“I’m so sorry.”
“At least, coming from you, it’s not meaningless sympathy. You know what it’s like to be seen as not good enough for the man you love.”
Lola decided they needed a different topic of conversation. “You didn’t go back to dancing?”
“Heavens, no. I’m twenty-nine, a bit long in the tooth for the cancan. I tried my hand at acting once—I joined a repertory company, but I couldn’t stick it. I got through one week before I quit. Unlike you, I’m not brave enough for real acting.”
“Brave?” Lola couldn’t help a laugh. “Crazy is more like it. Last time I tried this, I was a colossal failure.”
“Which is why I say you’re brave. In your place, I’d have stayed in New York, used my inheritance as a dowry, found myself some nice, respectable chap to marry, and given up the stage for good. I’d certainly never have come back here and tried again. But perhaps . . .” Her friend paused and took a sip of champagne, giving Lola a wide-eyed stare over the rim of her glass. “Perhaps acting wasn’t your only reason for returning to London?”
Lola stiffened. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, Lola, really!” Her friend laughed, not the least bit put off by her attempt at hauteur. “This is Kitty you’re talking to. We shared a dressing room in our Paris days, remember? Do you think I’ve forgotten how often Somerton called on you there with champagne and chocolates?”
“That was a long time ago, as we’ve just been discussing. And,” she added, wrinkling up her nose in rueful fashion, “Denys liked me much more in those days than he does now.”
“It seemed a mutual feeling to me, luvvy. Oh, how you used to sigh and swoon over him.”
Pride compelled her to object to that description. “I have never swooned over a man in my life. Not even Denys.”
“Tell it to the marines! I remember how he used to wait outside our dressing room while you dithered over which dress to wear or whether a gentleman like him would think you too forward if you dabbed perfume behind your ears. And when he asked you to move to London to be with him, you were over the moon!”
“I have never swooned,” Lola reiterated. “And I don’t sigh, and I don’t dither. And even if I was as silly as all that once upon a time, I’m certainly not that way now.”
“No? I saw you looking at him while you said your lines yesterday.” She paused to set aside her champagne, then she lifted her hand to press the back of it against her forehead. “‘Commend me to my kind lord,’” she quoted with melodramatic fervor as she fell back, draping herself artistically over the arm of the sofa, her glass held high. “‘A guiltless death I die.’”
Kitty sat up, laughing, but Lola felt no inclination to laugh with her. “I have not come back to London to rekindle a romance with Denys!”
“Haven’t you?” Her friend studied her face for a moment, then sighed, looking let down. “You mean it really is about acting?”
“Partly. Denys and I are also business partners.”
Kitty cocked an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?”
She proceeded to explain, and though the other woman listened with rapt attention, Lola’s explanations didn’t seem to impress her.
“Business partners, hmm?” She gave a wink. “Well, that’s a start, I suppose.”
“Really, Kitty, you’re impossible!” She made a sound of impatience, sitting upright on the sofa. “Have you really forgotten what Madame used to say? ‘The lords, they love to chase the dancing girls, n’est-ce pas? But—’ ”
“ ‘They don’t ever marry them,’ ” her friend finished with mock solemnity.
The idiom wasn’t quite true in her case, but Lola wasn’t above using it to veer Kitty off this topic. “Well, there you are, then.”
“It’s time one of our lot beat the odds, I say. Why shouldn’t it be you? You know better than most that a girl has to have big dreams if she’s to accomplish anything.”
“I have no objection to big dreams,” Lola assured her. “Just impossible ones.”
“Is it so impossible? He loved you once. Why shouldn’t he fall in love with you again?”
Lola stared at her in dismay. “It’s not like that. We are business partners. That’s going to be hard enough to manage without bringing any crazy ideas of romance into it.”
“I don’t see how you can think not to bring romance into it. You two have a history.”
“There’s no reason why we can’t just be indifferent acquaintances.”
Kitty stared at her askance. “You and Somerton?”
“Yes,” she said, even as she mentally crossed her fingers. “Platonic, indifferent acquaintances.”
“You two have been many things, Lola, but indifferent has never been one of them.”
Lola’s mind went tumbling back into the past before she could stop it—the torture of keeping him at arm’s length in Paris, the bliss of their meetings at the house in St. John’s Wood. His mouth on hers and his body on hers and the frantic, wild euphoria of afternoons in bed together. Warmth flooded through her, pooling in her midsection, flooding her cheeks, tingling up and down her spine.
“Acquaintances, hmm?”
Kitty’s amused voice was like a splash of icy water.
“Yes,” she said, scowling. “And if you keep making fun of the idea, I fear our friendship is not long for this world.”
“Sorry.” The amusement vanished from her friend’s face at once, replaced by a somber expression. “All teasing aside, I’m not sure a man and a woman can ever work together. Romance, I should think, would always get in the way.”
“That’s not true. I know plenty of people who’ve had love affairs, broken up, and worked together quite amicably afterward. It happens in theater all the time, and you know it.”
“Well, yes, for a play here and there, maybe. But you’re talking about a lifetime of being in business together. And besides,” she added before Lola could argue, “even if you and Somerton do establish a platonic relationship, very few other people will believe that’s what it is.”
“I don’t care what people believe.”
“Somerton does.”
Lola grimaced at that unarguable fact. “I know,” she acknowledged with a sigh. “But I don’t see what either of us can do about it. Over time, people will just have to accept there’s nothing of that sort between us.”
“And his sweetheart? Do you think she’ll accept it?”
Lola blinked, taken aback, though she knew she shouldn’t be. “Denys has a sweetheart?”
“That’s the rumor.”
“Who—” She paused, her voice gone and her throat dry, and she felt the need for a swallow of champagne. She gulped down the entire contents of her glass before she could voice the inevitable question. “Who is she?” she managed at last, and she was absurdly proud of the indifference in her voice.
If Kitty wasn’t deceived, at least she didn’t tease about it. “Lady Georgiana Prescott. Daughter of a marquess. Very highbrow and elegant, if the scandal rags are to be believed.”
Lady Georgiana. Of course. How fitting, how right that he should return his attentions to his childhood love, the woman his parents had always wanted for him, the perfect sort of woman to marry an earl’s son. Even as that thought passed through Lola’s mind, however, she felt a bit bleak.
“Well, there you have it then,” she said, striving to sound brisk and matter-of-fact. “When he becomes engaged to Lady Georgiana, it will show everyone there’s nothing between us.”