Dying for Christmas Read Online Free

merging with the back half of a puma or similar wild cat. The woman’s back was arched, pushing out her very pronounced breasts, on which the artist had detailed every blue vein and even the tiny bumps on her impressive areolae. Her luxuriant honey-blonde hair flowed out behind her, matching up with the end of the cat’s tail. Her face too was markedly feline, with striking green eyes ringed with yellow; a disturbing, unblinking stare.
    ‘Hideous, isn’t it?’
    Dominic handed me a glass of champagne and dropped down on to the sofa beside me.
    ‘It’s … well … it’s very … big!’
    He laughed, and I was acutely aware of the heat from his body just a few inches from mine.
    ‘It’s an abomination. But I needed something big enough to fill the space, and it’s someone I know.’
    ‘The artist?’
    ‘No, the artist was me, and I’ve never claimed to be Picasso. I mean the model.’
    ‘Oh.’ I gazed back again at those green, catlike eyes and a shiver fluttered through me on butterfly wings. ‘A friend?’
    ‘My wife.’
    My hand froze in the act of bringing the glass down from my lips. ‘That’s funny. I thought you said I reminded you of your wife.’
    He turned to face me then, and the dimple was a gaping hole in his face that a person could fall into and never be seen again.
    ‘Did I?’ he said.

Chapter Four
    It was expensive champagne but I might as well have been drinking paint stripper. There could be lots of reasons I’d reminded him of his wife. He’d never actually said the resemblance was physical, had he? Maybe it was more of a general impression, some kind of aura we both shared.
    ‘You know, I ought to be getting home,’ I said in a voice scraped from the back of my throat. ‘I’m having drinks with friends. But please don’t worry about giving me a lift.’
    ‘Don’t be silly, Jessica Gold,’ he said, brushing his fingertips over my cheek so gently I fancied I could feel the individual whorls. ‘You’ve only just got here.’
    I turned my eyes back to the painting as if it might yet reveal hidden depths.
    ‘Where is she?’ I asked, nodding towards the figure.
    ‘Natalie? Oh, off fucking some brainless cock, I expect.’ His tone was light but his fingers froze on my face. ‘I haven’t seen her for months.’
    Even at this stage, even while the alarm klaxon was shrieking inside my head and my heart was beating out a rhythm that said, ‘Where is my bag? Where is my bag?’ I was still wondering what it would be like to kiss him.
    ‘Do you think it’s fair to say you struggle with boundaries?’ Sonia Rubenstein once asked me. ‘What I mean is, do you find it hard to draw the line between what’s appropriate and inappropriate?’
    Sonia always wore black, but she accessorized it with a selection of brightly coloured silk scarves that she wore looped several times around her neck. I liked to imagine her opening a special drawer in her bedroom in the flat above her Hampstead consulting room, and picking out a scarf like she was selecting a bloom at an upmarket florist.
    ‘I really do need to go,’ I said again, putting down the champagne flute with unnecessary firmness on a thick-glass coffee table and rising to my feet. ‘If you’ll just tell me what you did with my bag …’
    Dominic Lacey remained leaning back on the sofa and looking up at me with amusement.
    ‘Come back and sit down. We’ve only just started chatting.’
    ‘Yes, but I’m late. I really shouldn’t have come.’
    ‘So why did you?’
    His arm was now lying along the back of the sofa, his fingers drumming slowly, and I focused on his wedding ring rising and falling because I was too scared of what I’d find in his eyes, or rather what he might find in mine.
    ‘A moment of Christmas madness,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t thinking things through. They’ll be trying to get hold of me. In fact, I must check my phone.’
    ‘Ah yes. In case they’ve replied to that text you sent them.’
    I looked at