Sirens, p.5
Sirens, page 5
stable in rough Naturally there's more deck space, too.' this talk of
the boat, his abrupt unease melted. He sat : the port sheer-strake, the
towel around his neck, to the land and his legs stretched out in front
of him. er suspected you had a boat.' laughed. '. It's a well-kept
secret. There are times t got to get away from everyone and everybody.
Tennis . sport; get a lotta.
business done that way as well as .'He laughed again, a bright, breezy
sound. ' know hey pal around, sweat together, sunburn together, little
together and right away they think they can trust er. It's our form of
Mah-jongg.' t off her backside as if stung. "You mean that's the thing
we women can manage - Mah-jongg.' I certainly don't know the first thing
about it,' he said But seeing her expression, he quickly added, "Now t's
not at all what I meant. I only - Jesus, Daina, we talking about. I know
you're not another Bonnie Bonnie Griffin was an executive vice-president
at nt who, Rubens knew, Daina had dealt with during ng of Regina Red. t
the hell does that mean?' s was perhaps already beginning to suspect
that he dvertently poured gasoline on to the fire, thinking it 45 was
water, but he seemed unprepared as yet to back dowil. ' know very well
what I mean. We both know what she is. She breaks chops every chance she
gets.' ' that's what you think I do.' Her eyes burned sav gely in the
moonlight, ironically making her even more desirable ''s not what I said
and you know it. I only meant, well, V11 you know how girls are when
they get together ... '. How are they?' But she knew very well indeed. '
Christ's sake, I only meant that guys are the same way. You needn't bite
my head off.' They stared at each other for a time. Around them the sea
rocked in tiny splashes like a child playing contentedly. The fittings
on board creaked rhythmically in a kind of soothing.,. litany, conjuring
images of the land of nod and sugarplurm. r dancing, recalling to her
images like bright flashes of lightning of her childhood summer days and
nights on Cape Cod. ''s a hell of an executive,' Rubens said. ' she
murder to deal with.' ' only because -.? Daina began, then shut up. They
rocked back and forth on the tide. ' she is.' He smiled at her and the'
tension broke, a tropical current?. slicing through a formidable ice
floe. He seemed to sigh, though it might have been the wind, and came
towards her. looming over her, a lithe nocturnal creature she had beec
lucky enough to stumble upon in the dead of night. His magnetism reached
out across the closing expanse to embrace her in a kind of
self-generated heat. Her thiseemed to glow and her heart plummeted just
as if she were in a swiftly descending elevator. He had not yet touched
her but the moonlight, the slow drip of the seawater on to the ded as it
rolled in pearly drops off his skin, the way his half-opeo shirt clung
to the muscles of his chest, all combined to make him seem almost
priapic. She felt her nipples stiffen, begin to ache with her need and
she saw this inevitable end to the long night almost as if it were
predestined. Her tongue came oluwa unconsciously, touched her upper lip,
moistening it, Her mouth felt as dry as if she had just trekked across a
desert. She became acutely aware of him staring at her, his cy flicking
momentarily to her breasts where her wet and clinging 46 opened enough
to show her deep cleavage; then shining face. Her lashes were thick with
water r darkened and curled damply across her forehead, over her ears
and shoulders like sea grape. She began if she were the mermaid he had
conjured. here.' It was a whisper she was not even certain he yet it
seemed at once as soft and as harsh as the g in off the sea, bringing
with it tantalizing hints -off lands it had brushed in days gone by:
Tahiti, Japan, floating serenely on the other side of the e against his
chest feeling as superheated as an "sighed as her nipples scraped
erotically against him re his open mouth came down over hers. His tongue
hers while his hands reached down to cup her buttocks felt herself
lifted up on to the tips of her toes, back at once floating and
supported by the fulcrum of his s fingertips lightly caressing her
between her thighs she was pressed inward and upward. Her pubic mound
him already erect beneath his lightweight trousers and her hips in a
circle as they kissed. s were around his neck, her fingers gently
caressing feeling the toughness and the resiliency as they owly down the
ridged contours of his back. When she his waist she clawed his shirt
free of the waistband @trousers, ran her fingertips inside, upward; even
her -cut nails made him shiver. had already opened the butt6ns at the
rear of her now he unwound it from her as if it were a harem e until it
was a dark puddle at her feet, a perfect er from which she seemed to
emerge. He pulled her ck into steamy contact with his groin and she
gasped, him through the tantalizing second skin of her silk nties. rked
on her shirt while she stroked his chest and sides, his taut muscles
jump. Then he had her shirt open and s were inside, cupping her breasts.
