Cry for Passion (4 page)

Every night when he is home alone with me, he drinks himself into a state of unconsciousness slammed through him.

“Why should I know Jonathon Clarring?” Slowly Jack raised his lashes and met the senior MP’s waiting gaze. “I examined his wife, not him.”

“Best damn stockbroker in London. The man’s made me a bloody fortune.” The Chairman of Justice punctuated his endorsement with a fresh billow of smoke. “See him. Tell him I sent you.”

Jack had not before realized how thoroughly he disliked cigars.

Pushing back the heavy leather wing chair—wood skidding across wood—he stood. “I leave such things to my man of business.”

“Lodoun.” A frail hand weighted down his shoulder. “Pity you lost today. Mothers suing their sons. And winning! Dreadful, just dreadful. Take comfort in the knowledge you were in the right.”

Bitter irony welled up inside Jack.

Slowly he turned, motion dislodging the hand that held him. “Was I, Father?”

Jack addressed the Father of the House.

The most senior member of Parliament—a man of seventy-five years who chaired the Select Committee of Privileges—was older than Jack’s own father. Unlike his own father, the most senior member of Parliament knew the cost of ambition.

Empathy glinted in the senior MP’s eyes. Or perhaps it was the flickering light that gave the illusion of empathy. “Did Stromwell here tell you that your name came up today in meeting?”

While Jack was in court, destroying an innocent woman.

The Chairman of Justice’s gaze stabbed his back, sharp and appraising. His voice carried over the suffocating din of masculine conjectures: “I mentioned to Father what a splendid Lord of Appeal in Ordinary you’d make.”

A Lord of Appeal in Ordinary sat in the House of Lords and adjudged the legal cases brought before it. Were Jack to be so appointed, he would for his lifetime be awarded the rank of Baron.

Such an appointment would be the pinnacle of his career. But no appointment came without a price.

Jack had learned that as attorney general. But he was attorney general no more.

“I didn’t realize the appointment was available,” Jack said neutrally.

“It isn’t . . . yet.” Reaching out a liver-spotted hand, Father squeezed Jack’s forearm; there was strength yet in the aging fingers. “But it will be.”

All it would cost was more silence, more compromises, more lonely nights.

A chorus of “. . . Shame you lost . . .” greeted Jack at each table he passed.

Each man suspected the truth, but no one dared voice it: Shame you lost to a man you cuckolded.

Jack collected his coat, hat and umbrella from the cloak clerk. A bowing, black-and-white uniformed man opened the door.

With distant irony Jack reflected that membership to St. Stephen’s Club—a club that pandered to conservative Parliament members—cost more than the annual wages of the doorman whose liberty they were sworn to protect.

One second Jack stepped off the concrete stoop; the next second the bowed man who held open the door stood at the curb hailing a cab.

Jack was drunk. But the alcohol had not obliterated cornflower blue eyes.

The doorman waved away a four-wheeled Clarence cab and aggressively gestured to the driver of a two-wheeled hansom.

Anger sliced through Jack’s pain.

Everyone knew. Nobody spoke.

Not Father. Not the Chairman of the Justice.

Jack had never spoken of it until this day.

Tossing the doorman a florin, he stepped up onto the cab.

“Where t’?” penetrated the wool scarf covering the cabby’s mouth and nose.

A deafening chime vibrated the night, ended on a flat strike: It was forty-five minutes past eight.

Jack looked up at the black sky that was dominated by the Houses of Parliament, magnesian limestone shining like gold.

Where did Jack have to go?

He drank alone, surrounded by MPs thirsty for power. He lived alone, wedded to politics.

Jack gave the cabby an address.

Each turn of the wheel cried out: I need someone . . . I need someone . . . I need someone. . . .

Jack had gambled; his gamble paid off: The Achilles Book Shoppe was open.

A discordant jangle announced his entry.

Gaslit globes brightly illuminated the glass-plated store.

Respectable women in black bonnets with crowning white feathers and black cloaks leaned over tables piled high with books. Respectable men in dark coats with matching bowler hats roamed long aisles.

Rose Clarring could be one of those women. Jack Lodoun could be one of those men.

