Coming Up Roses (9 page)

He turned, surprised. “What’s the matter,
Miss Gilhooley?” With a wicked grin, he asked, “You want another
hamburger, too?”

“
No!” Exasperated, Rose started digging
around in her skirt pocket, where she carried some change. “I’m
quite full, thank you, but it was I who offered Little Elk another
one of those sandwiches, so I ought to pay for it.”

“
Tut, tut. I invited you to come with
me tonight,” he reminded her.

“
This evening is my treat.”

“
You didn’t invite Little Elk,” Rose
muttered, conscious that her friend’s company tonight was a direct
result of her own cowardice. “I should pay for him.”

“
Pshaw. Don’t be silly.”

“
I’m not being silly!” Heat crept up
the back of her neck. Rose wondered if she was making too much of
this. Probably. H.L. May rattled her composure more than any other
human being she’d ever met.

“
Here.” She thrust a silver dollar at
him.

He looked down at it and didn’t make a move
to take it. “Pooh.”

“
Blast you, H.L. May! You drive me
crazy!”

His slow grin stampeded the heat at the back
of her neck into her cheeks. Rose imagined she now glowed like one
of those electrical lights hanging all over the place at the
Exposition.

“
I’m not sure driving you crazy is a
bad thing, Miss Gilhooley.” He took her demurely gloved hand and
folded her fingers over the silver piece. When he was through, her
hand was firmly secured in his own.

“
Keep your money. This night’s on
me.”

He leaned close to her when he said it, and
his warm breath fanned her already burning cheek. Two strong and
contradictory impulses warred in her. On the one hand, Rose wanted
to turn around and scuttle away as fast as she could. On the other
hand, she wanted to throw her arms around H.L. May’s broad
shoulders and cling for dear life. The strain of dealing with the
wildly disparate hankerings held her rooted to the spot, staring
into H.L.’s magnificent, hypnotic eyes.

“
You have beautiful eyes, Miss
Gilhooley,” he whispered after what seemed like three or four
hours.

Rose swallowed, opened her mouth, discovered
her brain was barren of words, and shut it again.

“
In fact, taken as a package—a very
small package—you’re a most appealing female.”

Rose felt her knees go weak. Good heavens,
what was he saying? Her ears buzzed. Her mouth went so dry, she
wouldn’t have been able to talk even if she could have found a word
or two in her brain somewhere.

H.L. slowly released her hand and patted her
on the shoulder. “You just go back to your friend, Miss Gilhooley.
I’ll bring him another hamburger.”

She managed to nod, although she could have
sworn she had no control over her muscles. He chucked her under the
chin, grinned more broadly, and walked away from her. Sauntered
away from her. Swaggered away from her. As if he’d just scored a
home run and won the game for the home team.

Rose gulped again as the bones in her legs
stopped melting and her knees straightened. She realized her mouth
was hanging open and shut it. She blinked.

Damn
him!
Rose, who would never, ever speak a profanity aloud, and who
virtually never even thought profanities, wanted to fling hundreds
and hundreds of
damns
,
hells
, and
bastards
at H.L. May’s wide back.

Instead, she whirled around and stomped back
to Little Elk. Offhand, she couldn’t recall another time in her
life when she’d so completely and utterly humiliated. And all
because a handsome man had sweet-talked her.

“
Ooooooh! That man drives me
crazy
.”

She resented it when Little Elk’s chuckle
rumbled out.

Chapter Five

H.L. didn’t know why he’d flirted with Rose
Gilhooley. Hell, she was just a kid, really. He kicked at a wad of
paper in his path as he, Rose, and Little Elk stood in line for the
Ferris Wheel.

Worse, she was now mad at him. She’d
been almost relaxed before he’d succumbed to his urge to flirt. Now
she’d gone back to being stiff as a poker, frigid as winter, and as
uncommunicative as one of those sightless, earless fish somebody’d
discovered in an underground river somewhere in a cave. When she
did speak, she used words of one syllable. Hell, she used
sentences
of one syllable. Damn it,
what had possessed him to spoil it all? He needed her cooperation,
not her enmity.

