The Halloween Romance Collection (eBook)

Barbara Cartland (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
2400 Seiten
Barbara Cartland eBooks Ltd (Verlag)
978-0-00-107937-3 (ISBN)

Infos

Whispers in the Night, Kisses in the Dark...

Textauszug

Chapter Two

“Will you drive me to Windsor Castle tomorrow?” “No!”

“Why not? I felt sure you would be staying there when I learnt you cannot go to Bracknell as you intended.”

“I have made other plans.”

“Whatever they are they must be in the vicinity of Ascot and surely you can take me to The castle on your way?”

It was difficult to imagine how any man could refuse Lady Sydel Blackford when she pleaded with him.

Lying back on a chaise-longue she looked exceedingly alluring, wearing little or nothing but a diaphanous gauze negligée which clung to her perfect body.

She had been told so often that she resembled in face and figure the exquisite Princess Pauline Borghese, sister of Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been sculpted by Canova, that she almost instinctively fell into the same pose as the statue of the Princess.

Her golden hair was caught up on top of her head and her blue eyes looked at the Earl from under long dark eyelashes which owed more to artifice than to nature.

Everything about her was in fact slightly artificial, but at the same time there was no doubting her beauty or her sexual allure.

The Earl, however, leaning back in an armchair and sipping his glass of brandy, seemed for the moment immune both to her beauty and to the pleading in her eyes.

“Why do you not stay at The Castle?” she asked poutingly. “The King has asked you often enough to be his guest and you know full well that he likes having you with him.”

“I prefer to be on my own,” the Earl replied, “especially in Race Week, when I want to think about my horses.” “And not about me?” Lady Sydel enquired.

He made no reply and she said almost angrily,

“Why must you always be so irritatingly elusive? I would believe it was a pretence if it were not habitual.” “If I don’t please you, there is an obvious answer,” the Earl remarked.

Lady Sydel made a helpless gesture with her hands, her long fingers seeming almost too frail for the enormous rings she wore.

“I love you, Valient!” she said. “I love you, as you well know and I want to be with you.”

“My party, as you are equally aware, is a bachelor one,” the Earl replied.

“And where will it take place now that you cannot go to the inn at Bracknell as you intended?”

“I have rented Langston’s house. It is, I believe, quite near the Racecourse.”

“Langston? Do you mean that handsome boy who I understand has not a penny to bless himself with?”

“I imagine that is a fairly accurate description,” the Earl replied dryly.

Lady Sydel laughed.

“In which case you will doubtless find yourself in some crumbling old Manor, extremely uncomfortable, with the rain leaking through holes in the roof onto your head.”

“It would undoubtedly please you if that proves to be the case.”

“You had much better come to Windsor Castle with me.”

Her voice was very soft and alluring, but the Earl yawned and she said hastily,

“His Majesty is expecting you to dinner on Tuesday.” “I have told him that I will dine with him on Thursday after I have won the Gold Cup.”

“You are very sure of yourself!”

“I am sure of my horse and that almost amounts to the same thing.”

“It’s so bad for you, Valient, that you should always win what you desire, whether it is a horse or a woman.”

The Earl appeared to consider this for a moment.

Then he replied cynically,

“I think the odds are on the latter category.”

“I hate you!” Lady Sydel exclaimed. “And if you are thinking of Charis Plymworth I swear I will scratch her eyes out!”

The Earl did not reply and after a moment Lady Sydel said,

“I think I know why you will not come to The Castle on Tuesday evening. You are dining with John Dysart and Charis Plymworth is staying with him.”

“If you know I am already engaged, why press me to accept another invitation?” the Earl enquired.

“I could hardly believe you would be so treacherous, so abominably cruel to me!”

The Earl raised his eyebrows and took a sip of his brandy before he replied,

“My dear Sydel, I have never tied myself to any woman’s apron strings and let me make it clear, once and for all, I am not tied to yours!”

“But I love you, Valient! We have meant so much to each other and I believed that you loved me.”

