Splendor: A Luxe Novel by Anna Godbersen Read Free Book Online Page B

she was, and apparently all his politeness had not yet been rubbed off by his colleagues, because he could scarcely look her in the eye.
    She gave the boy an appreciative wink before turning to fetch a bottle from the icebox. Winking had become a kind of flirtatious compulsion with her, and as she reached into the cool darkness, she decided she was going to have to cure herself of it before she found Henry. When she turned back around, the boy was gone—as far as she was concerned, anyway. He had become as invisible to her as the rest of the bar.
    Diana’s mouth dropped open and a wild energy played in her chest. She had forgotten all the tasks that constituted her job, or how to perform them. The only man in the entire bar that she could now make out was darker than when she’d last seen him, and his skin looked especially tawny against the collar of his white linen shirt. The bridge of his nose was a color that suggested he had been out in the sun that day, and the expression disappearing from his face indicated that moments ago he had been having a careless good time.
    “Hello, soldier,” she managed at last, with what she could gather of her breath.
    “Diana?” Henry said, as though the sound of her name might confirm her unlikely presence in front of him. “How—” he stammered, “how did you come here?”
    “I was looking for you.” All the sentences she’d imagined saying to him since that day at the end of February, when he’d entered a doorway and seen her wrapped up in another man, had escaped her. The only sentence she could think of was the one she’d just uttered, and it seemed to her, at that moment, to contain the only relevant information.
    “You were?”
    “Yes.”
    “I mean—you got my letter?”
    Diana nodded. She had received it indeed. The pages were sewn into her suitcase; she had read them a hundred times.
    “You don’t hate me?”
    There was no gesture that could have communicated how far her feelings were from hatred, but she shook her head in a kind of attempt anyway. Whatever emotion she was experiencing—was it shyness, or trepidation?—was new for her, and she was a little surprised at herself for being unsure in front of Henry after everything that had happened between them, and all she had done to bring this moment about. He was staring at her with those inscrutable black eyes. Her heart had begun to tick with the fear that their meeting was almost over, that her quest would end here with both of them tongue-tied. After all, he was older than she, and more experienced, and perhaps now that he was a soldier, and not just a rich playboy with nothing else to do, he no longer had time for little girls.
    The touch of Señora Conrad’s thick fingertips on her shoulder shocked Diana back to the present. The file://C:\Documents and Settings\nickunj\Desktop\book.html 10/28/2009

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    room was still full of people, noisily talking up the working girls or clambering toward the bar and banging their glasses against its worn surface. She glanced at them, at the row of faces red with joy, and then back at Diana. A surprised and knowing light shone in Señora Conrad’s eyes, and after a watchful pause she drew her young employee away from her post by the elbow.
    “Come.” The lady gestured to Henry. Then she led them to the rear of her establishment, opened the door to the storeroom, and pushed one and then the other inside.
    The room was lined with crates, and the closed door protected Diana and Henry, if just barely, from the racket of an advancing evening. Both were bathed in the honeyed light of a single bulb muted with paper.
    Diana turned her chin up toward Henry, expecting a kiss, but for a while he could only manage a few disbelieving blinks. Relief, along with a kind of euphoria, had begun to seep into her chest, although Henry’s presence had not yet begun to seem real. He stepped forward, and she parted her lips, but he did not put his mouth to hers. Instead