by Betina Krahn
Slowly, she was drawn into the spirit of competition herself and began to think about her own desire and ability to compete in their contest. What would be wrong with showing them she could be just as clever, skillful, courteous, and persuasive?
Late in the afternoon she found herself stuck in the shoe department, polishing glass cases and feeling overworked and irritable and abandoned. She was drafting a few choice words to say to Remington Carr when he dared show his face to her again, when a very stout matron in a dark print dress and excessively feathered hat entered the department. There was a flurry of motion around the woman, and it took a moment for Antonia to realize that it was a number of jostling, gyrating children.
She watched as the woman paused to examine first one ladies’ shoe, then another, giving each a disdainful look and dropping it back onto the display. When the woman finally hit upon a shoe that seemed to meet her standards and looked around for assistance, every clerk in the area seemed to have disappeared. It seemed exceedingly odd to Antonia, for only moments before, they had been tripping over each other in order to help another well-heeled matron.
The woman called several times, “Clerk! I say, clerk!” then declared in great pique, “Really, I should expect better service here!” The department head came up behind Antonia and tapped her on the shoulder, ordering her to wait on the customer. Surprised by this rare opportunity, she plunged in to offer the woman her help.
“No, no—this one is much too narrow!” the woman insisted when Antonia had helped her wedge her foot into the shoe. A display of boxes on a nearby counter went toppling as two of the woman’s children pulled on it. Antonia discreetly pulled the small boys away and asked them not to touch things. They darted around the counter, and as she horned the woman into another pair of shoes, she saw them, joined by a sister, climbing up the shelves against the wall. She ordered them down and finally had to pluck them bodily from the shelves, knocking several shoe boxes onto the floor.
By the fourth pair of shoes, both Antonia and the bench where the woman sat were groaning silently. Between the woman’s impossible demands and her children’s atrocious behavior, Antonia was fast losing what was left of her composure.
“No, of course not—much too high a heel!” the woman declared, tossing yet another shoe back at Antonia. “A person could break her neck on a stair runner in such heels. I want something stylish. And sensible. And reasonable.”
Antonia was about to tell her to get a stylish, sensible, and reasonable foot first. But a glimpse of the department head standing at the edge of the area, scowling, made her hold her tongue.
As the woman’s frustration in not finding a proper fit escalated, she became increasingly irate. When Antonia hooked the buttons of yet another shoe onto her foot, she flinched and howled, claiming Antonia had jabbed her foot with the button hook and declaring that she’d never received such shoddy and incompetent service in her life.
Antonia pushed wisps of hair back out of her face, planted her hands in the small of her aching back, and suggested vehemently: “If you don’t like the service, perhaps you’d better take your business somewhere else!” Gasping at Antonia’s insolence, the woman struggled to her feet and made a straight line for the department head to express her outrage.
Just at that moment one of the woman’s boys reached the top of a free-standing display shelf and succeeded in pulling the entire thing over with him. Some of the shoes went crashing through the glass top of a display counter, and the sounds of shattering glass and a child’s scream brought people running from everywhere to see what had happened. Turmoil ensued as the woman came rushing back through the department, screaming that her baby had been killed. The manager came running after her, calling for help; and the other children froze, then began to wail with fright.
The boy was found on the floor, at the side of a nearby counter, crying but uninjured. The mother picked him up, pressed him to her ample bosom, and turned on the manager in a high rage.
“It was all the fault of that upstart girl—that shop creature!” she railed. “Insolent thing—she stood there insulting me while my poor dear baby was teetering on the brink of disaster—why, he might have been killed on that dreadful thing!”
Antonia was seeing everything in red and feeling the urge to mayhem rising, when the woman demanded they compensate her for her distress and fire Antonia. The tensions and accumulated outrages of a very long day erupted in a volatile blast, and she launched herself at the woman’s back, intent on having at least one handful of those absurd hat feathers as a souvenir of the coming fight. But something—someone—grabbed her by the waist and held her back.
Try as she might, she couldn’t get free, and soon she was pulled, struggling and flailing, away from that chaotic scene and through the nearest curtain. “Let me go—the old witch—I’ll scratch her eyes out—” she growled, shoving at the arms clamped around her ribs and scrambling for footing.
The laugh that vibrated her shoulders and rumbled through her head was familiar, and she realized who held her the same instant he spoke.
Chapter Sixteen
“Oh, no!” Remington said with a ragged laugh. “I can’t have you attacking my paying customers bodily, no matter how irksome and irrational they are.”
He carried her through a cavernous and deserted stockroom, between towering racks of shelves, past stacks of crates and barrels, and finally halted beside huge bales of fabric bolts. As soon as they stopped, she found the floor with her feet and managed to turn on him.
“She deserves it—did you hear what she called me?” She pushed back in his arms. “A shop creature! The moldy old crone blamed me because her foot was too fat for the shoe! And her pack of brats was climbing all over—” He began to laugh and she gasped. “It’s not funny!”
“Yes, it is.”
“It is not! She turned the shoe department upside down and tried to get me fired—don’t you dare pay that awful woman a penny, do you hear?”
