His Heart's Obsession Read Online Free PDF Page A

him—the impulse to throw himself at Hal’s feet and quote poetry. He trembled on the brink of saying something beautiful about true love, preferably in Latin, but his courage gave out. “I’m sorry, Morgan, sorry to impose once more on your good nature, but I cannot say this to anyone else. You will understand why when I open the matter.”
    Beyond the window, the moon sailed out from a fog bank of clouds. Hal drank his brandy and gazed up at the stained, bone-coloured crescent until Robert closed shutters and curtains over it. Lighting a further candle in every sconce—a week’s pay of candles—Robert chased away the lunatic light, replaced it with warm gold.
    That done, he sat on the edge of the bed and toyed nervously with his wig. On or off? He believed he looked better with it—just recently his hair had begun to recede slightly—but if he took it off, it would echo the candles in encouraging an atmosphere of intimacy, and perhaps persuade Hal to do the same. He took it off.
    “It puzzles me that everyone should think I’m such an expert pilot in these waters.” A frown scored Hal’s forehead with two parallel lines. “I’m every bit as single as the rest of you.”
    The candles flickered, the gold and brown dusk of the room filling up with their sweet honey scent. Robert worried his lip between his teeth. Sure though he was of Hal’s inclinations, at this final pinch the terror of exposure burned its way down his backbone like a live ember creeping its way down a slow-match . I know I’m not wrong. But if I am…?
    Glancing up, he found Hal watching him with a look of wary despair, as if he too held back some all-or-nothing confession. The intimacy, it seemed, was encouraging a very different reaction to that for which he’d hoped, other secrets trembling on the brink of exposure.
    The end of the world, it seemed, was nigh, and what would come afterward? Heaven or hell?
    “Hughes, I… Please. I need to tell you something.”
    The words came just as Robert’s pent-up eloquence burst its banks. He couldn’t stop the flood until it was all out. “I’ve loved this young person for years now, unrequited. I believe my beloved thinks of me as a friend. A good friend, I hope. But it’s…it’s… For romantic purposes, I might not exist at all.”
    Hal’s lips disappeared as his mouth drew a clamped line of pain. His fingers tightened on his mug. “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.” He stood up to take off his coat and, once he had folded it over the back of the chair, he abandoned its discomfort and—as planned—drifted slowly over to sit next to Robert on the bed, looking concerned. “You should tell her. Is she someone I know? Perhaps I should talk to her for you.”
    Almost from his first week on station Hal had attracted the young ladies of Jamaica as a flowering tree attracts hummingbirds. With his bright good looks, physical grace and, most of all, his air of romantic tragedy, he remained their darling years later, to the envy of the other officers. An excellent camouflage for his true nature. Robert could have told him that his throng of female admirers was the reason the squadron had a tendency to ask him for romantic advice. Yet how very abandoned he must feel—the unwanted centre of that whirl of intrigue and desire. Surrounded by love’s young dream, condemned himself to loneliness.
    Robert ached for Hal with a fierce, hot pain. He put a carefully casual hand on Hal’s knee, feeling the roughness of the heavy linen. The warmth of Hal’s flesh, seeping through it, travelled up his arm like flame eating along a fuse. So far, so good, and yet Hal had been about to tell him something. After all these years of being held at arm’s length, he had been about to confide in Robert as though he considered Robert a true friend.
    That was new. The plan could surely wait half an hour while he showed himself worthy of Hal’s trust. “Forgive me. You had something you wanted to tell me and I