Page 21 of No Mistress Of Mine

She had also become a danger to Denys’s future. Earl Conyers had called at the house in St.John’s Wood, waved his checkbook in her face, and suggested with thinly veiled contempt that she should leave London before he was forced to disinherit his son.

She’d torn up the draft of a thousand pounds Conyers had written and thrown the shreds in his face, but she’d also known she could not allow Denys to keep supporting her. She’d returned to Paris, secured a position at yet another Montmartre establishment, and tried to accept the brutal reality that she’d be singing and dancing in the cabarets until her looks went and her legs gave out and the smoke of men’s cigars destroyed her voice.

And then Henry had come, arriving at her dressing-room door with champagne—not, he’d assured her at once, as any sort of romantic overture, but in celebration. Denys, he explained, was coming from England to make her an offer of marriage.

She could still remember what she’d felt in that moment—the burst of keen, clear joy at the prospect of marrying Denys, and the cold, harsh reality that had at once overshadowed it.

“So you’re here to congratulate me?” she’d asked, shoving down girlish idiocies. “That’s a bit premature, isn’t it?”

“Most women would be chomping at the bit to marry a lord. You don’t seem quite so eager.” He gave her a shrewd glance she feared saw far too much. “But then, you’re an unusual woman.”

“What is your real reason for coming here?”

Henry smiled, the knowing smile of a man of the world. “I’m here to give you an alternative to saying yes.”

“What makes you think I’d want an alternative?”

“Call it a guess. You’ve always impressed me as a sensible girl, tough, practical, and hardheaded.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Conyers knows I’m here. He also knows Denys’s intention to make an honest woman of you. They had quite the epic battle about it yesterday. It was especially lurid, I understand, since Conyers had just discovered how Denys financedA Doll’s House.”

Lola frowned, uncomprehending. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t you know? He mortgaged his estate, Arcady, the one his father bequeathed to him when he came of age.”

Oh, Denys,she thought, heartsick,what have you done?

“Needless to say,” Henry went on, “the earl doesn’t much fancy the idea of you as his daughter-in-law.”

“So you’re here to try bribing me on his behalf?” She made a sound of derision. “When will he accept that I won’t take his money to give Denys up?”

“He already has, which is why I’m not here to offer it. And forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but it seems that you already have given Denys up. Otherwise...” He glanced around the dressing room. “You wouldn’t be working here.”

She didn’t much like being so transparent to a man she barely knew, but she gave a nonchalant shrug. “When I left London, I didn’t know a ring was in the offing.”

“If you had known, would you have stayed?”

“I don’t know,” she said truthfully.

“And if you were to marry Denys, could you make him happy?”

She felt cold suddenly, fear brushing over her the same way the chill winds of autumn brushed aside the languid, sultry days of summer. She didn’t reply to Henry’s question, but she didn’t have to. They both knew the answer.

Viscount Somerton, the son and heir of Earl Conyers, being happily married to a cabaret dancer was a glorious and impossible fantasy, akin to a sailor marrying a mermaid, or a butcher from Kansas City marrying a society girl from Baltimore by mail-order proxy. The chance of happiness for such unions was precisely nil. And yet... and yet...

Yearning welled up within her.

“I have to change,” she said, and started to close the door, but Henry flattened a palm against the door to stop her.

“May I wait?”

A man didn’t come into a girl’s dressing room, especially with champagne, unless he was an intimate acquaintance or she wanted him to become one. On the other hand, Henry Latham was a powerful man in theater circles, not one to be snubbed lightly.

“I’m not here to seduce you,” he said as she hesitated, “or to throw Conyers’s money in your face. I have an entirely different sort of offer to make. We can talk about it while you change.”

She wanted out of her costume. She was tired and sweaty, and her ribs ached, as they always did after dancing in a tight corset. Abruptly, she turned away. “Do as you like.”

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