Beauty and the Brain by Duncan Alice

Author:Duncan, Alice
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: historical romance, southern california, early movies, silent pictures
Publisher: Alice Duncan

Brenda watched Colin stalk away from her and wondered what had possessed her to attack him like that. It wasn’t her business if George and Colin were having problems with each other. And really, if she looked at the situation calmly, she agreed with Colin. George’s action had been cowardly.

Of course, he was very young.

Then again, she herself had been even younger when she’d begun supporting her family. Colin was right about that, too.

But the circumstances had been so different. George had been brought up with, if not wealth, then at least comfort. Brenda’s family had never been comfortable. They’d always existed on the slim, perilous edge separating survival from starvation. In an odd and hideously ironic blow of fate, her family had been better off without her father than with him.

That sounded unfair and cruel, although Brenda didn’t mean it as such. She’d had to be intensely practical almost from infancy, and old habits died hard. Financial circumstances weren’t the only important aspects of life. She sighed heavily.

She, better than most people, understood that when people intoned in their superior, preacherly voices that money didn’t matter, it was because they had plenty of it. And they were right. If one had money, it didn’t matter a rap. If one didn’t have money, it mattered almost more than anything else in life.

Darn it, why was she being so gloomy this morning? Because she’d quarreled with Colin was why, and she knew it. Blast her ready tongue.

She ate her orange in a moody silence, wishing she could replay her last scene with him She’d hold back her sarcastic opinions if she had it to do over again. It would have been far more reasonable of her to have asked Colin civilly what had brought George to California. If she’d done so, he might even have allowed her to help him deal with his brother.

Fat chance of that now. She’d attacked, he’d parried, and they’d been at each other’s throats in an instant. Whatever was it that made Colin and her rub against each other so irritatingly and so constantly? They caught fire like a match to dry kindling every time they spoke to each other. She didn’t understand it. She’d never, ever had trouble getting along with people before she met him. She could get along with people she hated, for heaven’s sake, and she didn’t hate Colin. Far from it.

Unfortunately, real life, unlike life as portrayed in the pictures, didn’t allow for second takes. She smiled grimly, recollecting Martin’s always-present ambition to capture every scene in one take.

With another hearty sigh, she sipped the last of her tea and recalled her first meeting with. Colin. She’d had such high hopes for a relationship between them. There seemed perishingly little chance of that now. She wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t even want to tell her about Indians any longer.

On that depressing thought, she left the restaurant and ambled outdoors to watch the filming, which was again taking place outside the lodge in the huge clearing that formed the lodge’s yard.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.