Jack shut the door on the night, closure eliciting another sharp jangle.

No one looked up. No one looked around.

Jack had no interest in the conservative men and women who comprised his constituency.

Sharp perusal stabbed through him.

But someone was interested in Jack.

He glanced to the back of the store.

A middle-aged clerk dressed in tweed caught his gaze.

He saw Jack’s drunkenness. He recognized Jack’s face.

He knew about the Men and Women’s Club—a group of men and women who had congregated inside the shop on the evening of the twentieth of April—and he knew why Jack had come.

Jack strode to where the clerk stood. He said, only, “Show me.”

Without question the clerk opened the white-enameled door bearing the insignia of “Latin and Greek Classics.”

A wall of books with embossed titles in Latin and Greek—some of which Jack recognized, some of which he did not—confronted him. Two overstuffed armchairs were angled in a corner.

He had entered a reading room.

His fingers fisted around the grip of his umbrella.

There were no pornographic books to titillate the imagination. No artifacts to stimulate the body.

No hope for sexual satiation.

“Where is it?” ricocheted off gold and leather.

Jack’s voice was harsh.

From drink, he told himself. He knew that he lied.

His testicles and his cock ached for that which he did not have.

“Behind here, sir.” The man dressed in tweed pressed the middle panel of the bookshelves filled with gold-embossed books. The panel noiselessly swung inward. “In the basement.”

Jack stared at the downward path of dark wool carpeting that Rose Clarring had descended forty-two days earlier.

There were no banisters to catch a woman tripping on a trailing skirt. But the stairs had not been designed with a woman in mind.

“When you’re ready to leave,” the middle-aged man neutrally instructed, “a clerk will show you the exit.”

Jack followed Rose Clarring down into the dimly lit world of masculine pornography.

Behind him, the wall closed with a hissing click. Below him, wooden tables branched out into narrow aisles.

Too narrow, surely, for a wheelchair to maneuver, Jack remotely thought, yet a member of the Men and Women’s Club was bound to a wheelchair, and he, too, had roamed these aisles in search of sexual satisfaction.

Jack stepped down off the bottom stair. The air was noticeably cooler than the air upstairs.

This wasn’t the first time he had visited such a store, but it was the first time he’d visited this store. It looked and smelled much like every other pornographic shop.

The wooden tables bore the imprints of sweaty fingers. The flickering shadows reeked of male arousal.

Stepping in between a gap of oblivious men dressed in wool coats and felt bowler hats, Jack randomly selected a postcard.

A naked woman—lips curved in a knowing smile—with her left hand held apart another woman’s naked buttocks to expose a darkly puckered anus impaled by a thin nozzle. A short hose connected the nozzle to a bloated rubber bag. With her right hand, the smiling woman who exposed the compromised anus squeezed the douche.

The dull throb inside Jack’s groin sharpened.

He wondered what Rose Clarring would think of the picture. Perhaps, even, she had gazed at this postcard.

Had it excited her? Repelled her?

He wondered what the woman he loved would have thought of the act, commonplace in the world of male pornography.

She had liked it when he penetrated her between her buttocks.

Would she have been repelled if he had inserted there a syringe and directed warm liquid deep inside her? Or would it have excited her, as Jack was now suddenly excited by the thought?

Disgusted at the desire that had not died seven months and three weeks earlier, he flipped the card onto the table.

But he couldn’t leave. He couldn’t stop thinking.

Would she still be alive if she had asked for a divorce?

Jack moved away from the long table weighted down with boxes of postcards.

A glass showcase monopolized the end of the center aisle. Stoically Jack studied the contents.

“May I help you, sir?” enquired an impersonal male voice.

Jack knew Rose Clarring had visited the Achilles Book Shoppe. But he did not know what she had purchased. He did not know what excited her.

He did not know if the pain inside her eyes could be vanquished.

“Lay them out on top of the counter,” Jack said shortly.

Consternation laced the clerk’s voice. “Everything, sir?”

Gaze slowly rising, Jack penned the younger man with the authority invested in him by the Commonwealth of England. “Only those items made for a lady.”

The clerk quickly, efficiently laid out the requested articles—pings of metal followed by a click of glass and the thud of leather—then discreetly stepped backward.

