Nan Ryan Read Free Page B

the tall windows.
    Their beautiful relationship was forever altered. Overnight the brilliant university professor whose superior intelligence had so attracted her became a besotted admirer who could no longer think straight and wanted immediately to make her his wife.
    Temple shook her head now as if to clear it. Where, she wondered miserably, was the man who was as strong and independent as she? The man who wouldn’t swoon at her feet the first time she kissed him? The man who would think as she thought? The man who no more wanted the constraints of marriage and home than she did.
    Sighing deeply, Temple glanced at the porcelain clock beneath the bedside lamp: two o’clock. She should have been in bed and asleep hours ago. She was to meet Cousin Rupert downstairs in the dining room at dawn for a hasty breakfast before departing for the docks, where they would board the vessel to take them across the Channel on the first leg of their long journey.
    Temple began stripping off her clothes. When she was completely bare, she picked up the gossamer nightgown from the foot of the bed and pulled it over her head. She didn’t don the matching robe. Nor did she immediately get into bed.
    Temple Longworth was, as usual, still restless. Edgy. Unfulfilled. Longing for something. Something … she didn’t know what. Something that in her twenty-five years she had never found. Something that likely did not exist.
    All the light-hearted gaiety of the evening had evaporated, and Temple felt unusually melancholy. A sad, sweet yearning plagued her. Again.

The ruby, suffused with an incandescent red glow, produced that unique six-starred prism for which it was famous as its bearer’s dark fingers fitted the key into the lock.
    He opened the door and stepped quietly into the dimly lit foyer of the luxurious corner suite. Noiselessly he placed the key in a flat silver bowl on a marble-topped table and walked unhurriedly into the hotel suite’s high-ceilinged drawing room.
    He was unbuttoning his white suit jacket when a beautiful woman wearing only a revealing nightgown of sheer black lace came rushing out of the bedroom. She was Lady Barrow, a blood relative to Queen Victoria, a gorgeous but rather petulant thirty-three-year-old auburn-haired, milky-skinned divorcée and his mistress for the past six months.
    An affair that, for him, had become increasingly tiresome. She had become increasingly tiresome. She had fallen in love with him and had grown suffocatingly jealous and bad tempered because she so wanted to possess him.
    No woman had ever or would ever possess him.
    Lady Barrow hurried anxiously toward him now, scolding as she came.
    “Christian, you can’t treat me this way!” she cried shrewishly. “I will not tolerate it! It’s after one in the morning and you said you’d be gone no longer than an hour. Where the hell have you been? And with whom? I want to know her name. Tell me!”
    The jealous Lady Barrow continued to rage as the unresponsive Christian Telford calmly shrugged out of his suit jacket, tossed it over a chair back, and crossed to the liquor cabinet to pour himself a brandy.
    “… and I simply will not allow it! Are you listening to me, Christian? I will not be ignored, nor made a fool of! You cannot expect me to …” On and on she went, relentlessly rebuking him.
    Clasping the crystal snifter lightly in the palm of his tanned hand, Christian swirled the dark amber liquid about, the large ruby ring on his finger shimmering and showering red sparks with his movements. He lifted the glass to his lips and drained it slowly. He swallowed the smooth, warmed brandy and exhaled heavily.
    Finally he glanced at the angry, red-faced woman, raised his dark hand, and said in a low but commanding voice, “That’s enough, Beatrice.”
    Lady Barrow broke off in midsentence. She knew he meant it and was immediately contrite. She was sorry she’d said anything. She was frightened because she knew she was losing him, had