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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, wo
uld 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 the door panel, was a man so outrageously good-looking, so devastatingly handsome, that for a moment she thought she might actually have hallucinated him right along with the Perrier and the sliver of lime. As the handle of her suitcase dug into her palm, she took in the classic lines of his face, the molded cheekbones and lean jaw, the straight, perfect nose, and then his eyes, which were a brilliant Paul Newman blue and as thickly lashed as her own. How could a mortal man have eyes like that? How could a man have such an incredibly generous mouth and still look so masculine? Thick, dark blond hair curled up over the edges of a blue billed cap sporting an American flag. She could see the top of a formidable pair of shoulders, the well-formed muscles of his tanned forearm, and for one irrational moment she felt a crazy stab of panic.
She had finally met someone as beautiful as she was.
“You carryin’ any Confederate secrets underneath those skirts?” the man said with a grin that revealed the kind of teeth that belonged on magazine pages and made people count back guiltily to the last time they'd flossed.
“I think the Yankees cut out her tongue, Dallie.”
For the first time, Francesca became aware of another man, this one leaning out the back window. As she took in his sinister face and ominously slitted eyes, warning bells clanged in her head.
“Either that or she's a spy from the North,” he went on. “Never knew a southern woman to keep quiet for so long.”
“You a Yankee spy, darlin'?” Mr. Gorgeous asked, flashing those incredible teeth. “Pryin' out Confederate secrets with those pretty green eyes?”
She was suddenly conscious of her vulnerability—the deserted road, the failing sunlight, two strange men, the fact that she was in America, not safe at home in England. In America people packed loaded guns on their way to church, and criminals roamed the streets at will. She glanced nervously at the man in the back seat. He looked like someone who would torture small animals just for fun. What should she do? No one would hear her if she screamed, and she had no way to protect herself.