She heard him moan saw how hard her nipples were and his head lunged his
hot lips closing around the tip of one breast. 47 She thought again, as
pleasure began to assail her, of tht inevitability of this moment but
this time the effect on her was different. ',' she said. ' it." She put
her hands against thtj@,, sides of his head, pulled his sucking mouth
from her flesh. ''s the matter?' His voice was tight and clogged. She
crossed her arms over her breasts, turned away frora him, into the wind.
She felt lost, out of control, as if that, inevitability was no longer
something she wanted but merely a circumstance of life she had stumbled
upon in the darkiless Fear clutched at her with icy fingers, making her
shiver. Sh(`..:. felt his hand at the crook of her elbow, knuckles
against the@, side of her sensitive breast, shook him off wordlessly. '
I done something?' She found that she could not even answer him. She
though! of Mark, cursed him because she still wanted him, fires insick,
her dying hard, anger not yet the palliative it should be, would be in
the time to come. ' -?' ' quiet,' she whispered. '.' It might help to
tell him, she suspected, but she could not She tried twice but was as
helpless as a mute. She would never, could never go back to Mark - her
heart experienced this lik an arrow through its centre - yet the old
feelings had no shrivelled, dropped off. She went to the rail, stared
out to sea. The night was chie undressed as she was, but the gently
lapping water was war The Pacific, she thought idly, was aptly named.
Like L Angeles itself, it was laid back, sleepily content to move the
changeless pattern it had grown accustomed to through 2' the long
accretion of years. Nothing would interfere just li nothing could alter
the city. It existed, sapping vitality, turni it into sunshine and smog,
palm trees and Mercs, the waftir odour of money that they all inhaled
like burning lotus lea' and, like Ulysses' crew, refused to budge
themselves ... She turned away now, towards Rubens who waited as as a
statue, watching her. She knew now what she ' dc, must abandon herself
to selfishness; it was either that or fade a like a puff of smoke into
the LA haze. He was her lifeline; oni. 48 lave her tonight, his
strength, his power seeping into d towards him, her breasts swelling,
her arms at and when she was close enough to him so that their zed, she
lifted her arms, drew his head down to hers, his lips closed over hers
that fluttering of terror that the adamantine suspicion in her depths
that his energy might consume her like a moth crisped by istible flame.
,:"breasts,' she whispered as his arms came around her. ad bent as his
hands slid around her bare sides and lifted her breasts upward towards
his opening lips. threw her head back, her long exquisite neck arched,
,@"Clids fluttering uncontrollably as she felt the tender the origin of
a fierce fireline reaching down through men and into her vagina.
Involuntarily her thighs and her mound began a frantic up and down
movement him that made him gasp. moved back and forth until her breasts
were dripping combination of saliva and sweat and her nipples seemed ,
heat threatened to overwhelm her and it seemed ible that she was
breathing oxygen; the night air had to musk.
moaned a little, fumbled with his belt. He stepped his trousers and
immediately she surrounded, him with ers, gently stroking his length,
cupping the balls He groaned, licking the cleavage between her breasts.
ds were busy between her thighs, caressing her around of her panties. at
last they were totally naked, flesh to flesh. She took her fingers and
rubbed the tip around her lips until the ite friction was too much for
her and she felt him in her palm. en they pushed together, groaning with
the velvet contact slid all the way up her. The contact seemed to go on
for filling her belly, her throat. She was on fire. Her thighs led and
her breasts shook with the racing emotions. Her began to come from way
down inside her so that her flat stomach fluttered continually
againsthim. 49 'I can't -' he managed to get out. ''m sorry - oh -@
Simultaneously, his head came forward, his lips opening to catch a
swinging breast, his hands went behind her, cupped her buttocks so that
she felt as if she were being split in two by the incalculable heat. She
heard him groan one last time and she clutched hirn to her, his lunge
drawing a gasp out of her. Her orgasm was upon her, rushing at her from
out of nowhere. She bit into the muscles of his shoulder without knowing
what she was doing, tasting the salt and the scent of him in arousal
and, at that moment, her inner muscles clamped down on him. She only
felt the beginning of his explosion as she came in every part of her,
crying out and trying to merge herself with his hard, jetting flesh.
Afterwards they dived wordlessly over the side, rolling over and over
each other and the swells of the waves, an endless threesome at home in
another element, carefree and ecstatic, touching each other from time to
time with fingertips or the flat ends of their toes faintly puckered.
Occasionally their thighs would brush and Daina would feel a residual
jolt, ike stepping on a live wire, almost too intense to bear, as if her
flesh had become so sensitized that all contact verged on the painful.
