A Touch of Heaven by Portia Da Costa Read Free Book Online Page B

anal groove, hot and teasing.
    Time doesn’t pass the way it normally would. Breaths take an hour to draw in. The circle of his finger around my clit seems to last a day. When I have an orgasm, the pleasure builds over what seems like a millennium, intensity spiraling and soaring as do we, swooping and rolling as if we were diving through waves of bliss.
    “I love you,” I sob as all goes soft and dark.
    Just as we’re extinguished, Patrick answers, “I love you too.”
     
    I wake a while later to gilded twilight, the dying sun creating a skyscape that echoes my dream. If that’s what it was.
    My body feels heavy, replete with pleasure. As if I really did swoop and fly with Patrick, turning and barrel-rolling into ecstasy. It’s hard to sit up, as if I’m pinned to the mattress by complete relaxation, but I manage to haul myself up, gritting my teeth at a few little twinges as I straighten.
    We’re supposed to be having a talk. Did I say I’d go over and see him, or did he say he’d come here? I can’t remember. I only know I want to see him. I want to know . I want to hear whatever he has to say. Although after that strange dream, I’m not sure what I believe.
    Yesterday, I could swear I saw wings. And just now, I can almost imagine I felt them too.
    But they’re not there now, even though Patrick is.
    What on earth is he doing? He’s on his knees, beneath the tree in the garden next door, head bowed. Crikey, is he praying ?
    Suspicion and cynicism flare, even though I’m disappointed in myself for it. But still, I wonder if he knows I’m here, and the penitent posture is an act.
    He looks hazy and indistinct in the golden evening light, his hair gleaming where the last rays of the sinking sun dapple upon his bowed head through the gaps between the leaves and the branches.
    You’re a strange man, Patrick. A very strange man indeed. That is if you are a man at all.
    As if he’s heard my thought, he looks up. He doesn’t smile, but gives me a strange, complex look. Then he closes his eyes, nods and makes a little pass with his hand as if he’s crossing himself. A heartbeat later, he’s on his feet, brushing the dust from the knees of his trousers and then tugging his waistcoat back into place.
    As he walks in my direction, skipping over the little hedge, I imagine how his naked body looks, and how it felt in my dream.
    He can’t be an angel. I don’t think they even exist. And even if they do, why would one be prancing around my next door neighbor’s house and garden, apparently with nothing to do but chat up middle-aged women and romance them and make free with them?
    That’s not what angels do, is it?
    He swoops up the wrought iron stairs as if wing-assisted, and when I make as if to stand up, he sinks gracefully down onto the mattress with me. But down at the bottom, keeping a safe distance of propriety between us.
    “I still don’t quite believe you are what you say you are.” No use beating about the bush, eh? “I’m not a religious person. Although I sort of believe in some greater power for good. Angels have always been a metaphorical concept for me, not an actual…um…thing.”
    He’s sitting cross-legged, and he props his elbows on his knees and steeples his fingertips. “Well, yes, I get that. It’s a perfectly reasonable belief system.” He shrugs and quirks his plush, gorgeous mouth in a way that’s far from innocently pure. Well, at least that’s the way it looks to me. “But by the same token, I can’t deny the truth of what I am.”
    “But how on earth can you be here? I mean, shouldn’t you be up there…um…glorifying or something?” I’m talking about the incomprehensible, the unbelievable, matters of faith. And I don’t think I’m really qualified to do so. “What are you doing just hanging about here, sunbathing and eating junk food and reading romantic novels?” Not to mention giving pleasure to needy, sex-starved divorcees?
    “Well, we get sent on