"Yeah. That fancy accent of hers sure does manage to screw up good American cusswords."

The splashing in the pool gradually began to slow down. "You gonna jump in and save her any time in

the next century?" Skeet inquired.

"Suppose I'd better. Unless you'd consider doing it."

"Hell, no. I'm going to bed."

Skeet turned to walk out the gate, and Dallie sat down on the edge of a lounge chair to pull off his boots. He watched for a moment to see how much struggle she had left, and when he judged the time to be about right, he wandered over to the edge and dived in.

Francesca had just realized how much she didn't want to die. Despite the movie, her poverty, the loss

of all her possessions, she was too young. Her whole life stretched before her. But as the awful weight

of the water pressed down on her, she understood that it was happening. Her lungs bumed and her limbs no longer responded to any command. She was dying, and she hadn't even lived yet.

Suddenly something caught her around the chest and began dragging her upward, holding her close, not letting her go, pulling her to the surface, saving her! Her head burst through the water and her lungs grabbed the air. She sucked it in, coughing and choking, grabbing at the arms around her for fear they would let her go, sobbing and crying with the pure joy of still being alive.

Without quite being aware how it had happened, she found herself being pulled up on the deck, the last shreds of her greige silk blouse staying in the water. But even when she felt the solid concrete surface beneath her, she wouldn't let Dallie go.

When she could finally speak, her words came out in small choked gasps. "I'll never forgive you… I hate you…" She clung to his body, painted herself on his bare chest, threw her arms around his shoulders, held him as tight as she had ever held anything in her life. "I hate you," she choked out. "Don't let me go."

"You really did get shook up there, didn't you, Francie?"

But she was beyond replying. All she could do was hold on for dear life. She held on to him as he carried her back into the motel room, held on to him while he talked to the motel manager who was waiting for them, held on as he pulled her case from the rubble, fumbled through it, and carried her to another room.

He leaned over to lay her on the bed. "You can sleep here for the-"

"No!" The now-familiar wave of panic returned.

He tried to pry her arms from his neck. "Aw, come on, Francie, it's almost two in the morning. I want to get at least a few hours' sleep before I have to wake up."

"No, Dallie!" She was crying now, gazing straight into those Newman-blue eyes and crying her heart out. "Don't leave me. I know you'll drive away if I let you go. I'll wake up tomorrow and you'll be gone and I won't know what to do."

"I won't drive away until I talk to you," he said finally, pulling her arms free.

"Promise?"

He pulled off the sodden Bottega Veneta sandals, which had miraculously stayed on her feet, and pitched them to the floor, along with the dry T-shirt he'd brought with him, "Yeah, I promise."

Even though he'd given his word, he sounded reluctant, and she made a small inarticulate sound of protest as he went out the door. Didn't she promise all sorts of things and then promptly forget about them? How did she know he wouldn't do the same? "Dallie?"

But he was gone.

Somewhere she found the energy to pull off her wet jeans and underwear, letting them fall in a heap beside the bed before she slid under the covers. She pushed her wet head into the pillow, closed her eyes, and in the instant before she fell asleep, wondered whether she might not have been better off if Dallie had left her on the bottom of the swimming pool.

Her sleep was deep and hard, but she still jolted awake barely four hours later when the first trickle of light seeped through the heavy draperies. Throwing off the covers, she jumped unsteadily from the bed and stumbled naked toward the window, every muscle in her body aching. Only after she'd pushed back the drapery and looked outside at the dreary, rain-soaked day did her stomach steady. The Riviera was still there.

Her heartbeat resumed its normal rhythm, and she slowly made her way toward the mirror, instinctively doing what she had done every morning of her life for as long as she could remember, greeting her reflection to assure herself that the world had not changed during the night, that it still orbited in a predestined pattern around the sun of her own beauty.

She let out a strangled cry of despair.

If she'd had more sleep, she might have handled the shock better, but as it was, she could barely comprehend what she saw. Her beautiful hair hung in tangled mats around her face, a long scratch marred the graceful curve of her neck, bruises had popped out on her flesh, and her bottom lip-her perfect bottom lip-was puffed up like a pastry shell.

Panic-stricken, she rushed to her case and inventoried her remaining possessions: a travel-size bottle of Rene Garraud bath gel, toothpaste (no sign of a toothbrush), three lipsticks, her peach eye shadow, and the useless dispenser of birth control pills Cissy's maid had packed. Her handbag yielded up two shades

of blusher, her lizard-skin wallet, and an atomizer of Femme. Those, along with the faded navy T-shirt Dallie had thrown at her the night before and the small pile of soggy clothes on the floor, were her possessions… all she had left in the world.

The enormity of her losses was too devastating to comprehend, so she rushed to the shower where she did as much as she could with a brown bottle of motel shampoo. She then used the few cosmetics she had left to try to reconstruct the person she'd been. After pulling on her uncomfortably soggy jeans and struggling into her wet sandals, she spritzed Femme under her arms and then slid on Dallie's T-shirt. She looked down at the word written in white on her left breast and wondered what an AGGIES was. Another mystery, another unknown to make her feel like an intruder in a strange land. Why had she never felt like this in New York? Without shutting her eyes, she could see herself rushing along Fifth Avenue, dining at La Caravelle, walking through the lobby of the Pierre, and the more she thought about the world she'd left behind, the more disconnected she felt from the world she'd entered. A knock sounded, and she quickly combed her hair with her fingers, not quite daring to risk another peek in the mirror.

