Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [119]
She was sitting up in bed wearing an ermine-trimmed white satin bedjacket, and she looked expectantly at him with those beautiful, wide gray eyes.
“I’m ready, darling,” she said quietly.
“I didn’t want to rush you,” Harry said eagerly, offering her a glass of champagne.
She shook her head. “No, thank you,” she said primly, “I think I’d better keep my wits about me so I know what to do.”
He looked at her, puzzled. Of course she was a virgin, but shouldn’t she want to lose her head, not keep it?
“I expect it’ll be like hunting,” she explained brightly, “going over the jumps.”
Harry gulped his champagne and climbed into bed with her. He put his arms around her and she lay there quietly. He kissed her and she let him. He stroked her naked body and she stiffened. She lay frozen and silent when his lips traveled slowly across her breasts and her nipples, and gasped horrified as they found her virgin softness.
Harry consummated their marriage that night, but in the next few weeks he realized that for Louisa sex was a boring duty she performed only for the sake of possible future children, and even they would take second place to her favorite hunter. His mistake had been in believing that the sexy-looking girl in the figure-hugging britches and boots was the real Louisa. She thought, talked, and lived nothing but horses until he wondered why she didn’t smell of the stables in bed instead of Mitsuko.
After a frustrating few months he finally told her that if she ever learned to ride a man as well as she rode a horse, she might be able to keep a husband. But not him.
He played it the English way, he paid for an arranged night of love with a pretty companion in a Brighton hotel. Louisa presented the necessary evidence to a sympathetic judge and was granted a divorce. And Harry returned to San Francisco, only a year older, married, divorced, and several million dollars poorer.
CHAPTER 26
Francie didn’t expect to fall in love on board the S.S. Orient en route for Hong Kong. In fact, at first she wasn’t even sure it was love. She told herself it was just a shipboard romance; even less than that, it was a flirtation. It wasn’t even that, it was just that Edward Stratton was a nice man who had gone out of his way to be kind to a woman traveling alone.
She had been leaning over the deck rail watching San Francisco disappear on the horizon. There were tears in her eyes as she thought of Ollie, left behind with Annie. It was the first time they had ever been apart and she was missing him already and she knew it would only get worse.
The man next to her said, sympathetically, “Too late to turn back now,” and she turned to look at him, pushing away the tears with her fingers. He took an immaculate linen handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to her. “Look at it this way,” he said, smiling, “ahead lie the Hawaiian Islands and beyond that, China. You have a lot to look forward to.”
She nodded, inspecting him cautiously as she dabbed her eyes. He was a confident, handsome older man of medium height with thick, dark hair brushed firmly back. He had bushy black eyebrows and candid, light-blue eyes, he was clean-shaven and he had an English accent.
“Edward Stratton,” he said, offering his hand.
“Francesca Harrison,” she replied, managing a smile. “I’m sorry. I don’t usually cry in public.”
He shrugged. “Partings are always difficult.”
“Well, thank you for your help,” she said diffidently, turning and walking back into the glass-enclosed verandah deck. She half-turned to look at him; he was leaning against the rail watching her and he lifted his hand to wave.
The S.S. Orient was a luxury ship and its passengers were a mixture of businessmen and diplomats returning to Shanghai, tea-planters en route to Colombo and rubber-station employees bound for Manila and Penang. Francie’s stateroom was luxuriously paneled in walnut with polished brass fittings, soft carpets, and a big bed piled high with downy pillows and covered with an apricot silk