Free In Name Only by Roxanne Jarrett Page A

clinging odor of upholstery and food and cigarette smoke.
    There had been few passengers on the early morning flight from Caracas, and their passage through customs went easily and with a minimum of fuss. Outside, a limousine with a sleepy looking driver waited for them.
    "Is it a long ride?" Jill asked, stifling a yawn, and settling into the back seat.
    "Forty-five minutes or so."
    Staring into the black night, she discovered flat, open fields on either side of the limousine, rather than the jungle she anticipated.
    "Where's the jungle?" she asked.
    "I'm afraid that as Manaus spreads, the jungle recedes, but don't worry, there's plenty of it to go around. You just have to go farther to see it."
    "Is the house right in the city?" Jill asked, unable to mask a growing excitement.
    "Right in the city."
    "Ah."
    "I promise you won't be disappointed." His voice, disembodied, remote, had an edge of amusement to it.
    She was silent. Disappointed about what? She had absolutely no notion about the way Simon lived, the way they would live. How could she? She had had scarcely enough time to catch her breath and she was married; literally swept off her feet by a handsome stranger, just like in the fairy stories she had read avidly as a child. Swept off, carried away to a distant kingdom by a knight in a double-breasted business suit. Two people suddenly brought together who had nothing in common but the memory of Daniel Carteret—and Daniel Carteret's fortune.
    Hardly five days had passed since Simon Todd had walked into her life. Five days and a lifetime. Now they were racing through the dark toward a city she had thought was in a jungle—a jungle that had miraculously disappeared. What other tricks were in store for her?
    A sudden light flashed in the car and she looked across at the man who had become her husband. He was lighting a cigarette, and for a second, his face, as still and immobile, and quite as cold as granite, was lit by the flame. Then, with only the red glow of the cigarette ash to place him, he was gone. She had skirted thinking about it seriously until now. This was their wedding night. It was still their wedding night. Was it possible that this cool stranger would take her in his arms and make love to her?
    Did she want him to? She thought of his kisses, given freely as illustrations merely, illustrations for the sake of Jay Wilhelm and Mrs. Hughes. Illustrations to show the difference between romantic love and sex for the mere pleasure of it. Always illustrations. And the trouble was, she had thoroughly enjoyed every one of his lessons.
    She wanted to talk to him about it, to lay it all on the line, but there was something forbidding in his silence that made her quite afraid. He was a man who would take what he wanted, how he wanted it, when he wanted it. You couldn't set out to conquer the jungle and have it any other way.
    But I don't love you, Mr. Todd
. She remembered the way the words had burst out. He had laughed and teased her about romantic love, as if she were a simpleminded teenager. And she recalled his kiss, and how she had been unaccountably stirred as she had never been in a year of Derek's kisses. What was it? Merely the touch of lips to lips. That was all. Jill shifted uneasily in her seat. What in the world could she be thinking of? Simon Todd had made it quite clear that theirs was a marriage of convenience, and she had acquiesced. It was all a matter of money, and she mustn't forget it, mustn't forget it for a moment, because when she forgot it, she might have to think about her future, and that was forbidden territory. To think about a loveless future, a future without a real husband and children, all for the sake of a fortune, was unbearable.
    She had married this stranger for money, her uncle's money. She had married him to get away from snow and Chicago, and a silly job in a city where no one wanted to hire a college graduate who could speak excellent Portuguese—and that was all.
    Outside the