She hadn’t forgotten anything. She’d deliberately put Desdemona’s best line at the last, so that she could be looking at him, rather than at her fellow actor, when she made the heroine’s protestation of innocence her own.
He watched as her face relaxed, and her eyes closed, and in the moment of Desdemona’s death, she looked so lovely and so without guilt that he suddenly wanted to believe that last night in Paris had all been some horrible mistake.
But his rational mind knew no mistake was possible. Lola, wearing the sheer, intimate clothing a woman only donned for a lover, moving to sit beside Henry on the settee, her words in the face of his marriage proposal so clear and uncompromising that there had been no room for doubt.
Sorry, but Henry has made me a better offer.
A glimmer of the pain he’d felt that night, pain so long suppressed that he’d almost forgotten it, came roaring back with sudden force, violent enough that he jerked in his seat.
He wanted to tell her to go to hell and take Henry’s absurd notions of partnership with her. He wanted to say that, partner or not, he would never, ever, allow her to gain a part in any play he produced.
But it was too late for that.
He thought you would be fair.
Henry, it seemed, had known him better than he knew himself. Lola had been good today, damn it all, too good to be dismissed when the only reason for it would be that she’d wronged him years ago.
“Well, Denys,” Jacob murmured beside him, sounding far too pleased with himself. “I’m not sure MissValentine performed quite as you expected.”
Denys refused to be drawn. “Thank you, MissValentine,” he called to her as he gave the man beside him an impatient glance. “You may wait backstage with the others. Next, please?”
He beckoned to the rather reedy-looking young man waiting at the edge of the stage, but he wasn’t able to avoid offering an opinion of Lola’s audition quite as easily as he’d hoped.
“Denys?” Jacob prompted, when he said nothing. “Say something, man. What did you think of MissValentine’s performance?”
Denys sighed, grim resignation settling over him.
“I think,” he muttered, studying the seductive sway of Lola’s hips as she walked off the stage, “my life just became much more complicated.”
Chapter6
Lola hadn’t been required to formally audition for a part in years, and as she lingered in the reception room backstage with her fellow actors, waiting to hear the final casting call, it came home to her just how nerve-racking the process was.
The success of her show in New York had ended the need for auditions, and the only readings she’d done had been for tutors or for Henry in the sitting room of her New York apartment, and any assessments they gave of her work, while keenly critical, had always been offered with suggestions how to improve.
Reading for Jacob Roth, with Denys beside him and dozens of curious peers watching from the wings, was a whole different matter, and she didn’t have a clue as to the caliber of her audition.
Thankfully, she hadn’t forgotten her lines or tripped over her skirt, or stuttered over Shakespeare’s tricky dialogue. But now, surrounded by actors probably far more experienced than she, those facts did not seem very reassuring.
Voices swirled around her, engaged in the usual self-deprecating conversation punctuated by nervous laughter, as actors greeted each other and speculated about their chances, but Lola did not attempt to join in.
After her disastrous performance inA Doll’s House, spiteful things had been said behind her back, lurid accounts of her affair with Denys had hit the scandal sheets, and within days, London’s theater coterie was treating her like a plague contagion, sure she was only in the play because it had been financed by her lover. And why shouldn’t they have thought it? It was the truth.
Don’t worry,Denys had said.I’ll take care of you.
He’d meant to console and reassure her, but Lola could still remember lying in bed with him at the house he’d leased for her in St.John’s Wood, those words echoing through her brain and a sick feeling knotting her guts as she realized just what she had become.
I’ll take care of you.
She’d never wanted that, but that was where she’d ended up, becoming a kept woman without even realizing it. Little by little, with every gift he’d given her that she couldn’t bear to give back and every offer to help her that she couldn’t seem to refuse, with every touch of his hand and kiss of his mouth, she’d belonged a bit less to herself and a bit more to him. And with her acting career over before it had really begun, she’d lain in his arms that last afternoon in London and wondered if being a kept woman was the inevitable path for a girl like her.
She had fought so hard to avoid that fate. Men had been pursuing her from the time she was old enough for a corset, and though her mother had gone back to her high-society set in Baltimore long before then, leaving Lola and her father far behind, Lola hadn’t needed a mother to explain the facts of life, not about men. Somehow, she’d always known that the sort of pursuit most men had in mind didn’t involve a church, a vow, and love everlasting.
Before Denys, she’d given in only once, back in New York the winter she was seventeen, and the result of her very brief, very stupid liaison with handsome man-about-town Robert Delacourt had been a hard, humiliating confirmation of the first lesson every girl on the boards had to learn: stage-door johnnies don’t marry dancing girls.
After Robert, she’d taken what little cash she had and moved to Paris, where she’d been quite happy to keep the stage-door johnnies at arm’s length. It had been easy as pie to refuse the dinners, the champagne, and the jewels, for she knew all those gifts came at a price.
But then, Denys had come along, with his affable charm, his dark good looks, and—most of all—his deep, genuine tenderness. Tenderness was something she’d had little of in her life, and her parched soul had taken it in the way a wilting plant took up water, and eighteen months later, she had somehow become what she’d promised herself she would never be: a kept woman.