“She can’t get you fired, sweetheart.” His eyes danced in the dim light as he watched her righteous indignation. “You’ve never been hired.”
She stared up at him in disbelief that gradually widened to include her own anger. Her skin caught fire as she realized just how seriously she had taken what was, after all, only part of a wager. What in heaven’s name had come over her? “You really are a beast”—she shoved him without much effect—“forcing me to do manual labor, subjecting me to all manner of insult and injury—”
“Just as you did me,” he countered wryly. “Thank your lucky stars that I’m not making you wear trousers and a board-stiff collar into the bargain.”
She stilled in his arms, absorbing the warmth and certainty of him, feeling the lightness of his arms around her. Against her better judgment she looked up into his eyes. Desire rose, hot and vaporous, inside her, seeping through her body, gliding along her limbs, softening her bones. She could scarcely breathe.
“Do you know how luscious you look?” he murmured, lowering his head. He halted halfway down. “You know, the thought of you in a pair of trousers does have a certain appeal.”
She stiffened. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Wouldn’t I?” he said, grinning in a way that made her heart beat erratically.
His mouth descended on hers, and for a moment she stood motionless beneath his kiss, drinking it in, stunned by the liquid pleasure that poured through her. His kisses were like nothing else she had ever experienced. Each contained the same immediate and powerful intimacy, the same lush and compelling delight of the very first one. And yet each felt somehow unique and just created, filled with limitless new possibilities. That, she realized dimly, was what she felt vibrating in and through her: possibilities—a whole universe of emotion and sensation and experience yet to be discovered between them.
Her arms circled his neck as she gave back what he had just given her, parting her lips, molding her body to his, opening to his deepening explorations. When he stoo
ped to lift her into his arms, she was too weakened to resist—or to recall why she wanted to. He bore her back onto a pile of fabric bolts and suddenly she was lying in his arms, feeling his hands on her, directing them to the well-guarded mounds of her breasts. Through layers of apron, bodice, corset cover, corset, and chemise, she could still feel the heat of his hands. Her blood rushed to absorb it and focus it into the tautly contracted tips of her breasts, where it ignited a low, sweet burn.
The silence around them grew heavy with expectation as the exotic scents of dyed fabrics, cedar shelving, and straw-stuffed barrels blended with the sweet musk of woman and the tangy scent of male arousal. His hands raked her sides feverishly, seeking passage through her garments as the intensity of their kisses deepened. Then he pressed against her hip, undulating slowly, and every part of her body seemed to thicken and swell with awareness of him.
She felt the liquid warmth of his kiss on her closed eyes, her ears, her neck, and felt it stop at the barrier of her collar. He kissed her chin, her throat, then met that same obstacle. As her fingers flew to the buttons of her bodice, they found access blocked by the bib of the heavy apron she wore, and she gave a groan of frustration. Pushing him back, she sat up and reached for the ties of the apron at the back of her neck—then froze halfway through untying them.
The shift from horizontal to vertical caused those intoxicating pleasures to drain from her senses, and, looking around, she realized where she was and just what she was about to do. Good Lord—in a dingy, ill-lit warehouse of some sort, lying on a lumpy pile of fabric bolts—she was about to strip her breasts bare and surrender what was left of her virtue to a man she wouldn’t trust to give her the correct time of day!
Horrified, she scrambled back across the bolts and slid down the side of them, struggling to assert some control over her rebellious desires. Her hands trembled as she untied the apron strings, and when the apron was halfway off, she felt his hand on her upper arm and looked up to find he had slid closer and was staring at her with a look that contained roused passion and emotion.
“Antonia—” he said, breathing hard, searching the alarm in her eyes. What he saw there caused him to hold back the question he had been about to ask and to substitute another. “Well, what do you think of men’s work thus far?” He released her and slid from the bales, too, brushing his trousers and straightening his vest and tie.
“I think it is beastly, exhausting, and grossly unfair. I don’t know why anyone in his right mind would do it,” she said, folding her apron, then smoothing her bodice and the front drape of her skirt.
“Necessity, perhaps?” Remington suggested.
She looked at him and found his gaze filled with wry interest and a surprising bit of understanding. “It’s not so much the work as the way it’s done … all that wretched competition. But the worst part is the favoritism. One very bright and promising young clerk made a large sale today, only to have it taken from him and given to a senior man—at the department head’s whim. I was so furious. Poor Davidson. Where is the point of working hard, if it all gets taken away from you in the end?”
“Ummm.” He leaned his shoulder against a shelf and crossed his arms, looking thoughtful. “And what would you do to change things if you were the store director?”
“I would pay them all a fixed wage—no more commissions,” she declared.
“And which wage would that be?” he asked, stroking his chin. “The wage of a senior clerk who has a large customer clientele and works through dinner to increase his earnings, or the wage of a junior man who spends most of his time chatting up the office girls and loafing in the store room?”
“Well …” She huffed with annoyance. “Halfway between the two.”
“So … you would make the hardest-working clerks take a reduction in pay, while giving a raise to others who scarcely earn what they receive now?”
