Fragrant Flower Read Online Free PDF

to move because she was so surprised. Then, as she lifted her hands to press them against his chest and thrust him away from her, she felt his lips evoke a strange and utterly confounding sensation.
    It was a feeling she had never known before in her whole life. Something warm and wonderful crept up through her whole body into her throat and quivered on her lips beneath his.
    It was an emotion such as she had never dreamt of or realised could be possible. A wonder which came from inside herself and was part of her whole being.
    She could not understand it – she hardly believed it was possible. Only she was unable to move – unable to take her lips from his.
    She felt his arms tighten a little around her, but still she could not thrust him away.
    Vaguely at the back of her mind she thought that what was happening to her was part of the sunshine she had missed, the colour for which she had yearned, the music she had lost.
    It was all there, in the glory and the wonder that was suddenly a rapture because a man was holding her mouth captive with his.
    As he raised his head, she looked up into his eyes and felt that he mesmerised her to the point when her brain no longer belonged to her but, like her lips, had become part of him.
    Then, with a little cry she turned from him, to run blindly in a wild panic from the room.

Chapter Two
    “How could I have let him do it? How could I?” Azalea asked herself not once but a thousand times in the days that followed.
    She hardly had a moment to think, because there was so much packing to do before they finally left for Hong Kong – but at the back of her mind the question repeated itself over and over again, interspersed with the words, “I hate him! I hate him!”
    Lord Sheldon stood, she thought, for everything that she and her father had most disliked, the autocratic, superior Englishman who despised those under his authority and who had no respect for any race except his own.
    She knew that she should not have raged at him, but as she listened behind the curtains to what he was saying to his friend, she had felt her anger rise like a flood tide.
    When he practically accused her of being a spy she could not control the words which burst from her lips.
    In retrospect she thought it had probably been indiscreet of her to mention what Lord Ronald Gower had said.
    She had found notes on his views in the file which the General had been given by the War Office on being told of his new appointment to Hong Kong.
    Azalea knew she had no right to touch, let alone read what were her uncle’s private papers, and the file was clearly marked, ‘Hong Kong – Secret and Confidential’.
    But when, on its arrival at Aldershot, the General had left it casually on his desk, she had been unable to resist the temptation to glance inside.
    Once she saw what it contained her curiosity could not be assuaged until she had read everything in the file. It was her job to pack up the General’s belongings in the house they were occupying and to unpack them again when they arrived at Battlesdon House in Hampstead.
    Azalea made it one of her jobs to dust and tidy the General’s Study in what had been her grandfather’s house, and every day she managed to read more and more of the memoranda, communications and notes which were contained in the file on Hong Kong.
    Most of the correspondence was from General Donovan complaining about the Governor’s new policies which, if he was to be believed, not only infuriated the military authorities in the Colony, but also aroused alarm and anger amongst all the Europeans.
    In fact, the only criticism of the military came from Lord Ronald Gower.
    His opinion had been brought to the notice of the War Office because, shocked by what he considered to be the boorish arrogance of the officers of the 74th Regiment, he had refused to tour Japan with a group of them who were going there on leave.
    It was obvious to Azalea that her uncle had every intention of maintaining the