The Nicholas Linnear Novels by Eric Van Lustbader Read Free Book Online Page A

it again, at least the Japan he had left twelve years ago. For him there was no more Japan; it was but a withered flower—calling him still like a siren of the sea.
    Nicholas awoke just before dawn. For just a moment, he was quite convinced that he was in his old house on the outskirts of Tokyo, the Zen garden, the oblique shadows on the wall by his head made by the stand of tall rustling bamboo. He heard a cuckoo’s brief call, the rush of the morning’s traffic into the city, muffled, funneled and yet magnified by the distance and the peculiar acoustics of the topography.
    He turned his head, still half asleep, saw a female form asleep beside him. Yukio. She had come back after all, he thought. He had known she would. But now to actually have her here beside him—
    He sat up abruptly, his heart racing. A runic chanting, as if from far away across the distance of a sea, abruptly metamorphosed into the drifting crash of the surf, coming clear to him through the open window, the cry of the gulls. Still he knew the meaning of that arcane chanting….
    He took several deep breaths. Japan clung to him now like a fine gauzy veil, enmeshing him. What had recalled it to him so intensely?
    He looked around, saw the tip of Justine’s nose and her soft sensual lips, partly opened as she breathed, the only parts of her not covered by the sheet, blue and white and gray, rippling like the sea. She slept deeply now within its heaving bosom.
    What is it about her, he wondered, that pulls me like a current? Oddly, he felt adrift upon the tides. Watching her, the soft rise and fall of her warm body, he knew that he was being drawn back to Japan, into the past where he dared not tread….
    An unutterably delicious sensation woke him. He opened his eyes to find her thighs close to his face. He inhaled her musk, realized her lips were around him. Her tongue licked softly, lasciviously, and he groaned. He reached out to touch her but her thighs moved away. He watched, instead, the movement of her mount, tracing with his eyes the highly arched configuration, deeply bisected at its base, the soft curling hair glistening moistly down the center, her flesh as tumescent as his, an arrow of delight.
    The pleasure ribboned out before him, a highway endlessly extended. Each time he was on the verge of coming, she used her hands on him, lifted her mouth away, encircling the base until the anticipatory spasms subsided. Then she would resume and the crescendo would begin again, over and over until his legs shook and his heart pounded and he felt as if he were burning with a fever, pleasure pooling and radiating at the same time, leaden with the amount of it running through his pelvis and genitals.
    He became aware of her breasts swaying against his belly and he reached down, cupping them, rubbing the nipples until, involuntarily, her thighs opened, rushing toward him.
    Every touch was now so exquisite that he felt muscles jumping all over his body at each contact. She did something to the head of his penis and he cried out, moving. He clutched at her breasts and she slid up so that his shaft squeezed between them. He buried his face in the crevasse between her thighs, opening his mouth as far as he could as he shot and shot and shot.
    Vincent Ito arrived at the Medical Examiner’s office on First Avenue at Thirtieth Street at four minutes to eight in the morning. As he pushed through the plate-glass door at the top of the short flight of stairs, he nodded to the uniformed cop on duty and said hello to snowy-haired Tommy, Nate Graumann’s chauffeur. As he entered Room 134, he knew he had just enough time to grab a cup of coffee before the morning meeting began.
    He turned right through the short hall and into the Chief Medical Examiner’s large, crowded office.
    Nate Graumann, New York City’s Chief Medical Examiner, was a mountain of a man. His eyes were slitted, black and glossy, half hidden within semicircular folds of loose skin, somewhat paler