Yearn by Tobsha Learner Page B

alone with the Chinese woman once more.
    Jerome glanced across—still no reaction or even an acknowledgment. How delicious. Well, she could wait. He would seduce her but he would take his time, test his skills by doing it as slowly as he liked—after all, the flight was a good ten hours long and they’d only been in the air for an hour. Besides, wanting her was almost as erotic as having her, Jerome concluded, such was the mentality of a man who always got what he desired. Smiling to himself, he opened the script he had to read for his meeting in London.
    The lines of the first page seemed to writhe around seductively as Jerome tried to rein in his concentration. The script was an English period drama, set in the mid-nineteenth century, about a great rivalry between two famous Victorian biographers that had ended in a huge sexual scandal that had ruined both of them. Jerome was to play the part of the younger biographer, D’Arcy Hammer.
    Restless, Jerome flicked through the pages, scanning only his character’s lines. He arrived at an extended monologue: a scene between D’Arcy Hammer and Clementine, his young fiancée, a role that had been offered to the latest English ingenue to be catapulted to Hollywood. Hoping to absorb himself in the psychology of Mr. D’Arcy Hammer and temporarily forget the alluring woman sitting so close to him, Jerome began reading:
    D’ARCY LEANS FORWARD AND POKES THE FIRE, HIS FACE NOW FLUSHED WITH EXCITEMENT AND SOMETHING ELSE—THE MANIACAL GAZE OF THE OBSESSIVE.
    D’ARCY
    You have to understand, Clementine, what it must have been like for Banks, suddenly finding himself in this tropical paradise, this alien world where very few white men had walked before, and to feel this great passion, this irresistible attraction to a woman whose customs, appearance, and language were as strange to him as Eskimos might be to us. And yet love or perhaps primal lust . . .
    C/S OF CLEMENTINE BLUSHING AND YET SHE CANNOT TAKE HER EYES OFF THE YOUNG WRITER.
    D’ARCY (CONT’D)
    ...I believe, transcends the constraints of civilized society. It is pure; it lies in the heart of all of us, dormant. Unbelievably dangerous, and yet . . .
    HE LOOKS INTO THE BURNING HEARTH.
    D’ARCY (CONT’d)
    ...the young Joseph Banks had the courage to thrust his hand into the fire. . . .
    C/S OF D’ARCY: HAS HE GOT THE COURAGE TO THRUST HIS HAND INTO THE FIRE? WILL HE INCLUDE THE SECRET JOURNAL IN HIS BIOGRAPHY AND RISK RIDICULE? HE GLANCES ACROSS AT CLEMENTINE—THEIR EYES LOCK.
    CLEMENTINE
    I believe in the real you, D’Arcy. I don’t care what my uncle says, or what your adoring public believes. I know the truth of the man I love, whatever the future holds.
    AND D’ARCY HAS MADE HIS DECISION.
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    Jerome stopped reading and gazed out the window at the azure twilight that had become that moment’s time zone, the dull roar of the plane’s engines behind him. The role had caught his imagination. Here was a man who’d found someone who loved and desired his private persona, the vulnerable, fallible human side. D’Arcy had found someone who hadn’t cared about his fame or money. Who cared if it had ended badly? This character could have been him, 150 years ago, another brave explorer of human nature who yearned for true intimacy, just like he did!
    Now he could see D’Arcy crouched before that Victorian fireplace; he could feel his own chest encased within the tight velvet waistcoat, the starched stiff wing collars, the heightened pleasure of the proximity of the young woman D’Arcy wants but cannot have until marriage, the young biographer’s ability to live through his subject’s adventures—Jerome felt it all now.
    As if in response one of the actor’s eyebrows started to twitch as his face adopted the expression he imagined would suit a character like