He inspected her closely when they reached
the head of the line and offered a hand to help her into the
carriage. She didn’t want to take his hand; she resisted taking it,
even; but he didn’t give her a chance to scramble inside unaided.
He simply grabbed her hand and held on. He also revised his opinion
of Rose Gilhooley.

All right, so she wasn’t just a kid. She was
curvy as hell, and fully grown, even if she wasn’t very big.

Well, how could she be big and perform her
act so effectively? Annie Oakley was even smaller than Rose
Gilhooley, although with her, slightness didn’t seem so odd. After
all, Annie Oakley was a sharpshooter. That required skill, but no
outrageous degree of athletic ability. What Rose Gilhooley did on a
horse was masterful, and it had to require the strength of a
Hercules.

Yet she was a tiny, delicate-looking,
remarkably pretty young woman who, if you didn’t know better and
you saw her walking on a street, you’d think was a normal,
everyday, wife and mother. Or at least . . . Maybe not a wife and
mother, but a clerk in a department store. Or a type-writer for
some attorney’s firm. A secretary at a bank somewhere, perhaps. Or
somebody’s kid sister.

You sure wouldn’t look at her and
think:
Wind Dancer, Bareback Rider
Extraordinaire
. He grinned to himself. She was a
goddamned Herculette, in actual fact. He’d have to remember that
description when he wrote his first article.

Funny thing was that you didn’t notice how
tiny she was when she was performing. You only noticed how
incredible she was.

It was later, after you’d met her, that you
realized she was an adorable, not to mention eminently ravishable,
young woman. Damn. He almost wished he hadn’t noticed.

But that was stupid. H.L. May could withstand
lust. And anyway, he wasn’t sure lust was the right word. He
certainly felt a powerful attraction to her, but lust didn’t
exactly express it. He consoled himself with the thought that he
was excited about this writing assignment, and that his enthusiasm
was undoubtedly the only reason he felt this—interest. Yes indeedy.
Interest. That was it.

Fascination, even.

How nonsensical of him to think of it as
lust.

H.L. caught a flash of one of Rose’s
well-turned ankles, recalled how shapely her legs were, and had to
fight down a surge of sexual awareness.

Damnation. That wasn’t mere interest.

Unless . . . Ah, of course. That was it. H.L.
had read a monograph written by one of that German doctor Breuer’s
colleagues, Sigmund Freud. Freud claimed that nearly every human
emotion had something to do with one’s sexual drive. Therefore,
H.L. understood that sometimes, when one was particularly intrigued
by a subject, one’s carnal nature, being the notoriously
ungovernable monster it was, turned one’s intrigue onto sexual
channels. That’s the way the human brain worked. It had nothing to
do with Rose herself in relationship to him, H.L. May, skeptical
and jaded newspaper reporter.

H.L. smacked himself upside the head with the
heel of his palm. Who was he trying to kid?

“
Mr. May! Whatever is the
matter?”

Damn. Rose clearly hadn’t missed his
self-inflicted attention-getting gesture. He grinned at her to show
her that all was well in his universe. “Mosquito,” he lied glibly.
Hell, this whole Exposition was built on what used to be a swamp.
Mosquitoes were possible. Besides, her alarm at his unexpected
self-punishment had at least jolted more than one word out of
her.

She gave him a small frown that made her
appear like a very prudish, very delicate schoolmarm. “It looked as
if you might have hurt yourself. Perhaps you ought not to be so
violent with the mosquitoes.”

Then she smiled puritanically, and desire
swept through H.L. like a tidal wave. This was really stupid,
especially when he knew she’d been trying to be sarcastic. As if
she could ever out-sarcastic him, of all word-loving people.

He was distracted—thank God—when the wheel
moved and Rose expelled a tiny squeal. Then she looked embarrassed.
He wanted to hug her.

“
Wheel’s moving,” mumbled Little Elk.
His dark eyes glittered like onyx. He’d eaten three hamburgers
altogether, as H.L. and Rose had sat in silence, Rose staring off
into the distance and H.L. wondering what to say. Neither the
Indian nor Rose seemed to be troubled by silence. H.L. was used to
being in conversation when he was with people so he didn’t enjoy
the lack of chatter, but he endured.

