Virgin Enchained (Virgin Series Book 4)

by Louisa Trent

  “I did, yes.”

  Tobacco-tinged spittle flying, Milton screamed, “Circulate the damn tables, find your best offers, and take them out back.”

  When I realized Milton spoke in multiples, not a single customer, I panicked. Near faint, I protested, “I am no whore, sir.”

  “Starting tonight, that is exactly what you are – a whore. And you better make me a profitable one too. I have considerable cash invested in you. Time to pay up.”

  I had a practical streak, and so naturally, I asked, “How much?”

  The figure he quoted was a small fortune. I would have to take on ten men each evening to earn that amount.

  “But my dancing, sir,” I cajoled. “The men come here to see me dance.”

  “No. The men come here to come.”

  “P-pardon?” At times, Milton spoke in riddles. Or, at least they were riddles to me.

  But what did I know?

  I was no authority on the subject, having never even kissed a man. Dedicated to my profession, I’d had no time for trivial pursuits such as romantic involvements. Now Milton expected me to…expected me to…

  I had no idea what those expectations entailed. And furthermore, I had no one to ask.

  My own fault. After thinking myself their better, after holding myself apart and aloof from the rest of the dancers at this establishment, the girls here refused to talk to me, never mind discuss the intimacies of their back alley duties.

  Chapter Two

  After my conversation with Milton, I tread the boards for what might very well have been the last time.

  My ballet slippers were constructed for neither arduous hikes through the wilderness nor indoor foot dragging, of which I was doing quite a bit. The thin soles complained as I stomped down the narrow wrought iron stage stairs to the dancehall’s floor below.

  In the interest of running up the bar tabs of diehard fans who remained after the disaster of my performance, I headed for a large, open area where small tables were located and where most of the heavier drinking was done.

  Money was money. Why should Milton care how I earned it? It was all greenbacks, after all, and green was Milton’s favorite color. Serving up enough whiskey was my only means of staying out of the back alley tonight. That was the plan anyway. Now all I had to do was convince a hundred or so drunkards to cooperate and order up rotgut by the gallon.

  Only…no one did. Not even a single shot of bad whiskey could I sell. Lady luck, that capricious bitch, had decided to turn her back on me tonight.

  The tables in this area were mostly empty.

  But desperate, I kept walking, anyway. Past the mid-theatre region to the very end of the building, where one sole gent sitting alone at a table drew my attention.

  Then again, who else was around for me to notice?

  At this point, the theatre had pretty much cleared out entirely for the night. He was one of the few remaining members of the audience not already in the alley. This meant he was my last chance to keep my dancer’s position and not by turning tricks. Now, if only he was very very thirsty and had deep pockets too…

  Immediately, I sized him up as a big spender. Yippee!

  Respectable as well, not the typical fan of the cancan. In short, he was as out of place in the dancehall as a guppy in a shark tank. Like blood in the water, Milton’s place primarily attracted circling fins.

  He sat tall in his chair, heads and shoulders above the crowd. Yes, due to his tallness, he could see the performance from this distance, but why would he wish to?

  Expensively and stylishly dressed, he obviously could afford a higher priced seat out front where most of his kind – wealthy ticket holders– congregated. Of course, some gents who fell into this category only sat up-close to peep at the scantily-clad dancers. But those sorts, frankly, were of low moral character and looked it, from unkempt facial hair to expensive, but unpolished shoes.

  That was not this man. Even in the low-wattage, his leather boots gleamed. Not a trace of a scuff mark in evidence. And, if I squinted, I could see that his jaw appeared to be clean shaven, a rarity in men’s facial hair fashions these days.

  Then there were those with money to burn who routinely bought the best seat in the house, regardless of the entertainment venue – from a Gilbert and Sullivan’s operatic production at the Bijou to a freak show at the Dime Museum – simply because they could. Flaunting their money was what they enjoyed, not the production itself.

