[Barbara Samuel] Night of Fire(Book4You)
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Night of Fire
By
Barbara Samuel
Contents
"TELL ME A TALE, CASSANDRA," BASILIO SAID.
"There was a woman who lived in London, who had lost her courage in a terrible marriage, and had come to believe the only good men God ever made were her brothers."
He gazed down at her, his thick-lashed eyes very sober. "What happened to her?"
"A letter arrived from a stranger in a faraway land: a letter scented with the sea and olive trees.The images and words were very beautiful, and the woman thought he must be a middle-aged scholar, balding and sincere."
Basilio's eyes crinkled. "She did not imagine him to be the most virile and handsome of all men?"
"Oh, not at all. Quite dull, really. Over the months they shared many letters, telling their deepest thoughts to one another. And when he invited her to see his country, she recklessly took his invitation."
"And then she discovered a virile stallion," he teased wickedly.
Cassandra shook her head."She discovered a man who was beautiful inside and out, when she had despaired of ever knowing such a man."
He kissed her and she kissed him back, tenderly stroking his body. "Thank you, Basilio," she whispered.
He tugged her close to him, and exhausted, they slept.
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BARBARA SAMUEL
Night of Fire
AVON BOOKS
An Imprint
of HarperCollins
Publishers
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
AVON BOOKS
An Imprint ofHaiperCoMinsPttblishers
10 East 53rd Street
New York, New York 10022-5299
Copyright © 2000 by Barbara Samuel
ISBN: 0-06-101391-9
avonromance.com
First Avon Books paperback printing: December, 2000
Avon Trademark Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. and in Other Countries, Marca Registrada, Hecho en U.S.A.
HarperCollins® is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Printed in the U.S.A.
Ask me why I send to you This primrose, thus bepearled with dew?
I will whisper to your ears The sweets of love are mixed with tears.
ROBERT HERRICK
London May 1788
Cassandra told herself that she had recovered. That she was a woman of the world, and did not fall to pieces over a doomed romance. But the moment she saw him, when he walked into a box across the opera hall, she knew she had lied to herself.
He was out of place, and so unexpected that she gaped for a long moment before she could fit her mind around the fact that it was him.
Basilio.
Here, at the opera.
In London.
Blackness prickled at the edges of her vision. She realized she had not breathed, and inhaled deeply, but she could not look away.
Behind him was a man she vaguely recognized, a ruddy-faced lord from a county near her estate, which only made it all the stranger. Two women had settled at the front of the box, but the men continued some deep discussion, their heads bent together, one graying, the other darkest black.
A flash of memory hit her like a blow: her hand, white as moonlight against the jet of his hair, the curls leaping around the turn of her finger—
"Oh, God," Cassandra whispered.
Her brother Julian leaned closer. "I'm sorry—I didn't quite hear you."
She put her hand on his sleeve, trying to remember how to arrange her expression normally. "Nothing."
In the box across the crowded, noisy room, Basilio nodded seriously at something, and his hand settled in a quieting sort of way upon the shoulder of the small woman in front of him. She seemed hardly to notice, but even across such a distance, Cassandra read discomfort in her stiffness.
Abruptly, Cassandra stood, her limbs quaking. "Julian, I feel quite ill. I must go."
He leapt to his feet, his arm circling her shoulders. "What is it?"
She waved a hand, bent to pick up her shawl from the seat, and dropped it when her betraying fingers could not hold on to it. She stared at it, the beads glittering along one edge. It looked like water, she thought distantly, the way it shimmered in a pool on the dark floor of the box. It made her think of
another shawl, on another floor, and she closed her eyes against the pain of that memory.
How could a week have changed her life so utterly? A single week, torn from the hundreds and hundreds that made up her life. Forty times that number had passed since then, and none of them had changed her, turned her inside out, made her into a woman she no longer always recognized.