He didn’t begrudge Little Elk a single one of
those hamburgers. Or even the silence, if it came to that, because
it was a new experience for him. It was interesting to get to know
people from other walks of life and to observe both how they lived
and how they tackled new experiences. H.L. loved people of all
shapes, sizes, ethnicities, colors, and creeds. That’s why he’d
gone into the newspaper business in the first place.

On that happy understanding, he told himself
this was why Rose excited him so much: Because she was so different
from the other women in his life. And the other men, too, for that
matter.

Here she was, a perfectly ordinary-looking
female—well, perhaps prettier than most, especially when those
gigantic blue eyes of hers sparkled like gemstones as they did
now—but she’d lived such an incredible life. They hadn’t started
the interviewing process yet, but if Cody’s advertising circular
was to be believed, she’d been born and grown up on the wild,
western frontier near Deadwood, Kansas, one of the most notoriously
dangerous towns in the United States and its territories. Hell,
she’d already told him she’d been taught to ride by this Sioux
Indian. A Sioux Indian, for the love of God! For all H.L. knew,
Little Elk was one of the band of Sioux who’d wiped out Custer and
the 7th Cavalry at the Little Big Horn.

Squinting at Little Elk once more, H.L.
decided he was allowing his romantic side to get the better of him.
Little Elk would have been a small child in 1876. He most likely
hadn’t done any killing or butchering of soldiers—although everyone
in the United States had read stories about what women and children
did to the soldiers after the massacre. H.L. shuddered briefly,
unable to reconcile Little Elk, who seemed like a very nice fellow,
with such savagery.

“
Oh, look at that!”

H.L. frowned when he saw Rose grip
Little Elk’s arm and point at the scenery. Why was she hanging onto
Little Elk? It was H.L. who’d given her this exciting opportunity
to see the world’s fair from on high. If she was going to hang onto
anybody, it ought to be
him
,
H.L. May, damn it.

“
Lights,” Little Elk said, with what
H.L. considered remarkable brevity under the
circumstances.

In reality, the Ferris Wheel had begun its
ascent, and the three of them were now hanging, along with dozens
of other fair-goers, in a carriage swinging from a steel frame, and
observing a panoramic vista of the entire Columbian Exposition.

H.L. knew that in another couple of minutes,
when their carriage rose even higher, they’d be able to see the
city of Chicago spread out before them. And then they’d see Lake
Michigan and all the boats floating out there, many of which were
decorated for the fair.

A person got a dramatic and fascinating view
of the world from up here. H.L. liked it. He wanted to put an arm
around Rose’s shoulder and hug her small body close to his big one
and point out all the sites of interest in Chicago that he could
make out from up here in the air. Of course, you could see more of
those sites in the daytime, but there was something about the night
that made cuddling up with a pretty girl an alluring prospect.

And if he so much as tried to do such a
thing, she’d scratch his eyes out. Probably shove him out of the
gondola. H.L. entertained a mental vision of himself flying through
the air to land with a
splat
on one of the concession stands below. He sighed. There was
something the matter with him tonight, and he didn’t know what it
was.

“
I should say there are lights.” Rose’s
voice was nearly all breath, she was so excited. “Oh, my goodness,
I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“
Spectacular, isn’t it?” H.L. didn’t
mean to sound smug.

Nevertheless, he was responsible for Rose’s
seeing these astonishing sights, and he wanted her to remove her
hand from Little Elk’s wrist and pay attention to him.

“
Oh, my, yes! It’s truly incredible,
Mr. May.”

She finally let go of her friend and, folding
her hands in her lap, gazed out at the lights. She only glanced
briefly at H.L., and he decided something had to be done. After
clearing his throat, he said,

“
I’ll bring you here during the
daylight hours one of these days, Miss Gilhooley. We can conduct an
interview on the Ferris Wheel as well as anywhere else, I
suppose.”