Read Online Miner's Daughter by Alice Duncan - Free Book Online Page B

Tony tried to help you along.”
    “Humph. Well, if the test was to see if I
could act scared, I expect it worked out all right. He scared the
heck out of me.”
    Fudge. She shouldn’t have said heck out loud. With a sigh, Mari guessed she had a lot of practice to do
in order to fit in with the motion-picture community. The
rough-and-ready mining environment in which she’d been reared
hadn’t prepared her for polite society.
    But Martin only chuckled some more. “Whatever
happened, the screen test looks very good. If you always come
across that way on film, it looks as if you were born for
this.”
    She turned and gawped at him for a moment
before she realized he was kidding her. Trying to make her feel
good about making such an idiot of herself. It was nice of him but
unnecessary. Mari had no illusions about herself—or about life, if
it came to that.
    Gazing at her in turn, Martin said, “You
don’t believe me, do you?”
    Now she was embarrassed. But she told the
truth anyway. “Actually, no. I don’t.”
    “Why do you think I’d fib to you?”
    Good question. Mari thought about it. “To get
my mine?”
    “You’ve already agreed to rent me your mine,
Miss Pottersby. I told you the truth when I said you look exactly
the way the heroine in Lucky Strike is supposed to
look.”
    She thought some more. “In that case, I don’t
know why you’re fibbing to me.”
    Martin shook his head. “I wish you weren’t so
suspicious of our motives, Miss Pottersby. All we want to do is
make the best motion picture we can. If you’re right for the part,
it will help us along.”
    That made sense, even to Mari. Still, she
couldn’t feature a man-about-town like Martin Tafft or a stuck-up
rich boy like Tony Ewing actually needing her, Mari Pottersby, to
act in a picture. It didn’t make any sense. Such a scenario was too
far out of Mari’s experience to be believable.
    She decided to shut up about it. It was going
to be hard enough watching herself on film without making herself
miserable ahead of time
    They found Tony slumping in an uncomfortable
folding chair in a darkened back parlor of the Mojave Inn, looking
grumpy and with his arms crossed over his chest. The pose of
granite-like grievance didn’t last long, since the rag kept
slipping off his head and he had to keep uncrossing his arms to
slap a hand to it When she saw him trying to keep up appearances
thus, Mari’s heart did a teensy jump, and a twinge of compunction
attacked her
    “Oh, dear,” she murmured. “I’d really better
fetch some gauze and sticking plaster before we watch this test
thing “
    “I’ll help you.” Martin was laughing as he
said it.
     
    Tony didn’t think there was one single little
thing funny about this latest outrageous behavior on Miss Marigold
Pottersby’s part. The woman was a walking disaster. He’d only been
trying to help her, dammit.
    She had looked so small and alone and scared
when the camera started grinding that Tony had felt an overwhelming
compulsion to help her make good. And then the fiend had seized a
rock and tried to kill him with it. Damn her and all uncivilized
females to perdition.
    He glared at her and Martin when they entered
the room where they were going to screen her test. He wished the
damned washrag would stop slipping. He rose abruptly when they
turned around and walked out again.
    “Damnation, where are they going now?”
    But they were already gone. They’d left him
They’d taken one look at him, turned around, and left him all by
himself.
    Fine. This was just fine. First she tried to
kill him, then she opted to leave him alone to die by himself with
no one nearby to give a damn. All right for her. See if he
cared.
    He’d sat back down and resumed stewing in an
even more powerful grump when the door opened again His heart did a
crazy hitching leap when he beheld Mari, armed with scissors, tape,
and gauze, heading his way, although he wouldn’t show his pleasure
to her for all the