[Barbara Samuel] Night of Fire(Book4You) by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

seven."
    "Too serious. Big eyes."
    She nodded. "I liked to stand like this, right on the edge of the water, and imagine I was at the edge of the world. I tried to see those lands— what sounds they would have and what the people would wear and what strange creatures I would see."
    "What did you imagine?"
    "Elephants. India. Spices and glitter." She smiled.
    "Yes, that seems right." He reached down and snared a pretty pink shell, holding it out to her in his wet hand. "No pretty rocks and bangles?"
    "Oh, yes. I had many. Boxes full of them." She examined the spiral shape of the shell, and as if he were a ghost within the shell, her father appeared in her mind, not as he had been in his last, consumptive days, but as he had been then, when she was small. "My father used to bring them to me specially. We catalogued them together."
    "He was a scientist, then?"
    "Not really, only concerned for me. The others, my siblings, paired off, you know. The three oldest, then the two baby girls, and my cousin with Phoebe, who is just younger than me. No one enjoyed the same things I did."
    "Were you lonely?" Wind tossed his hair in his eyes and he shook it free.
    "Not at all." Around them the sea rushed and rustled, eternal and somehow reassuring. "I enjoyed my own company, but he worried that I spent so much time alone."
    "And he took time with you." A prompt, and an obvious one, but she gave him a brilliant smile for it, touched. What a good listener he was.
    "Yes. He did. He took time for all of us, really. He was a very indulgent father."
    "Is it from him you get your red hair?" He touched it idly. Casually.
    "No one knows where I get this hair. I'm the only one." She tucked the shell into her palm and looked down again at her feet. "No, he was an ordinary looking man, in many ways."
    "And you are not."
    She chuckled. "That was rather vain, wasn't it? He had beautiful blue eyes, and a wonderful laugh.
    Women always loved him because he was good to his children. He was good to women, too, I suppose."
    "I wish my mother had found such a man." He tossed a rock into the sea.
    "So do I," she said, and he turned back to her, his hair blowing on the wind into his face, his sleeves rippling, his legs in water to his knees. Behind him, the sky cast a backdrop of vivid blue. For a long dangerous moment, it seemed that they might kiss, but the sound of a dog barking interrupted. They turned together to look for it.
    It was a brown and white creature, with ragged fur and an exuberant nature. It carried a stick in its mouth and brought it hopefully to them. Gladly distracted, they played and ran with the mutt, splashing in the water, dancing in the surf, laughing and crying out jokes and warnings.
    At last, pleasantly spent, Cassandra collapsed in the sand and begged for the cheese and wine he had brought. While he fetched it, the dog came and fell down beside her, panting cheerfully as she stroked his ears. She had not been so relaxed, so at ease with herself and her surroundings, in a very long time.
    Maybe even since those long-ago days in Martinique.
    "I love the outdoors," she said. "I always forget how it makes me feel."
    Basilio collapsed beside her, dropping the saddlebag without ceremony. "So do I." He tipped up his face to the sun, closing his eyes. "The world as God made it."
    "Yes." His hair lured her, and that flush on his cheeks. She itched to touch the arch of his foot, and the chest she could glimpse at the opening of his shirt. Touch him. Kiss him. Lie with him, her Basilio, who was so unexpectedly beautiful— and so much more besides.
    Man as God had made him.
    Torture, Basilio thought. From the moment Cassandra had appeared this morning on her balcony, her hair loose and brilliant, her body clothed in only that whisper of gauze , the day had been torture. When he'd come upon her standing in the courtyard, her arms flung back, her breasts uplifted and delectably natural in their shape, she had stolen his breath. Laughing as they