A Twist of the Knife by Peter James Read Free Book Online Page B

brown hairs, thick and downy, on his chest and on his legs, and she liked that. Trevor was white and bony, and his body was almost hairless. This man was tanned, lean, fit.
    Hans.
    He looked wild, like a young Jack Nicholson, his hair thinning on the top. He looked just the way he had sounded on the Internet chat room when she had first been attracted to him.
    Feral.
    The background to the photograph was strange. An enclosed, windowless space that might be the engine room of a ship, although she had a pretty good idea what it really was. Like everything about him, it excited her. Shiny, floor-to-ceiling metal casings, beige coloured, with dials, gauges, switches, levers, knobs, winking lights. It could be some kind of control room in a nuclear reactor? Or a mission control centre?
    She felt on a mission very much under control!
    Who had taken that photograph, she wondered? A lover? Had he taken it himself with a time delay function? She didn’t care, she wanted him. All of him. Wanted that thing that half-dangled, half-rose. Wanted to gather it deep inside her again. Wanted him so badly she was crazed with lust. Mosquitoes got crazed with blood lust. They had to land, take in the blood, even if it killed them. She had to have Hans, take him into her, into her body, into her life, even if that killed her, too.
    She didn’t care. For now she was free. She had been free for two whole days and that was longer than she had been free for years.
    Over the scratchy reception of the car’s radio, struggling through the occasional interference of someone talking in German, Bob Dylan was singing ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’
.
    They were. They really were! Flecks of sleet struck the windscreen, and the wipers cleared them. It was cold outside and that was good. It was good to make love in the warmth when it was cold outside. And, besides, the cold had plenty of other advantages.
    I will never let you go
, Trevor had said.
Never. Ever
. He had told her that for years.
    Hans explained to her precisely what he was going to do to her. Exactly how he would make love to her the first time. And he had done so just the way he had described. She liked that Germanic precision. The way he had studied every detail of her photograph. The way he already knew her body when they met. The way he told her he loved her hair, and had buried his face into it. Into all of it.
    My name is Hans. I am thirty-seven, divorced, looking to start a new life with a lady of similar age. I am liking brunettes. Slim. Excuse my bad English. I like you. I don’t know you, but I like you.
    I like you even more!
    She would be forty this year. Hans would be her toyboy, she had teased him. He had laughed and she liked that; he had a big sense of humour. A wicked sense of humour.
    Everything about him was totally wicked.
    She looked OK, she knew. She’d never been a beauty, but she understood how to make herself look attractive, sexy. Dressed to kill, plenty of men would look at her. She used to keep in shape with her twice-weekly aerobics classes, then, when Trevor had gone through one of his particularly nasty phases, she had turned to binge eating – and then binge drinking – for comfort. Then she enrolled in WeightWatchers, and the fat and the flab and the cellulite had come off again. Her figure was good, her stomach firm – not a distended pouch, like the stomachs of some of her friends who’d had children. And her boobs were still firm, still defying gravity. She’d like to have been a little taller – she’d always wished that – but you couldn’t have everything.
    Anyhow, Trevor, who was much taller than her, told her the very first time they had made love that people were all the same size in bed. That had made her smile.
    Trevor used to tell her that nothing you do in life is ever wasted. He was always coming up with sayings, and there was a time when Janet had listened to them intently, adored hearing them, filed them away in her memory and