Blood Rules by John Trenhaile Read Free Book Online

breaths in an effort to absorb Leila through her scent. And from the way his jeans had grown tight at the crotch …
    She was looking at him too; not directly, not even often, but enough to let him see she was interested. Colin should have felt happy. He didn’t. He never knew what to do in these situations, which in any case had been few and far between for him. Did she want him to make a move? But how, with Mark in the back seat?
    Say something.
    What?
    Anything.
    “Where can I drop you?” he faltered. “I mean … oh, God, it sounds so silly, driving your car.”
    She laughed, a laugh with no shadows or reservations, and he shivered. “I want to go to the Randolph.” “The hotel?”
    “Yes. My brother’s arriving today; he’s got to know about what happened this afternoon.”
    “You’ll tell the police, of course?”
    “My brother will decide everything.”
    He felt disappointed in her. To let a man make up her mind for her, so … so … well, yes,
nice
—as long as you could be that man.
    Conversation languished. He glanced at his watch. At this rate, it would take no more than fifteen minutes to reach the Randolph Hotel. Then goodbye.
    He felt very strange. All his limbs seemed light. His vision was amazingly clear; he could hear every rustle of her clothes as she shifted position. She was wearing her severe look now, an expression suggestive of self-containment, hard work, proper self-esteem. It grew upon him with frightening intensity that this girl was
right.
The person he’d been waiting for all his life. The one.
    The cleanness of the perception was what astonished him most. There were no fuzzy edges to it. Not a single “but” marred the smooth surface of what he suddenly knew to be his rapturous love for Leila Hanif.
    Later he would tell people, “As the lights changed and I turned out of Cornmarket, I fell in love for the first time.”
    As the lights changed and he turned out of Cornmarket, he burst into peals of laughter, but when Leila asked what was funny he shook his head and replied, “Nothing.”
    It was because he’d fallen in love with a smell that he laughed.
    Mark Stamford left them at the hotel, muttering something about a stiff drink. But then Mark did not have the restorative power of love to help him. Colin and Leila stood beside the car in silence. He found himself smiling; that was because she had smiled first.
    She reached for his hand and shook it. “I haven’t thanked you properly,” she said. But her grave tone contrasted with the manner of her handshake; she was flicking his own hand up and down as if they were children at play. He read her eyes. They were brown, he discovered: dark, but shining as if with newly coated varnish, and now those premature laughter lines cut deeply into her face.
    “You should thank Mark too,” he said, remembering that Mark was no longer there.
    “No,” she replied. “I shouldn’t.” Before Colin could question that, she went on. “Come and meet my brother. You’ll like him.”
    Colin and Leila were shown up to a suite. The door opened to reveal the back view of a tall man wearing a dark coffee-hued jacket over pale slacks. He had the phone receiver to his ear and was carrying the other half of the instrument in his left hand. Hearing them enter, he swung around. He clapped eyes on Leila first and his face lit up; then he saw she was not alone and the expression of malice he turned on Colin was enough to make the young man shiver.
    “My brother, Halib.”
    Halib snapped a few final words of Arabic and reconnected the two parts of the telephone, dropping it onto a nearby table from a height.
    “Halib, I want you to be friends with Colin Raleigh. He helped me this afternoon. I mean,
really
helped me.”
    For a moment, Halib’s expression did not soften. Then, quite suddenly, his face broke into a beam and he came forward to embrace Colin, kissing him on both cheeks.
    “My very, very dear friend, it is impossible for me to know