  Not this man. He was doing no flaunting here, not in these cheap table seats.

  The third variety of wealthy audience member valued their anonymity more than anything else, including having a decent view of the stage. Hoping to keep their true identities under wraps, they chose to sit way, way, in the back, where the lights were as low as their risk of discovery.

  Hmm. Secretive sorts like those might be more open to a little hanky-panky…if they could keep their extra-curriculum activities quiet. But, I reminded myself, I was here to sell whiskey, not myself.

  Yet. Another ten minutes without making a single whiskey sale and I might be changing my tune.

  I made my approach. The lights were so dim back here, I could hardly make out his features …which seemed to substantiate why he had picked this table by the door in the first place:

  Privacy and a fast getaway.

  To prevent the latter called for using my female allure.

  What female allure, I scoffed to myself as I continued my no-nonsense stride in his direction.

  I waved at him, Frenchie-style. “Mon cher! Where have you been all my life?” I winked. “Ah, but my fine gent! You look très parched. What will you have to drink? A few whiskeys, non?”

  He looked straight at me. “Bonjour, Mademoiselle DuPont. No whiskey for me. Never touch the stuff. ”

  I groaned to myself. Lord! I could just cry. His accent sounded impeccable. Then again, what did a native New Yorker like myself know about legitimate Frenchie accents?

  Now up close, I could make out the silver in his hair, hair as dark as my own in the mirror. That darkness felt familiar. The silver made me feel safe. And so –

  I pushed on, thinking to chat him up. Then, when he was all nice and loosened up, take his drink order, if not for whiskey, then possibly gin. Hard spirits here were so watered-down, he could drink directly from the faucet behind the bar and never know the difference.

  “C’est magnifique! Vous parlez Français, n’est pas, monsieur?”

  That was it. The end of my conversational French repertoire. I was over my head here. My love of details did not extend to actually learning a foreign language for my impersonation of a sophisticated Parisian, only parroting superficial dribs and drabs, enough to get me by in a tight spot with a fan.

  Only this was more than a tight spot, I was clean out of French, and he was no fan.

  What to do?

  I lifted my lips into my best impression of a smile.

  A smile not returned by the gent. “You can be yourself with me, Miss DuPont.”

  Kind words, but his black eyes reflected the terrifying truth:

  Loosely translated in any language under the sun – this gent was onto me. Indeed, he seemed to see right through me, masquerade and all. Once again – just my rotten luck. Of all the drunkards who frequented this dancehall, leave it to me to pick a clear-sighted teetotaler for my first customer of the evening.

  There went my phony Parisian mystique out the window. My sophisticated, if fake, French je ne sais quoi too. And without artifice to hide behind, I could forget all about pulling off any kind of hard liquor salesmanship.

  And my real self?

  A tad rusty from lack of use. And not all that interesting even before I became someone else.

  At fifteen years of age, I left the orphanage where I grew up and went to work in an enormous mansion owned by a gentleman farmer, a “Gilded Age” New York City financier who entertained quite a bit for both professional and social reasons.

  An esteemed F
rench chef along with his Parisian wife, Madame Madeline, a renowned cook and baker in her own right, oversaw the house’s large kitchen staff of which I became part. Although I was only responsible for making yeast breads, bottom rung on the skills ladder, still there was a certain amount of dignity in that occupation, a certain amount of deportment in the way I carried myself – spine straight, chin raised, shoulders squared with pride. Finally, I had made the grade somewhere! I was now a baker of French baguettes!

  And I had even bigger and better plans.

  That position had only been a stepping stone, a way for me to save money for dance lessons. Someday, I would be a ballerina. Perhaps even in France!

  Recognizing my ambition, Madame Madeline had taken me under her wing. She instilled self-confidence in me, not only about my average appearance but about my capabilities. An orphan herself, she had served as my mentor and advocate. It was she who referred me to an aged male friend of hers who, coincidentally, taught classical ballet out of his home. I learned all sorts of things from him, not all of them dance moves, but that was a whole other story.

