Free Cowboy For Hire by Alice Duncan

little
horrified herself.
    Huxtable snorted and growled. “Temperamental
bitch, ain’t she?”
    Charlie scratched his chin and looked as if
he were trying not to laugh.
    Martin cried, “That’s it! That’s perfect! Use
that exact expression, Miss Wilkes!”
    “Gracious,” murmured Amy, and decided on the
spot that acting in the moving pictures was a lot more complicated
than one might expect if one only saw the end result. Then her
brain registered what Huxtable had called her, and she whipped
around, slamming her fists on her hips. “How dare you! You
drunken sot! Don’t you dare call me that word again!”
    Charlie lost the battle he’d been waging with
his funny bone and burst out laughing. Martin blinked, surprised.
Amy stamped her foot and didn’t know if she was more angry with
Horace Huxtable, with herself for allowing him to get under her
skin, or with Charlie Fox for laughing at her.
    With bitterness in her heart, Amy returned
her whole attention to the rehearsal. She tried hard to perform as
Mr. Tafft desired her to and to ignore Huxtable’s many snide
asides. She told herself she didn’t care what anyone else thought
of her acting. She had to act in truth when the time came for her
to perform with Horace Huxtable.
    He lumbered onto the set, still looking green
and bloodshot, and smirking up a storm. Amy frowned at him.
Charlie, she noticed, was watching curiously from the sidelines, a
grin on his face. She’d like to wipe that grin away but didn’t know
how to accomplish it.
    “All right,” said Huxtable. “Let’s get this
over with.”
    Martin’s voice had evidently become strained,
because he’d picked up a megaphone to help himself project. He
looked slightly nervous about this latest pairing, although he
sounded buoyant when he called out, “Take your places, Horace and
Miss Wilkes. Miss Wilkes, I think you should be at the fence
staring off into the distance, worrying about how you’re going to
hold on to your father’s legacy.”
    “Certainly.” Moving to the fence, Amy thought
that, had her own father been so careless as to stake the family
homestead as equity with so obviously undesirable a person as
Horace Huxtable, he would have deserved to lose it. With her
handkerchief she wiped dust off the top rail and folded her arms on
it. Huxtable huffed in the background, but she didn’t turn around
to see what he was huffing about.
    “Prude,” he said. “Afraid of a little
dust.”
    She heard that one, but opted not to respond.
If it was prudish to care about keeping her shirtwaist clean, then
she was a prude.
    “All right,” Martin said hurriedly. “Let’s
get on with it. Miss Wilkes, you don’t know Huxtable has entered
the yard. You’re over there mooning into space, and when he speaks,
you’re startled and whirl around. Got it?”
    “Got it.” She was pleased she sounded so
sporty.
    “Action!” called Martin.
    Amy stared off into the unlovely distance,
missing the orange groves and poppy fields of her Pasadena home.
She tried to feel bad about losing a ranch in the desert outside of
El Monte, but couldn’t make herself do it because the scenery was
so ugly. She figured the orange trees and poppies would do quite
nicely as substitutes, so she mourned losing them instead.
    Huxtable wasn’t exactly light on his feet. He
stomped onto the marked-off set border, and Amy turned, trying to
look startled.
    “No, no, Miss Wilkes,” Martin set his
megaphone down and walked over to her. “You turned too soon. You
don’t turn until he speaks. Until then, you don’t hear him.”
    “But I did hear him. He walks like an
elephant.”
    Huxtable cast a long-suffering glance into
the heavens. Amy resented it like thunder.
    “But, you see,” Martin told her gently,
“nobody but you can hear him. The audience watching the picture in
the theatre won’t. The picture’s silent.”
    Fiddle. That’s right . “I beg your
pardon. May we try it again?”
    “Of course.”
    She felt