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

in their tone that accentuated her French accent in a way Frank had not heard in her before. “Lutz leaves a rose outside the door whenever Breitner wants to see me.”

Frank bristled at her words. They sent a shiver through his spine.

“It’s a dangerous game you’re playing, Patricia.”

She smiled, and ran her fingers over his chest.

“No more so than yours,” she rejoined, and punctuated this statement with a kiss on his right nipple, which she teased with her tongue and tugged at with her teeth. The way in which she could suddenly banish her sadness sent a pulse of excitement coursing through his veins.

“Frank, I have an idea. If you want to move out of your hotel and find somewhere else to live, why don’t you come and stay here? I have to go away next week, and will be gone for some time. So, when you get back from Cologne, you could come and stay here until my return. You would be safe from Breitner for a time. He would never think of looking for you here while I’m away.”

Frank was not so sure that his tormentor would be so easily duped. But in his erotic enchantment he had put any threat from Breitner to the back of his mind. And had even forgotten about the promised trip to Cologne. Yet Patricia’s unexpected invitation now lent a new urgency to his plans. He vowed to himself that he would make his preparations the following morning.

They did not make love on this their first night together, but lay in each other’s arms enjoying the beauty of the moment. The exquisite touch of skin upon skin. The perfumes that gather around the triangles of the neck. A sense of deep tenderness that Frank took with him into the timeless reaches of sleep.

It was close to dawn when a rude hand fetched him back from this paradise. His immediate impression of that waking instant was of a fierce ache tearing his head apart. No matter how his head was positioned on the pillow, he felt that his brain was being dragged from the comfort of his skull and pummelled beyond recognition. But he sensed it was not this so much as the noise that woke him from his sweet dreams – a deafening, repetitive clanging above his head that seemed to fill the entire room.

“What the hell is that?”

“Only bells. Just damned church bells.”

He looked down at the face on the pillow beside him, and caught the scent of a familiar perfume in the air. The flame-red curls of her hair draped over the green polyester satin. And her lips still moved vaguely in the wake of her words. But her eyes remained firmly shut. Who was she? The scene threw him into the tangled arms of a dream state that he struggled to unravel, until eventually sleep returned to save him from the clutches of his desperation.

By the time the full brunt of wakefulness finally forced itself upon him, this discordant interlude in the night had already faded. He gazed on the delicate, sleep-entrained features of Patricia’s face on the pillow beside him: her long dark lashes keeping the seductive charm of her eyes still firmly closed to the morning light; her lips in a beguiling, asymmetric pose, as if forming words that wanted to be spoken; and her raven hair curled around her ear in a way that accentuated the fleshy fullness of the lobe. He had never realised until that moment what beautiful perfection there was to be found in the earlobe. Even the perforation made in the tender flesh of the lobe to accommodate an earring displayed an impeccably neat precision.

It occurred to him at that moment that he had never actually seen Patricia wearing earrings. He wondered what special occasions she reserved them for. Were they perhaps another part of her life that was set aside for Breitner?

He watched spellbound by the sight of her beginning to surface, the way she extended first her left arm and then the left leg from under the sheets, as if instinctively testing the air before she woke. Enthralled by the unfolding splendour of her stirring, he instantly set aside any thoughts or feelings about Breitner. And by the time she was fully awake, the picture of her smile on the pillow had not only put to flight any memory of the bully from Berlin. It ensured also that he had completely forgotten the intrusion of the brief, but disturbing dream of church bells, that familiar perfume and the blonde curls on the pillow. They had lost any meaning they might have had for him.

But disappointment soon set in when Patricia – now fully awake – announced that she had lectures to attend that morning. And brought home to Frank that, before his day with her had even started, it was already practically at an end.

Before he left, however, she promised to get a second key to her flat made that afternoon and to drop it by at his hotel. So he would get to see her again that day. A promise that imbued him now with a sense of ambition and allowed him to take the rest of the day in his stride. More easily than any other day he could remember. Patricia had given him a purpose, however vague in its definition.

When he got back to his hotel room later in the day, he found this purpose had already acquired a certain cutting edge.

Chapter 13

The suitcase lay on the bed, looking harmless but heavy. It would probably have been cumbersome enough to carry even without its contents. But when Frank opened it up to find all the bundles of literature that his friend wanted him to hump across Germany, it was plain that his journey was not going to be easy. It was a large leather case, and it was crammed full of the little handbooks on chess that Achim had shown him, together with some small pocketbook collections