  Back then, when I was just fifteen, I thought the world was my oyster.

  I knew better now. After this evening’s confrontation with Milton, I felt positively worthless. Had I been deluded all along about my talent? Who was I really inside?

  This audience member had my sympathies. What a huge letdown for him! When he first saw me coming toward him across the floor, he probably expected that hoity-toity Mademoiselle Daphne DuPont from Paris to show up at his table. Instead he got humdrum me.

  With no flirty repartee at my disposal, no amusing wit to speak of, I was essentially rendered tongue-tied.

  Slumping in utter dejection, I raked myself over the proverbial coals.

  Landing in this mess was my own bloody fault. This was what came of getting above my station in life. Ballerina! Ha! Who did I think I was? An orphan like me was lucky to have gotten this nowhere position performing the cancan. Furthermore, I could not pretend to unawareness here. I knew this day of reckoning was coming. I should have been better prepared. Milton had warned me on more than one occasion that my tenure at the dancehall was reliant on my performance of extra “duties”. And then tonight, he had spelled it all out for me, in no uncertain terms, what I needed to do to stay on:

  Namely, take customers into the alley out back.

  Why had I not practiced my seductive “come-hither” look in my cracked mirror before ever leaving the dressing room tonight, the one with the pursed pouty lips and the wiggly eyebrows, the one I had used on stage a year or so ago when I played the part of a cancan dancing whore – a little true-to-life foreshadowing there as it turned out.

  And, what was worse, I was letting my true feelings show. Despite what the customer said about being myself, that was only so much blah, blah, blah. No man was interested in a woman’s true feelings. Little wonder he had refused to buy drinks from me. He was here looking for a good time, not the sad story of my tragic life.

  I took myself to task. Enough of the self-pity already.

  Madame Madeline had encouraged me to be self-confident…even when I was at my most shy and tearful. The ballet had taught me discipline, how to move elegantly even when under emotional or physical distress. The stage had trained me to act a part. Here I would pretend to be a valiant storybook heroine rising above misfortune…

  I was crushed. So what and what of it?

  Down on my luck was not the same as beaten. I admitted to being relatively innocent, but I was not hopelessly naïve. My mentor, Madame Madeline, had been French, after all.

  Going by the old adage that a picture was worth a thousand words, I flung caution to the winds. Tugging at the bodice of my cancan costume, I flashed the extent of my sophistication – my gold nipple hoops.

  His response?

  Markedly unimpressed.

  Ignoring the gold hoops, he stared soulfully into my eyes. “Your rendition of the ballet moved me, Miss DuPont. I felt your grief in every elegant step. Swan Lake, was it not?”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  A sucker was born every minute in the Red-light District and I had just located mine.

  “Care to go out back to the alley with me, sir?” I followed this invitation up with a salacious moue, a flirtatious expression I used all the time on stage.

  “I thought you serious about dance, Miss DuPont?”

  “Sir – I am!”

  I was also serious about keeping the job that paid for the leaky boarding house roof over my head and my one small meal a day.

  “You were quite good, Miss DuPont, an unexpected sight in this part of town. I was on my way to an appointment. I only dropped in here to squander an hour or so. But your transformative performance got to me, and so I stayed. Your dignity…everything about you…kept me here, glued to the seat. I am a man of utmost punctuality, and so a complete disregard of my prior commitment says much about my respect for your talent.”

  Nice sentiment. But empty platitudes would get me exactly nowhere. Cash. I needed cash. Lots of cash.

  Nowhere as smooth as he, I stumbled over my next words. “You know those pliets I performed? They reflected a temporary leave of my senses, sir, a fleeting cultural revolt against the cancan.”

  “I see.”

