Cry for Passion Read Free Page B

not know what to tell her family.
    The impatient jangle of a harness sliced through a creak of wood.
    Reluctantly Rose pushed open the cab door.
    A thin line of sunlight marked the four-storied brick town house that she had called home for twenty-one years, but that had ceased to be her home the day she married.
    Her bedroom had overlooked the street. Blinds now shuttered the tall rectangular window.
    Rose paid the cabby.
    The white-enameled door swung open.
    “Mrs. Clarring.”
    Giles, the black-haired, sixty-year-old butler who was no less stately than the town house, briefly bowed; simultaneously he held out an imperious, white-gloved hand.
    “Hello, Giles,” Rose said huskily, offering up her umbrella.
    The folded black silk disappeared; instantly the white-gloved hand reappeared.
    Rose gave up her black leather gloves . . . her cloak. . . .
    Not quickly enough.
    The butler tugged warm wool off her shoulders.
    Rose transferred her reticule from one hand to the other, losing her cloak. Feeling unaccountably naked, she stepped forward.
    A familiar clearing of a throat stopped her.
    Tears stinging her eyes, Rose wiped her feet on the doormat. Head down . . . inspecting her handiwork . . . she asked, “Is Mother home?”
    “Mr. and Mrs. Davis are in the drawing room.”
    She resolutely lifted her chin and squared her shoulders. “Thank you.”
    A comfortably plump man and woman—his graying hair thinning, her gold hair graying—were seated around the leather-tooled drum table that had for all of Rose’s life been the center of the Davis family.
    But it was neither tea, nor a puzzle, nor a game that occupied the man and woman.
    Rose stopped short of the table, feet sinking into thick wool carpet, breath lodging inside her chest.
    Judgment would not come on the morrow; it had come now, this evening.
    Blue eyes—her eyes, masculine instead of feminine—glanced up and pierced her soul. “Do you think so little of us, Rose, that you let us learn about this in the paper?”
    The hurt and betrayal inside her father’s voice squeezed closed her throat.
    Her mother had taught her how to pour tea at that drum table, Rose thought with a bittersweet pang. Her father had taught her how to play draughts.
    Now The Globe spread across the tooled leather, black print summarily destroying thirty-three years of trust and respect.
    Jack Lodoun had said she was a very pretty woman. Rose did not look very pretty in the evening newspaper.
    Underneath the drawing capturing her likeness the caption read: “Rose Clarring: A Woman in Search of Illumination or Fornication?”
    “Do you think so little of me, Father,” Rose managed, “that you think I would be unfaithful to Jonathon?”
    “I didn’t say you were unfaithful,” the fifty-nine-year-old man harshly denied.
    Rose held his gaze. “But it’s what you think, isn’t it?”
    How ugly was the color of guilt.
    He flushed. The gaze of the man whose eyes Rose had inherited slid away.
    “Why didn’t you tell us, Rose?”
    Rose glanced down at the fifty-three-year-old woman who was taller than Rose, but who was golden-haired like Rose. “Tell you what, Mother?”
    “Why didn’t you tell us it was you who didn’t want children? All these years we thought it was . . .”
    The older woman’s voice faded, unable to complete the thought: All these years we thought it was Jonathon who did not give you children.
    The secrets Rose had kept from her family pushed up inside her throat.
    Too late.
    Their revelation would not now alter the future.
    Rose drew in an unsteady breath. “Is that what the paper reports, that I joined the Men and Women’s Club to learn about preventive checks?”
    The face that all of Rose’s life had shone like a beacon—pale with worry during childhood illnesses . . . flushed with pride at social recreations . . . wet with tears at her wedding—turned a dark, shameful red.
    “Perhaps, Mother . . . Father”—Rose’s corset squeezed her heart—“I