Passionate Pleasures Read Free

Mavis.”
    “Good Lord! I barely have time!” Mavis Peabody exclaimed, and hurried from Kathryn St. John’s office.
    Watching her go, Kathryn smiled. She and Mavis had been best friends since nursery school. They had never lost touch, even when they had gone to different colleges.
    Mavis meant well. She had been happily married for twenty-six years to Jeremy Peabody. They had two children: a boy, and a girl who was now engaged to be married. Mavis loved her job and her family. She’s duller than I am, Kathryn thought, but she knew that wasn’t really so.
    Mavis didn’t understand what it was like being raised in the St. John household. Kathryn’s mother, Jessie, had been a sweet woman who was devoted to her husband and children. She had given up a promising career as a concert pianist when she married Hallock Kimborough St. John IV. She had fitted herself quietly into the male-dominated St. John household, delivering the requisite male heir within twelve months of her marriage. She had miscarried a second son two years later, and when Kathryn had been born two years after that, she was visibly disappointed, especially after the doctor told her that having another child would kill her. And it had, when Kathryn St. John had been six.
    After that, there was no strong female influence in Kathryn’s life. The household consisted of her grandfather, Hallock III, her father, and her older brother. The house was managed by a houseman, Mr. Todd, who saw that everything in the St. John household was in perfect order, and cooked the meals. A series of cleaning ladies came in once a week over the years. Twice a year they came for five days in a row, to spring clean, and several months later to prepare the house for the winter months.
    And no one paid a great deal of attention to little Kathryn St. John. Her brother was the scion of the family. He followed his grandfather and father down the broad center aisle and into the family pew at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church each Sunday, never once remembering to hold the door and step aside to allow his sister entry once she came up from the Sunday school. After a month of Sundays Kathryn St. John took to entering her family’s pew via the side aisle. The first time she did it, she surprised her grandfather, but then a small smile touched his thin lips, and he nodded his approval to her.
    He believed that she had accepted her place in the scheme of all things St. John. Actually that Sunday had marked Kathryn St. John’s declaration of independence. She was eight years old, and from that moment on Kathryn ran her own life. She was careful never to clash directly with her male kin. As long as her grandfather lived, he was deferred to as head of the household. Kathryn did not bother with her father, and she ignored Hallock V as much as she could. When she wanted something, she worded her request in such a way that it was unlikely her grandfather would refuse. And the things she could not learn from the male-oriented household in which she lived, she learned from Mavis’s mother, grandmothers, and older sisters.
    She was a quick study, and Kathryn St. John knew she had learned to be a proper lady the day she overheard Mavis’s maternal grandmother say to Mavis’s mother, “I just don’t know how poor little Kathy St. John survives in that household of men. You would think old Hallock would have brought a nanny in for the child when Jessie died. Not that Jessie paid a great deal of attention to her daughter. It’s amazing she’s as well-mannered and ladylike as she is. Well, breeding will tell, won’t it?”
    “I wish Mavis were half as ladylike,” Mavis’s mother had replied. “I’m glad they’ve remained friends. I think Kathy is an excellent influence on my daughter.”
    Hearing those words, young Kathryn St. John smiled to herself. She didn’t need anyone but herself to survive in this world. She could do whatever she wanted to do, herself. Let her male relations believe