  So could I. Now that it was too late, I realized I had wasted precious time at the wrong table. This well-dressed, refined, and oh-so cultured gentleman, a man who unabashedly used the word ‘transformative’ correcty, was not buying what I was selling. Not whiskey. Not my body. My target group was the ale-swilling peeper who did…who did…who knew what he did…to himself under a tented playbill at the front of the audience, the drooling idiot who got his jollies looking up dancers’ skirts.

  Drat. And drat again. All the likely buyers for my wares had already exited the theatre and were even now paying enormous sums of money to more business savvy dancers than myself.

  The gent took my hand. “I sense, if the opportunity presented itself, you would prefer working somewhere other than here. Am I correct, Miss DuPont?”

  Feeling myself give way under his gentle insistence, I whispered, “At the most uneventful of moments, a terrible longing rises up within me to dance legitimately, in the style in which I was trained. And, tonight, nostalgia for that old dream spurred me to recklessness.”

  “Interesting. Go on.”

  “But you must have…other things on your mind, sir. The girls…”

  “My attention is entirely on you. You monopolize my every thought.”

  Talk about seduction! He had it down pat. How could I resist such attentive interest? It could become addictive.

  “Such a silly thing, sir. You see…this evening, the yeasty aroma of freshly baked sweet loaves wafted into my basement dressing room from the North Street Bakery and Confectionery next door. That aroma triggered within me a memory that propelled me backwards in time. There I sat, perched on a rickety three-legged stool in my dressing room before the makeup mirror, gazing sightlessly at my reflection in the cracked glass, when a pining for my former ambition simply overtook me. I was a different person back then. That yearning dragged me not to the orphanage where I grew up, but back to my first position at a mansion in upper state New York, the estate of a gentleman farmer.”

  Oh, God! I was rambling.

  “Am I putting you to sleep, sir?”

  “No. You have a gift for imagery. Do continue.”

  He was just so sympathetic. He turned my head.

  Taking him at his word, I did continue. Indeed, I droned on and on:

  “There at that estate, I stood at the scullery sink, sir, bent over a dented dishpan while scouring the charred remains of over-cooked dough from the bread tin when, out of sheer fatigue from the drudgery…or perhaps to stretch my cramped back muscles…I took a deep breath and glanced out the window. As it often did, the covered bridge crossing the stream into town drew my gaze.

  “In my recollect
ion, I grimaced then, for an abundance of cat o’nine tails seemed to wave snidely at me in salute, mocking my servitude in the kitchen as they, themselves, danced freely in the summer breeze.

  “And tonight, for whatever reason, it hit me – the irony, sir. Now I was the one who supposedly danced, but not as freely as those swamp grasses danced back then. And suddenly, I was heartbroken over the course my career had taken.

  “Still, the show must go on that was the first rule of entertainment I ever learned. After paying the price of admission, the audience rightly deserves the best performance an entertainer can muster. And, for me, that best was the ballet. And so I took a chance and danced a few steps…”

  My composure broke, and I sniffed. Tears threatened to run down my face and ruin my theatrical makeup – my armor – against honesty.

  Throughout my confession, he continued to hold my hand, more firmly now than before, possibly due to my shakiness.

  “This trip down memory lane has upset you,” he said softly. “No need to continue, Miss DuPont. No need to take me to the back alley either. Please excuse me.”

  He left me, a bit sodden, my makeup worse for wear. And I knew that was the last I would ever see of him. He had forsaken a mess like me for some other better put together girl.

  I was about to stumble away, my tail between my legs, when he returned.

  “Drinks all week on me until the bar closes,” he informed me. “Your obligation to management is paid in full.”

  A fortune wasted on hard spirits! From a non-drinker. The wonder of that. I could not even imagine having that kind of money to squander.

  I pulled myself together. “Thank you, sir. Then, I shan’t make the usual rounds to peddle watered-down liquor to customers. Your generosity gets you my undivided attention for the rest of the evening. Spent in conversation. Or anything else you so desire.”

  I wiped at my smeared makeup, doubtlessly making it worse, all the while thinking how this gentleman completely transfixed me.