The Dark Frontier A. Decker (i like reading TXT) 📖

She was too important. He needed to know more about her. About why his decision made her glad. But everything remained securely locked away, and he had no idea where he should start looking for the key. She seemed so rootless in every way. So hard to pin down.

“You know, when I was a little boy,” he said at last, “I had dreams of growing a huge oak tree at the bottom of our garden that would get as tall as our house and outlive me by hundreds of years. It would be my gift to posterity.”

“I can just imagine you as a little boy. You must have been very sweet,” she laughed with a gentle sparkle in her voice. It was a laugh that appeared to be born of the purest affection. And it left him with an exquisite tingling sensation. Like bubbles of the finest champagne.

“Every spring for about three years,” he continued, “I would plant acorns in pots and watch them strike root, pushing out the first two leaves on their way to heaven. Then, when they were big enough to survive on their own, I would secretly put the seedlings in the ground in a distant corner of the garden. But every time my mother found them, she pulled them up. ‘We don’t want these growing in the garden, they’ll destroy the foundations of the house before too long’ she used to say. Goodness knows how long she was hoping to live. But I never gave up, and every spring I tried again, until my dream faded.”

“Is that why you decided to go to Cologne for your friend? So you can finally plant your oak tree?”

He sensed she was mocking him.

“You remind me of those acorns I was always trying to plant,” he said. “The way I kept hopelessly trying to help them strike root and was constantly being thwarted.”

Patricia broke into a new kind of laugh.

“That’s the first time anyone has likened me to an acorn. What does that make you? A squirrel come to sneak me off to your lair?”

“You mean my nest. Foxes have lairs.”

She was making fun of him. But she did it with such magic that he found it impossible to take offence. He lifted his empty glass.

“Is there any more wine?” he repeated.

“I think I’ll call you my squirrel from now on,” she said.

The sense of possession implicit in these words sent a ripple of excitement through his chest. Bewitched by her mysterious beauty – which was all the richer for its modesty – he followed the line of her body with an impatient eye as she rose, still laughing to herself, and fetched the bottle from the cooking niche.

She bent forward slightly to pour the wine. Frank watched with rapt attention, drinking in the beauty of her slender wrist and her straight black hair as it cascaded over her face and concealed for a moment the enigma of her smile. The way her fingers flexed around the stem as they chinked glasses reflected the tantalising amalgam of vulnerability and strength of purpose – a paradox that teased his desire for her. He leaned forward and, before she could put the glass to her mouth, took it in his left hand to savour the soft sweet flesh of her lips on his.

Her response was not so much reciprocation, more a passive lingering. This encouraged him in the belief that it signalled at least a mild appreciation of his advances. Until his hands travelled down to the curvature of her waist and started slowly working back up the buttons of her blouse.

“What are you doing?”

Her words did not wholly convince him of the surprised innocence in the inflection of her voice. An impression that was reaffirmed when his continued unveiling of her slender body failed to elicit any further words of protest or bewilderment. On the contrary, as she let her blouse drop to the floor, a shy smile of acceptance flickered over her face. He took her in his arms, carried her over to the bed and laid her on the quilt cover as carefully as he might set down an injured dragonfly on a lily pad.

For a moment, which lost all shape of time, not a word was spoken.

Frank ran his fingers gently over the flesh of her lips. He let his middle finger lie in the exquisitely deep furrow of her philtrum.

“We call it the mark of an angel in French,” she whispered. “Placed there by Lailah according to Jewish tradition.”

“I can believe it,” he said.

In a gesture of sweet surrender, her eyes followed the movement of his arm as his fingers explored further, gently skimming over the contours of her body. He sensed a frisson of tension as he did so – like a gentle pulse of lightning between the touch receptors of their skin – from the dainty, perfectly proportioned anatomy of her feet, over the soft black fleece protecting her virtue, to the muted ridges of bone that adorned her neck and put him in mind of the delicate collar worn by a certain kind of dove that he could not put a name to. The faint trace of a flush came into her cheeks, and she smiled.

“It seems to me that you have an unfair advantage.”

She reached over and began to unbutton his shirt. He allowed the gentle touch of her fingers to work his garments loose and watched in silent passion. But not without a certain discomfort.

“I thought we were on a pretty equal footing already. After all, until I set eyes on you in all your nakedness, you knew far more about me than I did about you. I’ve simply redressed the balance. And now you’re trying to tip the scales back in your favour.”

“No,” she said playfully. “Simply undressing the redressed balance.”

Her immodesty, the way in which she made no secret of her appetite, took him by