Dallie stood leaning against the door frame wearing a sky blue windbreaker beaded with rainwater and bleached-out jeans that had a frayed hole at the side of one knee. His hair was damp and curled up at the ends. Dishwater blond, she thought disparagingly, not true blond. And he needed a really good cut. He also needed a new wardrobe. His shoulders pulled at the seams of his jacket; his jeans would have disgraced a Calcutta beggar.

It was no use. No matter how clearly she saw his flaws, no matter how much she needed to reduce him to the ordinary in her own eyes, he was still the most impossibly gorgeous man she had ever seen.

He leaned one hand against the door frame and looked down at her. "Francie, ever since last night, I've been trying to make it obvious to you in as many ways as I could that I don't want to hear your story, but since you're hell-bent on telling it and since I'm getting pretty close to desperate to get rid of you, let's do it right now." With that, he walked into her room, slumped down in a straight-backed chair, and put his boots up on the edge of the desk. "You owe me someplace in the neighborhood of two hundred bucks."

"Two hundred-"

"You pretty well trashed that room last night." He leaned back in the chair until only the rear legs were on the floor. "A television, two lamps, a few craters in the Sheetrock, a five-by-four picture window. The total came to five hundred sixty dollars, and that was only because I promised the manager I'd play eighteen holes with him the next time I come through. There only seemed to be a little over three hundred in your wallet-not enough to take care of all that."

"My wallet?" She tore at the latches of her case. "You got into my wallet! How could you do something like that? That's my property. You should never have-" By the time she'd pulled her wallet from her purse, the palms of her hands were as clammy as her jeans. She opened it and gazed inside. When she could finally speak, her voice was barely a whisper, "It's empty. You've taken all my money."

"Bills like that have to be settled real quick unless you want to catch the attention of the local gendarmes."

She sagged down on the end of the bed, her sense of loss so overwhelming that her body seemed to have gone numb. She had hit bottom. Right at this moment. Right now. Everything was gone-cosmetics, clothes, the last of her money. She had nothing left. The disaster that had been picking up speed like a runaway train ever since Chloe's death had finally jumped the track.

Dallie tapped a motel pen on the top of the desk. "Francie, I couldn't help but notice that you didn't have any credit cards tucked away in that purse of yours… or any plane ticket either. Now, I want to hear you tell me real quick that you've got that ticket to London put away somewhere inside Mr. Vee-tawn, and that Mr. Vee-tawn is closed up in one of those twenty-five-cent lockers at the airport."

She hugged her chest and stared at the wall. "I don't know what to do," she choked out.

"You're a big girl, and you'd better come up with something real fast."

"I need help." She turned to him, pleading for understanding. "I can't handle this by myself."

The front legs of his chair banged to the floor. "Oh, no you don't! This is your problem, lady, and you're not going to push it off on me." His voice sounded hard and rough, not like the laughing Dallie who'd picked her up at the side of the road, or the knight in shining armor who'd saved her from certain death

at the Blue Choctaw.

"If you didn't want to help me," she cried out, "you shouldn't have offered me that ride. You should have left me, like everyone else."

"Maybe you better start thinking about why everybody wants to get rid of you so bad."

"It's not my fault, don't you see? It's circumstances." She began to tell him all of it, beginning with Chloe's death, stumbling over her words in her haste to get them out before he walked away. She told him how she'd sold everything to pay for her ticket home only to realize that even if she did have a ticket, she couldn't possibly go back to London without money, without clothes, with the news of her humiliation in that terrible movie on everyone's lips so that they were all laughing at her. She realized right then that she had to stay where she was, where no one knew her, until Nicky got back from his sordid fling with the blond mathematician and she had a chance to talk to him over the telephone. That's why she'd set out to find Dallie at the Blue Choctaw. "Don't you see? I can't go back to London until I know Nicky will be right there at the airport waiting for me."

"I thought you told me he was your fiance?"

"He is."

"Then why is he having a fling with a blond mathematician?"

"He's sulking."

"Jesus, Francie-"

She rushed over to kneel down beside his chair and looked up at him with her heart-stopping eyes. "It's not my fault, Dallie. Really. The last time I saw him, we had this awful quarrel just because I turned down his marriage proposal." A great stillness came over Dallie's face and she realized he had misinterpreted what she'd said. "No, it's not what you're thinking! He'll marry me! We've quarreled hundreds of times and he always proposes again. It's just a matter of getting hold of him on the telephone and telling him I forgive him."

Dallie shook his head. "Poor son of a bitch," he muttered.

She tried to glare at him, but her eyes were too teary, so she stood and turned her back, struggling for control. "What I need, Dallie, is some way to endure the next few weeks until I can talk to Nicky. I thought you could help me, but last night you wouldn't talk to me, and you made me so angry, and now you've taken my money." She spun on him, her voice catching on a sob. "Don't you see, Dallie? If you'd just been reasonable, none of this would have happened."

"I'll be goddamned." Dallie's boots hit the floor. "You're getting ready to blame all this on me, aren't you? Jesus, I hate people like you. No matter what happens, you manage to shift the blame to somebody else."

She jumped up. "I don't have to listen to this! All I wanted was some help."

"And a small bit of cash to go with it."