Free Coming Up Roses by Alice Duncan Page B

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