Free The Eleventh Commandment (1998) by Jeffrey Archer Page A

much-thumbed copy of The Joy of Sex. Each night, curled up under the sheets with a torch, Tara would turn the pages.
    But it was only after her graduation from Stone Ridge that she lost her virginity - and if everyone else in her class had been telling the truth, she must have been the last. Tara had joined her parents for a long-promised visit to her great-grandfather’s birthplace. She fell in love with Ireland and its people within moments of landing at Dublin. Over dinner in their hotel on the first night, she told her father that she couldn’t understand why so many of the Irish were not content to remain in their homeland, but had to emigrate.
    The young waiter who was serving them looked down at her and recited:
    ‘Ireland never was contented.’
    ‘Say you so? You are demented.
    Ireland was contented when
    All could use the sword and pen.’
    ‘Walter Savage Landor,’ Maggie said. ‘But do you know the next line?’
    The waiter bowed.
    ‘And when Tara rose so high …’
    Tara blushed, and Connor burst out laughing. The waiter looked puzzled.
    ‘It’s my name,’ Tara explained.
    He bowed again before clearing away the plates. While her father was settling the bill and her mother was collecting her coat, the waiter asked Tara if she would like to join him for a drink at Gallagher’s when he came off duty. Tara happily agreed.
    She spent the next couple of hours watching an old movie in her room, before creeping downstairs just after midnight. The pub Liam had suggested was only a few hundred yards down the road, and when Tara walked in she found him waiting at the bar. Liam wasted no time in introducing her to the joys of Guinness. She wasn’t surprised to discover that he had taken the job as a waiter during the holidays before he completed his final year at Trinity College, studying the Irish poets. Liam was surprised, however, to find how well she could quote Yeats, Joyce, Wilde and Synge.
    When he took her back to her room a couple of hours later, he kissed her gently on the lips and asked, ‘How long are you staying in Dublin?’
    ‘Two more days,’ she replied.
    ‘Then don’t let’s waste a moment of it.’
    After three nights during which she hardly slept, Tara departed for Oscar’s birthplace in Kilkenny, feeling qualified to add a footnote or two to The Joy of Sex .
    As Liam carried their bags down to the hire car, Connor gave him a large tip and whispered, ‘Thank you.’ Tara blushed.
    At Stanford in her sophomore year, Tara had what might have been described as an affair with a medical student. But it wasn’t until he proposed that she realised she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with him. It hadn’t taken her a year to reach a very different conclusion about Stuart.
    They had first met when they bumped into each other. It was her fault - she wasn’t looking when she crossed his path as he swooped down the face of a large wave. Both of them went flying. When he lifted her out of the water, Tara waited for a richly deserved tirade of abuse.
    Instead he just smiled and said, ‘In future, try and keep out of the fast lane.’ She performed the same trick later that afternoon, but this time on purpose, and he knew it.
    He laughed and said, ‘You’ve left me with two choices. Either I start giving you lessons, or we can have a coffee. Otherwise our next meeting might well be in the local hospital. Which would you prefer?’
    ‘Let’s start with the coffee.’
    Tara had wanted to sleep with Stuart that night, and by the time she was due to leave ten days later, she wished she hadn’t made him wait three days. By the end of the week …
    ‘This is your captain speaking. We’re now beginning our descent into Los Angeles.’
    Maggie woke with a start, rubbed her eyes and smiled at her daughter. ‘Did I fall asleep?’ she asked.
    ‘Not until the plane took off,’ Tara replied.
    After they’d collected their luggage, Tara said goodbye to her parents and went off to join