100. A Rose In Jeopardy by Barbara Cartland Read Free Book Online

kind.”
    Marian. It could not be!
    Lyndon parted the branches of the palm so that he could peer through.
    It was her!
    His ex-fiancée, sitting a couple of tables away with his best friend from his schooldays, the redheaded rowing champion, Julius Maberley!
    Marian looked strikingly beautiful with her glossy brown hair piled up like a Grecian Goddess and her cheeks and lips glowing pink in the light of the candles.
    Lyndon felt his heart melting as he watched her.
    He had forgotten how exquisitely beautiful she was, with her delicate heart-shaped face and her long eyelashes that fluttered like the wings of a tiny bird.
    But what was happening now?
    Marian was reaching out across the table to lay her white-gloved hand over Julius’s.
    Lyndon’s heart contracted painfully in his chest.
    How could this be? Only a few days ago she had still been insisting that she loved Lyndon and that she was determined to win him back and marry him.
    He fumbled in the pocket of the cloak and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper, one of the many letters she had written to him.
    “Darling,
    You are being an utter fool to make so much fuss about something so silly .
    Your Papa’s good friend, Mr. Merriman, was an absolute poppet – if he hadn’t been there on the stairs to catch me, who knows, I might have had a horrible fall.
    I didn’t mean to kiss him, it just sort of happened and anyway, darling, I know you will come round. All girls love to flirt a bit, we just can’t help it. It’s you I love, Lyndon. There will never be anyone else for me and I shall die if I don’t see you.
    Please, please, darling boy, stop being so silly.”
    Lyndon pushed the letter back into his pocket.
    Was it really so silly of him to be upset that the girl he loved had allowed one of his Papa’s drunken cronies to take her in his arms and then press a horrid lecherous kiss against her lips?
    His stomach tied itself in a knot as he remembered Marian’s pretty face, laughing at him there on the stairs of his parents’ Mayfair home, when he had tried to pull her away from the clutches of Mr. Algernon Merriman.
    When he would not see the funny side of it, she had run out of the house, slamming the door behind her.
    And then his Papa, sprawling drunkenly across the stair carpet, had yelled at him, told him he was being an idiot and a silly over-sensitive fool.
    Even his Mama was not very sympathetic, when he told her what had happened.
    “That’s just the way your father is,” she said, a cold little frown on her aristocratic face. “His mind is only on the next wager he can make.”
    With a deep sadness and rage, Lyndon realised that she was right and he felt ashamed of his Papa.
    “You expect too much of Marian,” Lady Brockley continued. “She’s a very young and high-spirited girl and there will be a terrible fuss from her family if there is any problem with the engagement.”
    But Lyndon could not marry a girl who behaved as Marian had done and who did not understand how much she had hurt him.
    She did not believe him when he had told her this.
    She called at the house in Mayfair, even though he would not speak to her and then she wrote him many letters sometimes three or four a day insisting that she still loved him and that she wanted to marry him as soon as possible.
    Thank goodness he had not given in!
    As Lyndon watched her through the fronds of the palm tree, he felt the pain in his heart turn to an icy anger.
    She was smiling tenderly at his old friend, Julius, and gazing up at him with her huge eyes.
    Not so long ago she had looked at Lyndon like that. His instinct had been right. Marian had never truly cared for him.
    He had done the right thing by walking out then and there, escaping from his Papa’s rudeness, his Mama’s coldness, Marian’s flirtatious behaviour and the relentless insistence of all of them that he should marry her.
    Now Julius had taken Marian’s little hand in both of his and was stroking it.
    Good old Julius!