The Pleasure Trap Read Free

enjoy?”
    Miss Claverley replied with great dignity, “Of course I know who Mrs. Barrymore is. What I didn’t know was that she had money to spare.”
    “Bags of it,” said Eve, grinning.
    “Mmm. Maybe I should write a book.”
    “Maybe you should.”

    When Eve left the breakfast room, her shadow, Dexter, a descendant of the beloved Sheba, left his post at the front door and trotted after her. On reaching her bedchamber, Eve went straight to her escritoire and dashed off a note to her publisher, then sat for a moment, chewing on the end of her pen as she contemplated the projected trip to town.
    “You know, Dexter,” she said at last, “there’s something holding me back. I know I
want
to accept Lady Sayers’s invitation, but I can’t seem to get the words down on paper.”
    In her mind’s eye, she saw a ballroom with glittering chandeliers. Beautiful young debutantes and their handsome partners whirled around the floor. Beyond them, through the glass doors to the terrace, lay the gardens, bathed in moonlight.
    The scene was all too familiar. She’d dreamed about it for years. This was how her stories came to her, in her dreams, but only this dream had the power to make her tremble.
    She corrected herself. Her other stories had taken place in settings she drew from memory, from famous gardens that she had visited as a child. The ballroom and debutantes were completely beyond her experience. Then where had this setting come from? She felt as though she recognized it.
    She gave a self-conscious laugh. “Will you listen to me? I’m beginning to sound like my crazy Claverley cousins.”
    Dexter’s soulful black eyes were trained on his mistress as she gazed into space.
    Eve’s thoughts had shifted to her parents, especially her mother. As a child, she’d never questioned the way things were. Her father had been busy making a name for himself as a landscape gardener. As a result, he was absent a good deal of the time, traveling all over England. Whenever it was convenient, she and her mother would pack up and join him. That carefree existence came to a devastating end when Antonia died and Eve’s father remarried a scant year after her mother’s death. She hadn’t wanted a new mother and, with childlike doggedness, had refused to be parted from Aunt Millicent.
    It was the beginning of a long estrangement between father and daughter that had lasted to the present day, not a quarrel or a falling-out but a tepid relationship that never quite warmed the heart.
    It was inevitable, Eve told herself. She was passionate about her mother and could not bear to see another woman take her place. Martha, her father’s wife, was the opposite of her mother, and that rankled, too. Where Antonia had been artistic in many areas—writing, sketching, playing musical instruments—Martha was happier in the stillroom, counting her jars of jam and pickles. Life with Antonia was an adventure. Martha had her feet planted firmly on the ground.
    Maybe that’s why her father chose someone so different from her mother to be his second wife. Maybe life with Antonia was
too
unsettling. Maybe her gift of sensing what her husband was thinking and feeling was too uncomfortable to be borne. And maybe he thought the same about his daughter.
    She heaved a sigh. She should have made the effort to heal the breach long before now. Her father and his wife lived in Brighton, so there had been plenty of opportunities for her to do the right thing. She’d tried. It wasn’t her father who was the problem so much as Martha. The second Mrs. Dearing made it perfectly obvious that she wasn’t comfortable around her freakish stepdaughter.
    And now she’d left it almost too late. Though her father wasn’t an old man, his health wasn’t good. He was becoming forgetful and there was something particular she wanted to ask him, something only he could tell her. She wanted to find the quarry in Kent where her mother had met with that tragic accident.
    It