They regained the deck and Rubens led her wordlessly below, opening the
portholes and switching on low lights. There was a head, a tiny galley
with stainless-steel fittings, a dining area with a table and facing
booths that ingeniously could be converted into a double bed. Rubens
moved expertly around the galley, preparing eggs and bacon, coffee. It
was very quiet on the water and, straining, Daina now heard the soft,
elongated sounds for which she had been searching earlier in the sea,
for she could discern now the dialogue of the whales, deep and echoing
as they reverberated through the endless corridors of the Pacific. They
were not sounding, no rush of black flukes, no high jetting f expelled
water, no humped glistening backs rising from the depths to breach the
surface, to take the long breath before another dive. These were the
mysterious, haunting sounds they made in stalking the deep. 50 . face to
the porthole, feeling the soft night wind 0 she drank in the sounds, her
eyes filling with recalled the bright hot days deep in that last high
she had spent with her father before he died. were closed but the tears
seeped out and down her t the same as the sound of the whales brought
back Cod days and nights, images whirled in a child's not merely pieces
of bright glass coloured by eyes tightly shut, she could not see how her
hands ed into tight white fists, her nails dug painfully , of her Palms
but, later, she could find the the semicircular series of red weals, and
wonder at . Now, however, she wiped at her tear-blurred rown arm,
sniffed. the small cabin Rubens, occupied with the sizzling d the
precise parting of the eggshells, did not see or thing and by the time
he turned to her, proudly holding '"Itwo plates of steaming food, she
had returned to the -to whom he had, moments before, made love. 51 Two
In the endless moment just before he was shot, James Duell called out
her name. '!' The peaceful morning at the villa in the south of France
to which they had been invited for a week had been abruptly shattered by
the roar of explosives, the harsh bark of machinegun fire.
Some of the assembled guests had no idea of what the sounds heralded and
they glanced at each other in mute bewilderment. But others - James and
Heather included - like the silver-haired American secretary of state,
Bayard Thomas, were familiar with these noises and scrambled for cover.
Outside the light was harsh and bright. The villa was coming under a
brutal lightninglike frontal assault that was bringing the American and
Israeli Secret Service agents running from their assigned positions
around the grounds. Mist was rising. The high irbn gates lay twisted and
broken where the grenade explosion had tossed them. Through the gap shot
perhaps twenty figures in olive drab fatigues stripped of all markings
and insignia. For the most part they carried lightweight MP40 machine
pistols. Their faces were made grotesque and unreadable by smeared
lampblack. They were led by a tall, broad-shouldered man with a full
beard and light brown eyes. He stood calm and unshakable, waving them on
all around him. They opened fire as they ran with seemingly no regard
for their own personal safety. ' certain you kill them affl' the bearded
man roared in oddly clipped English over the chatter of the gunfire.
Secret Service men fell, twisting, riddled with bullets. One used a dead
compatriot as a shield, backing away until he was caught in a ferocious
crossfire that downed him. Another retrieved a wounded terrorist's MP40
to spray death back at them before he was shot in the face and was
pitched aside. 52 r ran in a ragged zig-zag away from the attack, A
walkie-talkie from beneath his clumsily flapping suit was shot just as
he began to speak rapidly into it. agents still alive fought back and,
here and there, ist slumped to the blood-soaked ground. But, in- the
wave of attackers advanced, killing as they the villa, James Duell
managed a quick peek through comer of a shattered front window.
"Christ Jesus,' He ducked back as a stray volley of machine-gun fire
through the opening. People scattered, screaming as stitched a line
across the wood panelling on the opposite Af the room. He turned back to
Heather. are they?' she said. 0, undoubtedly. You know what they've come
for. ' Rachel?' was in the kitchen the last time I me on!' He leaped
forward, heading out from their ry near the end of one plush sofa. Susan
Morgan, a brunette of approximately the same age as Heather, out of his
way as he raced across the living room s the open alcove and the
kitchen. es, wait - 1 ' cried. e great iron-bound wooden door to the
villa flew open. white smoke wafted in, making Heather and Susan to
cough and, with it, ten figures who spread out, ing through the living
room. In a moment, another red in, his arm around a wourided compatriot.
ryone stay very still 1' bearded man stood just inside the front door.
An MP40 e pistol was grasped in one hand. just behind him and e right
was a small, dark-complexioned man with a dour ance and eyes like a
rodent's. He carried the somewhat bulky AKM automatic rifle. On the
other side of the . man was a statuesque woman with shining black hair,
cheekbones and an Asian cast to. her eyes. She was dressed tically to
the men, carried an MP40 on her hip. t the very instant of the door's
banging inwards, James 11 had paused, turning to look and now he was
caught in 53 the open, midway between Heather's position and the
doorway to the kitchen. ',' the bearded man said, glancing around the
room at the frozen, frightened faces of Bayard Thomas, his aide, Ken
Rudd, Susan, Heather, Freddie Bock, their industrialist host, Mackinnon
and Davidson, the two English MPs, Ren6 Louch, the French ambassador to
the United States, and Michel Emouleur, his very young-looking attach6.
