Angel by Colleen McCullough Read Free Book Online Page B

did it. I doubled my right hand into a fist and whacked him a beauty on the left eye. As he staggeredI do pack a punch, the Bros made sure of that-I saw a newcomer over his shoulder, and gave David a shove off the step down onto the path. I looked, I hoped for the benefit of the newcomer, like a particularly dangerous Amazon. Caught in a ridiculous situation by a stranger, David scuttled out the front gate and bolted down Victoria Street as if the Hound of the Baskervilles was after him.
    Which left the newcomer and I to look each other over. Even given the fact that I was on the step and he on the path below it, I picked him as barely five foot six. Nuggety, though, standing lightly balanced on his toes like a boxer, his reddish-brown eyes gleaming at me wickedly. Nice straight nose, good cheekbones, a mop of auburn curls trimmed into discipline, straight black brows and thick black lashes. Very attractive!
    “Are you coming in, or are you just going to stand there and decorate the path?” I asked coldly.
    “I’m coming in,” he said, but made no move to do so. He was too busy looking at me. A peculiar look, now that the wickedness was dying out of his eyes-detached, fascinated in an unemotional way. For all the world like a physician assessing a patient, though if he was a physician, I’d eat David’s Akubra town hat. “Are you double-jointed?” he asked.
    I said no.
    “That’s a pity. I could have put you in some grouse poses. There’s not much meat on you and what there is looks sporty, but you’ve got very seductive breasts. They belong to your body rather than a bra manufacturer.” He hopped up the step as he said this, then waited for me to precede him inside.
    “You have to be the artist in the garret,” I said.
    “Dead on the knocker. Toby Evans. And you must be the new girl in the back ground floor flat.”
    “Dead on the knocker. Harriet Purcell.”
    “Come upstairs and have a coffee, you must need one after the wallop you gave that poor silly coot outside. He’s going to have a shiner for a month,” he said.
    I followed him up two flights of stairs to a landing which had a huge female symbol on one of its doors (Jim and Sob, undoubtedly) and an alpine view on the other (Klaus Muller, undoubtedly). Access to the garret was up a sturdy ladder. Toby went first, and as soon as I’d climbed onto firm ground he pulled a rope which plucked the ladder off the floor below, folded it against the ceiling.
    “Oh, that’s terrific,” I said, staring about in amazement. “You can pull up the drawbridge and withstand a siege.”
    I was in an enormous dormered room with two alcoved windows at its back and two more at its front, where the ceiling sloped. The whole place was painted stark white and looked as sterile as an operating theatre.
    Not a pin out of place, not a smear or a stain, not a speck of dust or even the outline of a dried-up raindrop on the window panes. Because it was an attic, the windows had seats with white corduroy cushions on them. The paintings were turned with their faces to the wall in a white-painted rack and there was a big professional easel (painted white), a dais with a white chair on it and a little white chest of drawers beside the easel. That was the business area. For leisure he had two easy chairs covered in white corduroy, white bookshelves with every book rigidly straight, a white hospital screen around his kitchen nook, a square white table and two white wooden chairs. Even the floor had been painted white! Not a mark on it either. His lights were white fluorescent. The only touch of colour was a grey army blanket on his double bed.
    Since he’d got personal first with that bit about my breasts-the cheek!-I said exactly what I was thinking. “My God, you must be obsessional! I’ll bet when you squeeze the paint out of a tube, you do it from the bottom, then carefully bend the empty bit over and make sure it’s perfectly squared.”
    He grinned and cocked his head