Free Cry for Passion by Robin Schone Page B

grating whine of passing carriages: The spectators, as well as MPs, were breaking for the evening meal.
    “Yes,” Jack said, voice distant.
    He had said that.
    “Did I?”
    A muscle ticked inside his jaw.
    He thought of the private act upon which he had just voted. He thought of the reporters who could at any moment exit St. Stephen’s Hall, each of them familiar with Rose Clarring and the trial he had lost.
    He thought of Father, and the carrot of Lord of Appeal in Ordinary that he had the night before dangled.
    “I see,” Rose Clarring said, shadowed face becoming a polite mask. His fingers involuntarily tightened around her elbow: She emotionally moved out of his reach. “I didn’t mean to intrude on your time. Please accept my apologies.”
    But Jack couldn’t let her go.
    “Why didn’t you buy a dildo?”
    The harsh question underscored sharp heel taps and rousing laughter.
    Rose Clarring had said she wanted to feel a man inside her body. Yet when visiting the Achilles Book Shoppe, she had purchased a French postcard instead of an object that would provide physical if not emotional satisfaction.
    The stiffness of her elbow did not relax. “I wanted my vagina to be a special place for my husband.”
    But Jack was not Jonathon Clarring.
    A tiny pulse beat against the palm of his hand.
    Her need. Or his.
    “Did he ever give you an orgasm?” Jack asked, knowing the answer, hoping he was wrong.
    She searched his gaze for long seconds, as if seeking inside his eyes the man who had twenty-one hours earlier exposed his sexuality.
    But Jack was not drunk this night. And this night belonged to neither Cynthia Whitcox nor Rose Clarring, but to the common good of England.
    “We were children,” she said finally.
    Pain knotted Jack’s groin, history repeating itself.
    “So your husband never gave you an orgasm,” he unemotionally surmised.
    “I don’t need my husband to give me an orgasm.” The sharp click of footsteps receded. A feminine trill trailed behind the men. “I’m quite capable of doing so myself.”
    “By exciting your clitoris.”
    An external appendage.
    Gaslight burnished a gold curl; shadow hollowed her eyes. “Yes.”
    “But you don’t fuck yourself,” Jack said flatly.
    “No,” she confirmed.
    “But you want to divorce your husband.”
    “Yes.”
    “So that you’ll be free to find passion.”
    The heavy rumble of a wagon rode the street.
    “Yes,” Rose Clarring said, acknowledging the needs Parliament did not.
    “Yet you don’t know what passion is.”
    Denial sharpened her voice. “I know it doesn’t reside inside a woman’s womb.”
    “Then where does it reside, Mrs. Clarring?” Jack studied her face in the flickering light of the lamppost: the pale slice of a cheek, the soft curve of a lip, the darkness of her pupils. “Inside a woman’s vagina?”
    “No,” she said with conviction.
    “You know that”—her flesh beneath her wool coat scorched his fingers—“how? Because you didn’t orgasm when your husband fucked you?”
    “Don’t say that.”
    “That your husband fucked you?” Jack deliberately asked.
    “My husband did not fuck me,” Rose Clarring said tightly.
    “But that’s what you wanted him to do, isn’t it?”
    “No.”
    “You said you wanted to be fucked by a man, Mrs. Clarring,” Jack said, purposefully pushing, fingers throbbing, unable to relinquish her. “You said you wanted to feel his sex buried inside your sex, thrusting deeper, and harder, and deeper.”
    “I said I wanted a man to take pleasure in the love we share,” she riposted.
    “You said you wanted to experience passion.” The scream of a fire engine drifted over the Thames; the whine of traffic swallowed it. “How do you know, Mrs. Clarring, that passion isn’t just a splendid fuck?”
    She had not once refused to answer in the witness box. She did not do so now.
    “I don’t,” she said finally. Lamplight leaping . . . falling. “I don’t know.”
    Neither did