, and for all she knew a herd of horrid wild beasts lurked in those pines just off the side of the road. She forced herself to look straight ahead. The only thing that kept her from returning to the Went-worth plantation was the absolute certainty that she could never make it back that far.
Surely this road led to something, she told herself. Even in America they wouldn't build roads to nowhere, would they? The thought was so frightening she began playing small games in her head to keep herself moving forward. As she gritted her teeth against the pain in various parts of her body, she envisioned her favorite places, all of them light-years away from the dusty back roads of Mississippi. She envisioned Liberty's on Regent Street with its gnarled beams and wonderful Arabian jewelry, the perfumes at Sephora on the rue de Passy, and everything on Madison Avenue from Adolfo to Yves Saint Laurent.
An image sprang into her mind of an icy glass of Perrier with a small sliver of lime. It hung in the hot air in front of her, the picture so vivid she felt as if she could reach out and clasp the cold, wet glass in the palm of her hand. She was beginning to hallucinate, she told herself, but the image was so pleasant she didn't try to make it go away.
The Perrier suddenly vaporized into the hot Mississippi air as she became aware of the sound of an automobile approaching from behind and then the soft squeal of brakes. Before she could balance the weight of the suitcases in her hands to turn toward the noise, a soft drawl drifted toward her from the other side of the road.
'Hey, darlin', didn't anybody tell you that Lee surrendered?'
The suitcase slammed into the front of her knees and her hoop bounced up in the back as she twisted around toward the voice. She balanced her weight and then blinked twice, unable to believe the vision
that had materialized directly in front of her eyes.
Across the road, leaning out the window of a dark green automobile with his forearm resting across the top of
