Cry for Passion Read Online Free PDF

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