Blackbone by George Simpson, Neal Burger Read Free Book Online

nothing. The only purpose I serve in your life is to run your goddamned errands and squire you around. You’re using me!”
    She stayed at the door. “Warren, you want too much.”
    “Too much? All I want is a sign that you care!”
    She watched him a long moment then said quietly, “I’ve never encouraged you.”
    He sank deeper into the sofa. The anger flowed out of him, replaced by defeat. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s right. You never have. Oh, God, you’re a cold one. You knew this would happen, that you could just frost me and frost me and sooner or later I would complain, and then you could wriggle right out of it by saying, Sorry, Warren, old asshole, I never fucking encouraged you! And, by God, you never did. You certainly never did.”
    Loring moved away from the door. “I’ll make some coffee.”
    “No!” Warren rolled over. His legs hit the floor and with effort he pulled himself up. He reeled from dizziness and dropped back again. “Okay. Go ahead. Make it. It’s the least you can do for me.”
    Loring went to the kitchen, resisting an impulse to pick up a rolling pin and beat some sense into him. She put water up to boil then touched her cheeks. They were burning. Why should she be embarrassed, or feel guilty? She was only telling him the truth. She had never encouraged him. Simple as that. And he knew it, too, or he wouldn’t be so angry. The sleeping dog wakes. But he knew something, or he would never have had the courage to come here, even drunk, and pull this nonsense. She went back into the living room, flashing a smile. He was still on the sofa, watching her balefully.
    She could blame her mother for this. She had wanted to get rid of Warren after the first date, but Mother had begged her not to be hasty. Mother, the professional club woman and would-be marriage broker. She had successfully found husbands for seven young ladies from the better New Haven families, but she had failed miserably with her own daughter, who had rebelled from the time she could spell the word. Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe hadn’t been good enough for Loring, even though her father—a Wall Street securities specialist whose portfolio remained fat no matter what the political climate—could afford to send his daughter to the top school in the world. Instead, she had picked plain old Columbia University in New York City. And not to study home economics, either. Entirely on her own and with no encouragement at home, Loring had managed to turn herself into a professional archaeologist. And it utterly burned her parents’ collective egos that she chose to soil her hands with field work. They would rather see her stashed away in a Park Avenue town house with good old Warren Clark, leading a life they could understand and at least partially control.
    More than ever, Loring was convinced she could never let that happen. Besides, Warren did nothing for her sexually. Oh, he wanted it all right. The poor fool was beside himself with unresolved sexual tension. But he awakened nothing inside Loring, not even the remotest stir.
    Especially not like this, when his courage—what there was of it—came from a bottle.
    The kettle whistled. She returned to the kitchen, made the coffee strong and black, and brought him a large cup. She helped him sit up and got him to drink some of it.
    When he was beginning to think more of his throbbing head than his rage at her, she sat down on the floor in front of him and waited.
    For a long time, he wouldn’t look at her. Then his eyes slid to her face, and some of the fight went out of him.
    “What did Charlie Hemphill say?” she asked.
    Warren ran a hand through his hair. “He wanted to know why I wanted to know, so I made up some bullshit about State Department business, hush-hush, connection with the museum, and then I mentioned your shipment. He had the cargo manifest as cabled from Liverpool, and we found it on there with no trouble. One crate shipped from the British Museum,