Hooking the grip of the umbrella over his forearm, Jack picked up a gold nipple bob and clipped it to the tip of his little finger: It pinched.

The image of a translucent pearl earring flashed through his mind’s eye.

Rose Clarring had small, delicate earlobes, he remembered.

He wondered what size her nipples were. Were they smaller than the tip of his little finger? Larger?

Would her breasts fill his mouth as had those of the woman he would never again suckle?

The pain binding his finger spread to his chest; it did not restrict the flow of blood that thrummed through his testicles.

Jack pulled off the nipple bob. A dildo snared his gaze.

His fingers curled around hard leather.

Did Rose Clarring fuck herself at night, he wondered, and imagine a dildo was the flesh of a man other than her husband? Did she thrust it deep against the mouth of her cervix when she came, and pretend it ejaculated sperm that hadn’t been robbed of its seed?

The memory of wet, hungry flesh gripped Jack.

Caressing his cock. Squeezing his cock.

Drawing from his aching testicles one spurt of ejaculate . . . two spurts . . . three spurts . . .

He dropped the dildo. He gripped the umbrella.

He turned from the showcase.

Everywhere Jack looked another memory surfaced.

The pump of fingers. The lick of a tongue.

The tangy scent of arousal. The slick taste of desire.

A moan of satisfaction.

Glass glinted; liquid glistened.

Compulsively he crossed to a round wooden table artfully arrayed with crystal-stoppered bottles.

Jack’s throbbing glans recognized both the brand and the substance: Rose’s Lubrifiant, a sexual lubricant he had purchased in the past, but not for a woman named Rose.

Chapter 4

Rose woke with a start.

The wooden banister she gripped dissolved into sweat-dampened sheets. The pounding of a gavel continued to pummel her eardrums.

I would be very afraid, were I you, squealed a coiled spring.

Rose’s eyelids snapped open. Darkness dilated her pupils.

It was not a convicting judge’s gavel that pounded the bench, she realized, but a metal knocker that pounded a door.

Rose’s husband could put her away, the knocker hammered home. A possibility that had seemed dim in the light of day, but now she was surrounded by the dark of night.

For the first time in her life she was truly alone: No one would come to her aid if she called for help.

Reason galloped to Rose’s rescue.

She had left a note informing Jonathon of her new address late in the afternoon, too late for him to file a lunacy order. Nor would a criminal so loudly announce his intentions.

Wrestling back the covers, Rose slid out of bed. Cold, hard wood curled her naked toes. Blindly she located a nightstand. Inside the top drawer, her scrabbling fingers stubbed a tin of safety matches.

Blue light sparked, shot up a plume of yellow fire.

Lifting an icy glass globe, she touched the burning match tip to a blackened wick. Light radiated outward, replacing darkness with bare, shadowed walls.

Blowing out the dying match—breath a silvery plume—Rose dropped the blackened stick into a small milk glass bowl and grabbed the candle she had earlier used to light her way up the stairs. Dancing yellow flame leapt from the wick of the oil lamp to the candle stub.

The urgent pounding spurred Rose forward.

Fluttering candlelight illuminated the dark length of the corridor . . . the steep descent of wooden stairs . . . a white-enameled door wreathed in shadow.

“Who is it?” Rose asked, heart tripping.

More pounding vibrated the door.

A warning. A promise.

It could only be Jonathon.

Now they would have the discussion they should have had twelve years earlier.

Rose unlocked the door and swung it open. “Jonathon—”

Eyes made black with shadow stared at her from underneath a rain-misted bowler. “I seem to always be the other man, Mrs. Clarring.”

A wave of brandy fumes snapped back Rose’s head. “You’re inebriated.”

“But not unconscious.”

Unlike her husband, Jack Lodoun implied.

Raw betrayal slashed through Rose: It should be Jonathon who knocked on her door, not this man.

She gripped cold, damp wood. “It’s late, Mr. Lodoun.”

“A barrister and the law are much alike,” Jack Lodoun returned, dark gaze holding hers. “You get one shot at justice. If you close this door, you forfeit your chance.”

“I thank you for your consideration—”

“I assure you, I am not a considerate man.”