She blinked. “That’s not what I meant. I meant …” It seemed a bit more complicated, said aloud, than it had seemed in her mind. “It might not sound fair, put that way, but then neither does the way the department heads show favoritism and take sales from some clerks to assign them to others.”
“There has long been a seniority system at the Emporium,” he said, considering it. “Most shops and mercantile establishments are organized that way.”
“Well, it’s unfair. If there has to be competition, then it ought to be free and open … with each man keeping what he earns.”
“Sounds reasonable. Let’s say that we put that into effect tomorrow. Who could possibly oppose something as straightforward as that?” The look on his face said it wasn’t a rhetorical question. Who indeed? It didn’t take her long to see the problem.
“The department heads, all the senior clerks, and, I suppose, a number of junior clerks who have the heads’ favor …” She listed them on her fingers and realized where he was leading. “You’re saying it wouldn’t work. They would resist the change and do things their own way, regardless.” Fighting the urge to surrender, she squared her shoulders. “But it could work. As the owner you could insist, and if insufferable old fossils like Hanks didn’t like it, they could always go somewhere else.”
He laughed and his eyes shone as they flowed over her. “More problems, I’m afraid. ‘Old fossils’ sometimes have considerable influence with customers; trust and confidence in merchants takes a while to build with customers. Also, replacing workers and training new people can be expensive business …”
“I can’t believe it is impossible to improve working conditions in your store,” she said, impatient with his genial pessimism.
“Not impossible. Just difficult. And in ways you probably didn’t anticipate … perhaps couldn’t anticipate until you’ve been in a position of making such decisions.” He smiled and reached out with one finger to lift a stray wisp of hair back from her forehead. “Congratulations. You’ve just had another taste of men’s work. My work, in fact. Lots of ideas, lots of possibilities, all with problems attached. How do you like it?”
She stood looking at him, feeling the hard edges of her determination against him softening dangerously. For a moment she glimpsed the complexity of the world he inhabited and began to see men and their work in a new light. Men had to compete—within constraints that sometimes frustrated their best efforts—and often with the knowledge that others depended on them. Suddenly she was bombarded by conflicting feelings, wanting to know more, yet afraid of what learning more would mean to her.
Suddenly his face, his eyes, were all she could see.
“Is there a way to change it?” she said softly, drawn to the power and certainty of him, seeing him as a knowledgeable and powerful man in a man’s world.
“It can be changed, but it will take time. People have to adjust, even to freedom and fairness. It’s not easy to change a lifetime of habits and attitudes. It usually takes something important—something a person wants a great deal—to get him to change.” The warmth and longing in his gaze said that he had found that something …
If it hadn’t been for Davidson strolling back through the stockroom, calling her name, she might have acted on the wild impulse trembling her limbs just then. The young clerk spotted her with someone and came hurrying over … only to halt with his jaw drooping as he recognized her companion. Rescued from her own reckless impulses, she hurriedly introduced Davidson to his noble employer, then fetched her hat and declared she was through with the mercantile trade.
Remington caught up with her as she left by the front door of the store, and he escorted her to the carriage waiting down the block. As he made to help her in, she paused on the step.
“Don’t you dare send this monstrous vehicle for me tomorrow morning,” she insisted, staring disapprovingly at the seductive opulence of the coach’s interior. “If I ever have to travel to your offices again, I’ll hire a cab.”
Paxton House was charged with tension when Antonia and Hermione returned home that evening; Antonia felt it the moment sh
e walked in the front doors. Eleanor and Pollyanna were waiting to usher them into the drawing room, with news that they had a guest for supper. There on the center settee, in a cluster of anxious faces, sat Alice Butterfield Trueblood, another of Antonia’s former protégées, her dark eyes filled with hurt and evidence of tears recently shed. The sight caused Antonia to halt.
“Lady Toni!” Alice pushed to her feet and stood wringing pale hands until Antonia’s tension melted and she came forward with open arms.
“Alice! How good to see you!” She enfolded the young woman with a fervent hug. Alice’s presence there during the supper hour spoke volumes to Antonia, but she had to ask, all the same. “What brings you here?” Alice made a noise of distress against Antonia’s shoulder, and Antonia gave her a comforting pat. “Was it my letter?”
Alice nodded, and when she pulled away, one look at Antonia’s sympathetic expression made her burst into tears. “Oh, Lady Toni—it’s so awful—”
Antonia led her back to the settee and listened as she poured out the story of a marriage gone wrong. It had begun with such promise: Alice had been certain Basil Trueblood loved her, and she had done everything womanly possible to make up to him for the involuntary nature of their vows. But from the start nothing she did was quite elegant enough, precise enough, thorough enough, or good enough to please him.
“The roast was too rare one time and overdone the next. The table linen wasn’t white enough, there wasn’t enough starch in his shirts, the bedsheets were too stiff, and I let the tea steep too long,” Alice said, sniffling and dabbing at her eyes. “My perfume had too much jasmine, my posture needed improving, I didn’t have the silver polished to a proper sheen, my laughter wasn’t quite musical enough, I didn’t choose the proper wine with supper, the curtains I selected were a half shade off color, and even …”
