Cry for Passion Read Free

trial is over, Mrs. Clarring: Go home.”
    But Rose Clarring did not hear him, caught up in her own past.
    “I laughed, too.” The innocent happiness that flooded the cornflower blue eyes stabbed through him. “It was impossible not to be happy when I was with Jonathon.”
    But now she proposed to divorce him, a husband she loved.
    “I don’t want to hear this,” Jack said harshly, suddenly choking on the scent of coal and manure, and the asphyxiating perfume of springtime roses.
    “But I need to tell you,” catapulted through the air. The brief glow of happiness drained from Rose Clarring’s face. Inside her eyes he glimpsed the pain he had evoked in the witness box. “I need you . . . I need someone . . . to understand.”
    But Jack didn’t want to understand this woman when the woman he loved lay dead in the ground.
    A heavy omnibus lumbered past them, wood creaking, wheels groaning.
    The barrister inside Jack noted that Rose Clarring’s breasts heaved with the force of her breathing. He felt no triumph at finally shattering her composure. Not when the man inside him stared at those breasts and appraised their size.
    Stoically Jack met her gaze.
    Black vulnerability dilated her pupils; instantly it was swallowed by determination.
    “I need to tell you,” she repeated.
    But no need went unpunished.
    Jack couldn’t say that, either.
    “When Jonathon set the boys down, staggering and giggling,” she continued, sunlight gilding the tips of her lashes, “he looked at me and said, ‘I want you to give me a dozen just like these.’
    “And I wanted to give him sons, Mr. Lodoun.” The castigating wind drove home her earnestness. “I wanted to give him little boys with whom he could play. I wanted to give him little girls he could pamper. I wanted to make Jonathon as happy as he made me.
    “You accused me of joining the Men and Women’s Club in order to learn about prophylactics, but it wasn’t preventive checks that robbed my husband of children: It was the mumps.
    “I am a living reminder of every dream he ever dreamed. Every night when he is home alone with me, he drinks himself into a state of unconsciousness. As long as we are married, he will look at me and see only his inability to create life.
    “Yes, my husband has the legal authority to do as you say.” Jack watched dispassionately as Rose Clarring took a deep breath—small, round breasts rising . . . falling . . . egret feathers flogging the wind—and regained the inner resolve that had defied his earlier examination, and that had won the sympathy of twelve jurors, all men with wives and children. “But I have the moral obligation, surely, to end the pain that is crippling us both.”
    A distant bell pierced the whining, grumbling traffic and the muffled shouts interspersed with song. Three more strikes followed, Westminster Chimes announcing the quarter hour.
    It was fifteen minutes after five: The trial had ended sixteen minutes earlier. In six hours and forty-five minutes, the first of June would end and the second day would dawn.
    And where would he be? Jack wondered.
    He had never fathered a child, but he had never wanted children. He had loved a woman, but he had not wanted marriage.
    Jack stepped around Rose Clarring and raised his umbrella.
    The flagellating breeze abruptly died.
    “Who was the woman you loved?” catapulted through the stillness and stopped a hansom cab.
    Jack stepped up onto an iron rung, spine straight; the cab tilted with his weight, instantly righted, his left foot anchoring the wooden platform. The gaze that followed him pierced the wool of his clothes, the flesh stretched taut across his body, the bones that held him rigid.
    Swinging open the door, keenly aware of the cabby, who was a potential witness—every move he made, every word he uttered a matter of public record—Jack turned his head and caught Rose Clarring’s gaze. Clearly, coldly, he enunciated: “Cynthia Herries Whitcox.”
    Daughter of the