Free The Ruby Tear by Suzy McKee Charnas Page A

not really okay . “Very good, Mr. Schoen. Sorry to have gotten you up. I’ll expect you here after breakfast with your written report.”
    “Certainly, Mr. Griffin,” Schoen said. “Goodbye.”
    Tired and chilled, Nick climbed back into bed. He hated the idea of leaving Jessamyn here in the city even just to go up to New Paltz, but the Burch Collection find sounded too promising to be left to anyone else to examine.
    Assuming it was anything at all. Maybe it was just some tale of a poltergeist in the carriage house, or ghosts from a long-forgotten Indian burial ground.
    Or maybe it was much more.

Temptation
    J ess had a drink at Anthony Sinclair’s apartment after rehearsal. His obvious loneliness had touched her, and a nervous vulnerability that he usually concealed better. He was a high-strung man.
    While their Director talked about the improvements he saw, he could sweep them all into his own enthusiasm. Afterward—as Jess and Anthony had agreed over a light meal when the session finished —seen in a colder light, what it boiled down to was more work, harder work, for the actors, and more expected of them.
    The play hinged, naturally, on the interaction between the two leads, Marko and Eva. He was the elder son of the powerful family on whom leadership fell with the death of his father. Eva, though essentially a sort of spirit, was also his niece, returned home from a wandering life. She brought with her word of what that family’s interests had wrought against poor and helpless people elsewhere; and what price must be paid in return.
    Others in the cast cheerfully encouraged Jess and Sinclair to spend time together, on the theory that this would help to create a strong undercurrent of feeling between them on the stage. They both went along with it, only partly in jest.
    Jess found herself attracted to Sinclair’s air of world-weary vulnerability combined with a surprising playfulness. There had been no man in her life since leaving physical therapy. Maybe it was time there was.
    It’s like being a widow , she thought; here she was, slow-dancing to mellow jazz in Anthony Sinclair’s living room at two o’clock in the morning. Anthony was not-so-subtly coming on to her. He hummed a counterpoint to the sax melody, and the warm contact of his body was making her bones feel softened.
    He was a well-built man, experienced, demonstrative, probably a dream as a lover—the first few times, anyway. Real-life but short-lived romantic liaisons were not uncommon in productions of plays about intense emotions and family bonds. And she was needy tonight, she realized, in a way she couldn’t recall having been for a long time.
    Working with a handful of excitable, dedicated professionals on a passionate play, day after day for hours at a time, had roused her sleeping senses and the appetites of her healed body.
    Still, she told herself (even as her arm tightened around Anthony’s shoulders), she wasn’t some dewy-eyed ingénue fresh out of drama school. She knew better than to believe that she, from among all women, would be the one to permanently win Anthony Sinclair away from his wife’s side—assuming that she wanted him on that basis, which wasn’t all that alluring an idea to begin with. Most theatrical men—like their female counterparts—were fickle, nervous, egotistical people; they had to be, to be able to do their work.
    It didn’t make for stable home-lives.
    Jessamyn had sown some wild oats (so to speak) of her own, so she didn’t hold a weakness for sexual adventurism against her fellow professionals. Forever at risk of public failure, rejection, and ridicule in their work, they sought approval and acceptance wherever they might find it.
    Sally Sinclair was currently featured in a musical on Broadway. It was said among the crew at the Edwardian that if an opening that suited him appeared in that show’s cast, Anthony would find a way to get out of his obligations in “The Jewel” and go join his