The Last Time I Saw Paris Read Online Free Page B

some kindling and a couple of logs, and put a match to them. She kneeled, warming her hands in front of the blaze, listening to the logs crackling and the booming of the surf along the shoreline. Dexter finished his dinner and trotted in from the kitchen. He dropped his blankie on the rug, kneaded it carefully with his big paws until he reached some obscure point of doggy satisfaction, then slid lazily down and closed his eyes.
    Lara curled up on the sofa, her legs tucked underneathher. She wrapped the soft blue chenille throw around her shoulders and lay back against the cushions. Silence settled around her and in minutes she too was asleep.
    When she awoke, the fire had burned out and the house felt cold. She had no idea how long she had slept and was astonished when she checked her watch and found it was 2:30 A.M. NOW she was wide awake but there was nothing to do but go to bed. She would get up early, do some chores. There were always things to be taken care of in a beach house: fresh paint, minor repairs, leaking faucets, stuff like that.
    She let Dexter out for a quick prowl, waited for him to come in, then trailed wearily up the narrow cottage stairs with him at her heels.
    Peeling off her clothes, she took a quick shower to warm herself up, then put on sweat socks and an old gray T-shirt and climbed into the canopied four-poster that, because the stairs were too narrow to accommodate its gargantuan size, had had to be hauled up over the balcony and through the French windows.
    Turning out the light, she huddled under the blankets and lay waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dark. She could hear Dex shuffling and the whoosh of the central heating system as it sent out welcome warm shafts of air and, as always, the roar of the ocean. Usually it was a lullaby, but tonight it did not send her to sleep.
    The light of the half-moon fell onto the smooth, untouched pillow beside her where Bill’s head should have lain. She stared at it for a long moment, wondering where he was sleeping. And if he was with Melissa. Her heart was a leaden lump in her chest, and she buried her forty-five-year-old face in her own monogrammed Italian cotton pillow that was smoothas silk and twice as expensive. She thought angrily that women should be told about monogrammed linens. Like cigarettes, they should come with a warning label:
Caution: This may not last forever.
    When she and Bill were young marrieds, their cheap plaid flannel sheets, soft from many washes at the Fluff & Fold, had kept them warm when the cranky heating system in their old two-room walk-up had gone on the blink yet again.
    Bill had been a resident at Chicago’s tough Cook County Hospital then, and Lara was struggling with a boring job. They had been so poor, and so happy. A pang of nostalgia swept over her as she recalled the smell of mildew that had greeted them each time they opened the door of their walk-up apartment, and the eternal odor of spaghetti bolognaise; that was all she had known how to cook. She remembered how Bill’s chilled naked body had felt, slipping into the narrow bed beside her. She so warm under the flannel, he still freezing from his drive back through the snowy streets after night duty at the hospital. And how she would burrow like a rabbit into his arms, snuffling the intoxicating smell of his skin, a mixture of soap and hospital antiseptic and the citrusy cologne he always wore, and the familiar musky, sexy maleness of him. They never spoke. He didn’t want to wake her and she wanted him to catch a few precious hours before the grueling life of a hospital intern took him over again. That is, unless they made love, which is what usually happened. And then they did not need to speak. Their close-wrapped bodies, their clinging arms and searching lips had said it all. Hadn’t they? Sometimes Lara thought her memories seemed more like dreams.
    Lying sleepless in the moonlit room with only thesound of Dexter’s breathing for