Rebel with a Cause

Surely Emily had misread her expression. Missy Lenore Devlin had never been one to be scandalized! Why, ask anyone back home, she was the one creating a scandal.

She stepped out of her petticoat and let it fall in a heap about her feet. Undressing in front of a stranger was about as adventurous as one could get. Pray that she wasn’t blushing herself to embarrassment.

When the last of her garments hit the floor, she kicked them into a corner and sat in the chair with her legs crossed at the ankles and her hands folded on her knees. So what if she was naked in front of a semi-clad stranger? She lifted her gaze, determined to meet this challenge with a confident grin.

Emily was not looking in her direction. Instead, she fluffed Muff’s fur and spoke softly to him. She glanced up and smiled.

“What a sweet little fellow.”

“Yes … sweet. He’s been nothing but that for the entire trip. Why, back home that’s what everyone calls him, sweet little Muff.” Missy knew she was babbling, but what did one say in such a circumstance? My, isn’t it a lovely evening to be sitting in a whorehouse naked?

“I used to be like you.” Emily said.

“I suppose it’s all a part of your job.”

“What?” Confusion lifted Emily’s painted-on eyebrows.

“Bare as a jay?”

“Respectable.” She shrugged her shoulders, twirling her fingers in Muff’s fur and looking at something in her mind. “Once I had dreams. There was a day when I’d have turned as red as you are now.”

Missy would have protested her blushing condition, but that was not what this conversation was about. To outward appearances, Emily looked like a goddess in satin and feathers, with her breasts peeking through her sheer underwear and her bare calves showing. Somehow, though, she didn’t look a bit like the soiled doves of the novels, laughing and flirting and dancing the night away with glasses of something wicked and intoxicating gripped in their gay fingers.

Emily looked beaten-down. Her smile seemed distant … hopeless even.

“Still, if it hadn’t been for Zane, I’d probably be dead.” With that, her spirits appeared to rally.

“Me, too.” Missy pulled the pins from her dirty hair. She fluffed it about her shoulders then frowned at her fingers where grit had lodged under her fingernails. “He also saved a little girl in the flood.”

“A lot of folks are indebted to Zane.” When Emily looked at her, Missy was sure that she did not see nakedness. “Then too, a lot of folks don’t wish him well.”

“Why would you be dead?”

“My folks passed when I was sixteen,” she said.

“My father died in a buggy accident.” How interesting, Missy thought, that the pampered eastern darling and the scorned fallen woman had so much in common.

“Mine died of scarlet fever. We were homesteaders just outside of town. Some others died, too.”

“That’s a pure tragedy. Did you have someone to go to?” As much as Missy sought freedom from her restrictive family, she knew from some experience that they could be counted on in a crisis.

“Zane was the only one. We were close back then. Really, he’s all I had. I tried to support myself by doing laundry, but my hands bled with the lye. My eyes aren’t good enough for sewing. There’s only one way a woman can support herself around here when her folks are gone.”

“Dancing,” Missy said with a sigh.

“Sure … dancing. I was so hungry and lonely, it was easy to tell myself, ‘Okay, Emily, you can do it for a little while, till you get back on your feet.’ The thing is, this business keeps you mostly off your feet. It’s hard to get back up.”

“How did Zane save you?”

“I meant to go to Pete’s Palace, but Zane wouldn’t have it. He said if I meant to take up the … dancing … life it would have to be at Maybelle’s.”

“He might have taken you to another town. Maybe a better life.”

“Oh, he tried. Years back I was so young and proud. I was set on making my own way in the world. Maybelle’s was the best he could do for me. Besides, he grew up here, Maybelle was like an auntie to him, it didn’t seem so bad back then.”

“What about now? You’re a grown woman. You could leave the sporting life, surely?”

Emily studied her fingertips making whirls in Muff’s fur. “There is one way.” She shook her head, staring hard at Missy. “I don’t know that I’d feel right about it, though.”

A heavy knock beat on the door. The knob turned. Missy dove for Zane’s coat and wrapped herself up a second after Moe stepped into the room with two buckets of steaming water.

He didn’t seem to take note of her flash of skin, but by heavens, there were some adventures that she did not need to have.

Missy stared at Herman Meyer of Herman Meyer’s Mercantile over a display of canned goods on the counter. He seemed perplexed. Speechless, he stared at the red hat that had been a gift from Emily. His eyes scanned downward over the feathers that tickled her cleavage.

“I said,” Missy pronounced loudly in case the man’s problem was that he was hard of hearing, “I’m here about your help-wanted sign in the window.”

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