“Clothing?” he asked with a deadpan expression.
“Yes, clothing,” she said, staring at him through the blue-tinted lenses of her glasses.
“She’s ingenious,” Ruby contributed with affected gaiety. She had so hoped her nephew could bring out Miss Ramsey, but during the course of this first meal, her hopes had been dashed. If anything, Miss Ramsey had retreated further into her shell. She seemed to be hiding behind her eyeglasses, shrinking inside her oversized ugly clothing, withdrawing even further behind a veil of secrecy and privacy. “You ought to see some of her creations,” Ruby continued, undaunted. “She works too hard at it, though. I’m constantly after her to get out more. To mingle with people her own age.”
Trent hadn’t taken his eyes off Miss Ramsey. “You do your work here?”
“Yes. I’ve turned the sitting room of the apartment into a studio. The lighting is good.”
“I’m not sure I understand.” He stretched his long legs far out in front of him. His knee bumped into hers beneath the table; she quickly pulled hers back. “How do you paint on clothing? What kind of clothing? What do you use?”
She smiled, pleased with his interest in spite of herself. “I buy surplus garments and textiles in warehouses, then hand-paint original designs on them.”
He scowled with skepticism. “There’s a market for such, uh, clothes?”
“I can afford to pay my rent, Mr. Gamblin,” she said tartly. She shoved back her chair abruptly and got to her feet. “It was a wonderful dinner, as usual, Ruby. Good night.”
“You’re not going to your room so early?” the landlady asked, distressed over Miss Ramsey’s sudden mood swing. “I thought we all might have a cup of tea in the parlor.”
“Excuse me tonight. I’m tired. Mr. Gamblin.” She gave him a cool nod before stalking from the dining room.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Trent muttered. “What bee got up her-”
“ Trent, don’t be crude!” Ruby interrupted. “Wait! What are you- Where-”
Heedless of his aunt’s surprised sputtering, he stood, tossed down his napkin, and left the table with the same angry urgency Miss Ramsey had displayed only seconds before. His long legs covered ground faster than she could. He caught up with her just as she reached the stairs. “Miss Ramsey!”
His voice carried with it the imperiousness of a drill sergeant. She stopped with her foot poised on the second step and turned around.
Before she could prevent it, he had her right hand firmly enfolded in his. “You didn’t give me a chance to tell you how glad I am to find myself in your delightful company.” Regardless of his seething anger, he spoke in dulcet tones. No woman walked Out on Trent Gamblin. “Enchanted, Miss Ramsey.” Lifting her hand, he pressed his mouth to the back of it.
She tried to hold in her gasp but failed. She felt as if she had been punched in the middle. Aftershocks rippled through her. Snatching her hand away from his, she spoke a frosty good night and haughtily retreated upstairs.
Trent was still smiling when he returned to the dining room. “I don’t like the gloating expression on your face, Trent,” Ruby said sternly.
He resumed his seat and poured himself another cup of coffee from the silver pot. “Miss Ramsey might act like a prickly old maid, but she’s still a woman.”
“I hope that you won’t do anything indiscreet or treat Miss Ramsey with anything but the utmost respect. She is a dear girl, but treasures her privacy. In all these months, she hasn’t divulged any personal information about herself. My guess is that there’s a great sadness in her history. Please don’t provoke her.”
“I wouldn’t think of it,” he said with a smile that was anything but sincere.
Since his aunt had always adored him, she didn’t question his earnestness. “Good. Now, be a sweetheart and come into the kitchen with me while I clean up. I want to hear everything that’s been going on in your life.”
“Even the raunchy stuff?”
She giggled and squeezed his chin between her fingers. “I want to hear the raunchy stuff first.”
Trent followed his aunt into her kitchen, but his mind was still on Miss Ramsey. What the hell was her first name, anyway He had noticed, in spite of her clothes-clothes that a bag lady would be ashamed to wear-that she had a remarkably graceful, fluid walk. Her posture was proud. The hand he had so arrogantly kissed might have been Unmanicured, but it was dainty to the point of fragility. For some reason, despite the rough skin and the faint smell of paint and turpentine, he had enjoyed kissing it very much.
Upstairs in the bedroom of her apartment, which took up the east side of the second story, Rana undressed. She had avoided mirrors in the last six months, but she looked at herself carefully now. The cheval glass stood in one corner of the antique-furnished room, so she could see her whole image reflected.
She had left New York weighing one hundred and ten pounds. Stretched over her five-foot-nine-inch frame, the flesh had been thinly distributed. Thanks to Ruby’s culinary arts, not to mention her nagging, Rana had gained almost twenty pounds. By any other standards, she was still thin. To herself, she looked fat. Her hipbones no longer protruded from a concave abdomen. Her breasts had become rounder, softer, far more feminine.
The extra poundage was also evident in her face. The cheekbones made legendary by photographs published in the world’s leading fashion magazines didn’t seem so pronounced, now that the cheeks beneath them had filled out.
She took off the unnecessary eyeglasses. Those topaz-green eyes that had lured hundreds of thousands of women into buying eye-shadow collections with names such as Sahara Sands and Forest Gems stared back at her. Artfully made up, they were spectacular. Even without makeup, their slanting almond shape was distinctive and arresting. Too arresting not to be camouflaged by tinted glasses if she wanted her identity to remain a secret.
She forced her lips into a smile. Her teeth were going crooked again. Her mother would fly into a tizzy if she could see them. How much money had Susan Ramsey spent straightening Rana’s teeth? Yet without the retainer Rana had been advised to sleep in every night of her life, her four front teeth were stubbornly overlapping again.
Picking up a hairbrush, she swept back the heavy strands hanging on either side of her face. She shook her head, as she had been taught to do. There it was, the Rana Look. A mane of dark red hair framing an exotic face. A blurred, diluted version, true, but a glimpse that brought back painful memories.
Even now she could feel the agent’s tobacco-stained fingers pinching her chin as they jerked Rana’s head this way and that to capture certain angles. “She’s just too… too exotic-looking, Mrs. Ramsey. She’s lovely, but… foreign. Yes, that’s it. She’s not all-American enough.”
“You’ve already got all-American models,” Susan Ramsey said with disgust. “My Rana’s different. That’s what makes her an undiscovered treasure.”
No one, not the appraising agent, not the yawning photographer, least of all her mother, noticed Rana wince. She was hungry. A cheeseburger came to mind, and the thought made her mouth water. No sense in torturing herself. She would be lucky to be allowed low-calorie dressing on her lettuce salad if she got lunch at all.
“I’m sorry,” the agent said, gathering the glossy eightby-ten pictures of Rana into a messy stack and handing them back to Susan Ramsey. “She’s a beautiful girl; she’s just not for us. Have you tried Ford? Eileen did very well with Ali McGraw, and she had dark hair and eyes.”
Stuffing the pictures back into a large portfolio and roughly taking Rana by the arm, Susan had marched out of the office. In the elevator, she marked that agent’s name off her long list. “Don’t worry, Rana. Everyone in New York can’t be that blindly stupid. Please stand up straight. And next time will you please try smiling a little more?”