There was a break in her voice that was very moving, but the Earl merely rose to his feet and set his glass down on the mantelpiece.

“Dramatics, as you are well aware, bore me, Sydel. I will say goodbye and look forward to seeing you in the Royal Box at Ascot.”

He bent to kiss her hand, but she held up her arms to him.

“Kiss me, Valient, kiss me! I cannot bear you to leave me. I want you! I want you desperately! I would kill you rather than let you love another woman!”

The Earl looked down at her, at the passion flaring in her eyes, at her head thrown back and the invitation in her arched half-naked body.

“You are very beautiful, Sydel,” he said in a voice that did not make his words sound particularly complimentary, “but at times your protestations of affection become a bore! I will see you at the races.”

He walked without haste towards the door and without looking back left the room.

Alone Lady Sydel gave a cry of sheer exasperation. Then with her clenched fists she pounded one of the silk cushions on the chaise-longue until exhausted she flung herself back to stare despairingly at the painted ceiling above her.

Why did the Earl always leave her frustrated and almost desperate?

She told herself she had in fact been rather stupid with him. She should have known by this time, having had innumerable lovers, that when men are satiated by lovemaking they want to be soothed and flattered – not engaged in a controversy such as had just taken place.

But her insatiable jealousy made her indulge in scenes and sulks which, while they had other men on their knees, invariably left the Earl unmoved.

“Curse him!” she exclaimed aloud. “Why should he be different?”

She knew the answer only too clearly – he was different! Because of it she had sworn that she would make him as slavishly enamoured of her as she was of him.

Yet it seemed that she had succeeded in making him her lover only when it suited him and was not sure that he was any more enamoured of her than he had been of dozens of other women.

Lady Sydel had originally been confident that where she was concerned everything would be different.

Was she not the most acclaimed beauty in the whole of the Beau Monde? Had not her looks and her fascination been extolled by every womanizer and roué? Was it not a fact that she had only to snap her fingers to have any man she fancied prostrate at her feet?

Yet she knew indisputably that the Earl eluded her.

Even when he made love to her, she realised that his mind and certainly his heart, if he had one, were not hers. She now thought despairingly that, since Lady Plymworth had appeared on the scene, he was not even as attentive as he had been in the past.

“I hate her! God, how I hate her!” Lady Sydel cried. She had only to think of Charis Plymworth with her dark red hair and slanting green eyes to feel murderous.

‘I will kill her, and I will kill him!’ she told herself, speaking with a ferocity that meant she was on the verge of one of her temperamental rages which terrified her household and at times even herself.

Lying on the chaise-longue she tried to imagine herself striking with a sharp knife the smile from Charis Plymworth’s enigmatic face, then turning on the Earl.

She wondered what she would feel if she had him lying dead at her feet, the blood oozing from a wound in his heart.

Then she told herself that life without him would be insupportable and somehow, by some means, she must ensure that he remained her lover.

“Charis Plymworth shall not have him!”

Her voice seemed to ring round the walls of her boudoir, to mingle with the exotic perfume she always used and the fragrance of the tuberoses with which, since someone had once told her they exuded the scent of passion, she always surrounded herself.

She rose from the chaise-longue to walk to a gilt-framed mirror which stood at the end of the room.

She stood in front of it, looking at the curves of her body which men always described as belonging to a Greek Goddess, the round white column of her neck, at the passion which still lingered in her eyes and on her lips.

‘He can rouse me as no other man has done before,’ she told herself. ‘I cannot lose him. I will not lose him!’

*

The Earl, driving himself in his high-perch phaeton, wondered why women always became abandoned either mentally or physically after they had been unusually passionate during the act of love.

It seemed to release something within them which at other times they kept under control.

He decided that he was already bored with Sydel’s clinging possessiveness and almost insane jealousy.

‘I was a fool to become involved with her,’ he thought.

He decided that when he returned to London from Ascot that he would not call again at her house in Bruton Street, where the gossips said spitefully the steps were almost worn away with her lovers...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.10.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 0-00-107937-9 / 0001079379
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-107937-3 / 9780001079373