Pleasure My Lustful Heart: A Romance Novella Read Free

want to be with you. But where would we go? How would we live? And what about our parents?"
    "We'll drive through Texas to Mexico," I told him. "Living is cheap there, and I can get some money, don’t worry. Our parents will love us anyway." I wasn’t sure about any of it — just pulling it out of the air. But I knew if I kept at it, I would convince him. Other people had been making up his mind for him all his life.
    Finally, he grinned in that innocent way of his, and said yes. Next day, I took the diamond Pa gave me to a jeweler and sold it. Then we bought a decrepit 11-year-old Chevrolet from an equally decrepit used car dealer, with most of the money. We would leave for Mexico on Saturday morning.
    But when Saturday morning came, Lucien was gone. The couple in the adjoining apartment said he’d left suddenly, hitch-hiking back to Birmingham. Oh, and here’s an envelope he left. The message inside said only this:  “I’m not the right one.” He hadn’t signed it
    I should have known from the start that Lucien was not a boy for an adventure. He didn’t have the courage to leave with me — or even to stay and face me.
    Now I had no Lucien, no one at all. When I took the car back to the dealer, he gave me only half of what I'd paid to buy it. And my mother’s diamond was gone, sold by the jeweler hours after I’d brought it in. When I told my father, he never passed judgment on what I’d done. "Come back to Pennsylvania," he said , "and finish your degree here."
    My adventure with a sweet, spineless boy from Birmingham was the most profound disappointment in my life. I promised myself then that it would be the last.
     
                                  *      *      *
     
    And now here he was, that boy from Birmingham, after nearly five years. Did he really think I'd see him, let him back into my life again? I remembered that he'd sent me a letter several months after I'd left Tulane. When I saw it was from Lucien, I threw it away without reading it. Other letters came for a while, then they stopped. He hadn't tried to contact me again, until now.
    It wasn't that I hated him, or even merely disliked him. I pitied him, not for what he did, but what he lacked. And I knew that was something that would never change. But my number was in the phone book, and I couldn't stop him from calling. I'll think about that later, I told myself. Right now I have to find out if Mr. Gregg Monsell can make business magic for Porteous Limited. Just be careful.
     
     
    CHAPTER 3
     
    All my worries about my father, the business, my own future, were welling up in me. Could Pa continue to manage the company? After all, he was 66, an age when many executives decide to pack it in and play golf the rest of their lives. But Sidney Porteous had never played golf, never wanted to. Manufacturing apparel is all he knew. Since Ma died, he spent every waking hour involved in the business. Now his world was changing, and it was becoming clearer every day that he couldn't handle it.
    I looked across the sewing room floor. A third of the machines were idle. The sixteen operators who were working — mostly women, but two men — were busy sewing, hoping, I was sure, that there'd continue to be work for them. As sewing floor manager, I was the one they asked about how the business was doing. I always said, "New orders are coming in." Were they? Not really. None that I knew about.
    And now, what about this Gregg Monsell? I hadn't heard him discuss a merger with Pa, but I couldn't believe Pa was right about Gregg saying he wanted to take over our company. Who would walk into a man's office and say such a thing? Pa saw him as a threat — he just wouldn't have anyone but himself managing Porteous Limited. But maybe we could be successful as part of a merged company, with a new kind of business. I didn’t have the experience to deal with such important decisions, but I was certain if we didn't do something soon,