Read Online SILK AND SECRETS by Mary Jo Putney - Free Book Online Page B

of surma and deftly applied it, blinking down on the spreading stick as she drew the cosmetic along her lids.
    Finally she regarded her image with satisfaction. She looked like a blend of East and West, certainly not provocative, but also neither masculine nor hopelessly plain.
    Then, as ready as she would ever be, Juliet sallied forth to meet her husband.
CHAPTER 4
    An hour after sunset, a polite soft-footed young man escorted Ross to the chamber where he was to dine with Juliet. The lamp-lit room appeared to be a study that had been converted to temporary use as a Western dining room. The Eastern custom was to eat sitting on the floor or on cushions around a low table, but this room contained a wooden table that had been covered with a linen cloth and set with plates and silverware in European style.
    The servant bowed and left Ross alone. He didn’t mind, for he found it interesting to examine his surroundings, which bore a distinct resemblance to his own untidy office back in England.
    Besides unusual bits of pottery and statuary, there were books and scrolls in half a dozen languages, both European and Eastern. Several of the Asiatic texts were so unusual that they filled his heart with scholarly lust. Briefly he wondered if there was any chance that Juliet would let him borrow them, or stay long enough to make his own translations. Then he recalled his mission and reined back his enthusiasm. He would have to return alive from Bokhara before he could borrow any books.
    Even more interesting were Juliet’s own maps and notebooks, where she had recorded her observations of the land and its peoples. There were more than a dozen notebooks, and he thumbed quickly through several. Perceptive and ironic, the journals would be a great success if published in London under some title such as
Persian Travels of an English Gentlewoman.
They were also an interesting insight into the woman his wife had become.
    Lifting the last notebook, he opened it at random and glanced down to see, written in Juliet’s distinctive angular handwriting, the words “I wish to God that I had never met Ross Carlisle.”
    His heart jerked as if a sliver of ice had stabbed into it, and he slammed the book shut and returned it to the shelf. Then he stood very still, breathing deeply to counteract his incipient nausea. So she kept a private diary as well as a record of external observations, and within its pages she was characteristically frank.
    Bleakly Ross regarded the tooled leather binding of the journal. The answers to all his questions about what had gone wrong in his marriage were probably in that book—and he did not have the courage to look inside.
    At the sound of approaching footsteps, he turned and tried to look as casual as if he were taking his ease in his own library. Then Juliet pushed aside the door hanging, and he stiffened. She had always had a genius for the unexpected, and now the damned female was doing it again. This afternoon in her Tuareg robes she had looked like a warrior queen. Now, dressed as a cross between a governess and a Turkish dancer, she was every inch a woman.
    She paused in the doorway, her expression wary. “Good evening, Ross. I’m sorry that I’m late.”
    “No matter,” he said easily. “I assumed that either you were delayed by the unexpected or you’ve developed an Eastern sense of time.”
    “A little of both, perhaps.”
    As she entered the room, he studied her face, comparing it with the past. The rounded features of youth had slimmed and hardened as the strong underlying bone structure became more prominent. Juliet would never be pretty in the soft, helpless, feminine way that many men liked. Instead, she was quite shatteringly beautiful.
    Gesturing at the table, she said, “I thought you might like to eat Western-style, and the table here in my study was best suited for that.”
    “It will be a pleasant change, assuming that I haven’t forgotten how to use a fork in the last three