Forbidden Read Online Free PDF

sister.
    ‘You will take a co-pilot?’ he asked his mother.
    Lady Mary asked about the Rothko painting. Amy enjoyed his enthusiasm in telling her about it. When he asked if he might call her back because he had Amy there for tea, he was obliged to pass the telephone over.
    Lady Mary and Amy were very fond of each other, more so since they were in agreement that Amy should never marry Charles. They spoke for a short time andthen Amy put the phone down.
    ‘She says to tell you she will call you from the flat in the Ritz late tonight, and to make sure you can afford the Rothko. If need be she will go partners in it with you, but only under duress, and you are to remember that the family Dürer cost only fifty pounds.’ They both laughed. The Dürer portrait had been in the family since 1512. Lady Mary never failed to remind Charles of what a good buy it had been, always ignoring the year in which an ancestor had purchased it. The story was told every time he was about to buy anything.
    The lift door opened and Amy, Charles’s farewell kiss still lingering on her lips, stepped out on to the ground floor of the hotel. Her attention was caught by a very pretty girl who was just finishing a call on one of the house phones. Amy watched her hurriedly put down the receiver and rush towards the lift. She was young and mischievous-looking, a sparkle of expectation in her eyes. She was bound for an assignation, no doubt sexual.
    Something instinctively told Amy she was the girl Charles had discreetly called from the bedroom. Amy was well aware of his sexual appetites and that he sated them with sensual ladies who understood love had nothing to do with their liaisons. It didn’t bother her; she knew she could change his having other women if she wanted to. She didn’t. Normally she was indifferent to his personal life when it didn’t include her, but this time she was somehow curious, as if she wanted to confirm what she already knew: that he was sexuallyactive and satisfied without her. And there was something else. If truth be told, that last kiss … had she not felt sexual stirrings? Slight as they may have been, yes, she conceded, possibly.
    She was several yards away from the lift but turned to see, as the doors closed, that the girl was the only person in it. Amy walked back and watched the needle on the indicator above the lift move until it stopped at number three, Charles’s floor. In spite of herself, she felt a pang of jealousy. She recognised it and despised such an emotion so put it out of her mind and heart. One day she would have to let Charles go forever. But that she would think about another day. She was still too high on art and having had such a lovely day.
    She was just walking down the steps to the front entrance of the hotel. Seeing Peter Smith and his family had been part of her joyful day, she remembered. On impulse she turned and walked back to the concierge’s desk. She asked for a piece of notepaper and a pen and wrote down her name, address and telephone number. Amy smiled at the concierge and asked him to have it delivered to Mr Peter Smith, then hurried from the hotel to her car.
    She slipped behind the wheel of the Lagonda and tied her white silk scarf round her head. Then she and Mr Craven went through their usual parting dialogue.
    ‘You’ll just about miss the afternoon traffic, Miss Ross.’
    ‘Just about. The car looks wonderfully clean. I’ll bring it in one day early enough for a proper waxing and polishing.’
    ‘And the top, miss? Before winter, might I suggest?’
    ‘Yes, before winter.’
    Amy tried to tip the doorman who always told her the same thing. ‘It’s taken care of, miss.’ He was not a man to pass up a tip, that was after all his livelihood, but so was obeying orders and staying on the good side of Sir Charles who had instructed him not to take money from Miss Ross.
    Amy smiled at several people about to enter the hotel who stopped to look admiringly at the Lagonda. A