The Kindness of Strangers (Skip Langdon Mystery #6) (The Skip Langdon Series) Read Online Free Page B

would always be carnations.
    Wish she could get away from Lise and live with Noel.
    She had fallen in love with him long, long before he noticed her, and for months had not gone to sleep without his face in her mind. She’d been beside herself when they started seeing each other.
    But the way she felt right now, at this moment, was so much more intense that she thought it threatened to explode her body.
    “What is it?” he said. “What’s wrong?”
    “The poem …” How could she tell him it wasn’t the poem, it was him?
    “It reminds me of you.”
    She didn’t answer.
    “So pure. So lovely in your purity.”
    She smiled. “So simple.”
    He took her hand, which had been obsessively folding a napkin. “Don’t.”
    “Oh, the napkin. Nervous habit.” But even as she spoke, she saw that he was shaking his head.
    “Not the napkin. I meant don’t be ironic—don’t cheapen the meaning. You heard what I said. I want you to take it in, not push it away.”
    No one had ever talked to her that way.
    The tears had fallen now and were running down her face, so that she could see clearly again. He was still holding her hand. She stared up at him, unable to form words, and he stared back, their eyes locked like necklaces that had tangled.
    Lise would die. My father would die. It would kill him.
    She couldn’t look away.
    “Let’s take a walk,” he said, and she thought, He needs air, too , barely surprised to realize once more how much they were in tune with each other.
    But she was wrong this time, and if they had needed air they wouldn’t have found it in the steamy embrace of early September, which pressed on Torian’s chest as she stepped onto the sidewalk. She was still trying to adjust when she felt herself pushed against a wall, Noel’s mouth on her, his huge hands in her hair.
    Before Noel, she had never tasted anyone’s tongue, never felt hands on her body, except her mother’s when she was tiny and her dad’s when she hugged him. Just one of Noel’s hands could reach from her waist to her breasts, could cover her entire shoulder. To feel them on her was to feel safe from the world, from Lise, from the penetrating sadness that informed her life.
    His tongue was silk and velvet at the same time, and all the perfumes of the East, and the sparklers that had so enthralled her as a child, and yet it was also something soft and wet for which she could think of no simile at all. She had tried to write about it, and there simply was no analogy in her experience. It was soft and wet and delicious, and yet certainly not like the soaked cake of a trifle or the plump thrill of an oyster, both of which sounded revolting when you put them down on paper. Nothing at all like the satin, electric ecstasy his tongue could produce, nuanced and gentle and delicate and maddening in its purposeful slowness.
    She thought: Caramel, maybe. Butterscotch. But that conveyed only the sweetness of it—not the aliveness. The joy.
    He was hard and huge and overwhelming, and yet if she focused only on the caresses, minute feather touches in her invaded mouth, it was like falling into a golden cloud, encompassing and infinite and softer than the air itself.
    “I needed to kiss you,” he said, and pulled away, walking now, holding her hand. They were on Canal Street and could have been seen, yet he did it anyway, and she did not stop him.
    They walked toward Woldenberg Park, and when they reached the levee, there was a breeze from the river, which lifted her hair off the dampness of her face.
    He touched her cheek. “You’re so beautiful.”
    She might have said, “You are a god. You are Apollo. You are the golden light of my soul, and the sun itself,” if she could have spoken, but a hunk of steel wool had grown in her throat and lodged there like a cancer.
    She stared up at him again, into the pale blue of his eyes, cold, pale blue she had thought at first, but hot now, lit with the heat of something she didn’t understand,