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 in A 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.
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 financed A 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 . . .