Now You See Her by Joy Fielding Read Free Book Online Page B

a better idea,” she said.

FIVE
    H ER SISTER WAS RIGHT about one thing, Marcy thought, sitting up in bed and gazing through the darkness at the man snoring softly beside her: Sex was like riding a bicycle. Once you knew how to do it, you never really forgot the mechanics, no matter how long it had been since the last time you did it. And it didn’t matter what kind of bike it was or how many speeds it had or how many embellishments had been added, the basic operating premise remained the same: You mounted; you worked the pedals; you got off.
    And her sister would know. As Judith herself admitted, she’d ridden a lot of bicycles.
    Marcy climbed out of bed and walked to the window overlooking Fleet Street. It was quiet, although surprisingly, even at almost two in the morning, there were still people out walking.The trendy area of Temple Bar never really shut down, according to Vic, who’d pointed out several scantily dressed fashion models draped like fur stoles around the shoulders of some music industry bigwigs at the boutique hotel’s crowded bar.
    They’d gone to his room at her suggestion.
    “Are you sure?” he’d asked when they first entered the elegantly underfurnished lobby of his hotel.
    “I’m sure.”
    They’d undressed each other quickly and expertly, made love easily and effortlessly. And repeatedly, she thought now, feeling the pleasant soreness between her legs. When was the last time she and Peter had made love more than once in a single night? Not in at least a decade, she thought, then immediately amended that to two decades.
    She grabbed her blouse off a nearby chair and wrapped it around her, the soft cotton teasing her nipple, mimicking Vic’s earlier touch. At first she thought it would be strange to have another man’s hands exploring her so intimately. After almost a quarter of a century of being with the same man, she was used to a certain way of doing things, a clearly defined order of what went where and when and for how long. She and Peter had long ago fallen into a familiar rhythm—satisfying and pleasant, if no longer terribly exciting. But good nonetheless, she’d always thought. Dependable. Reliable.
    She’d had no desire to change things.
    And then Devon had paddled her canoe into the middle of Georgian Bay one brilliant October morning—the air cold, the dying leaves a miraculous succession of red, orange, and gold—and nothing was ever the same again.
    Marcy shook thoughts of Devon from her head and looked around the room, which was sparsely decorated in various neutral shades: cream-colored walls, crisp white bedspreads, lightbeechwood furniture. The only real color came from several exuberant paintings by Irish artists, one on the far wall, another over the bed. The effect was at once understated and luxurious, a heady mix of old-school restraint and modern decadence.
    Rather like the man lying on his back in the middle of the queen-size bed, a white sheet wrapped lazily around his still-slender torso, Marcy thought, watching the steady rise and fall of Vic’s chest as he slept. She’d always liked a man with hair on his chest, had never really understood what today’s women found attractive about someone who’d been shaved and waxed to within an inch of his life. Hairy chests were like English gardens, unruly and vaguely chaotic, yet strong and stubbornly resilient. There was just something so reassuringly grown-up about a hairy chest, she thought, returning to the bed and perching on its edge.
    But then there were all sorts of areas where she and other women parted company on what constituted sex appeal. For one thing, she wasn’t overly fond of muscles. A well-defined pair of biceps tended to make her more anxious than aroused. As did men in uniforms of any kind, including the mailman.
You’re worse than my poodle
, Judith had once said, chastising her. And how many women could say they actually enjoyed the sound of a man snoring? How many found such a sound not