Bones of Paris by Laurie R. King

Author:Laurie R. King [King, Laurie R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345531773
Publisher: Random House Digital
Published: 2013-09-09T22:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-TWO

IT WAS NEVER too early for a drink in Paris, although the tables were mostly empty. He pulled out a chair for Sarah well away from the only other customers, an elderly couple with matching glasses of wine and a tiny quivering dog on the woman’s lap. When they had ordered, he offered Sarah his silver case, and lit their cigarettes.

She closed her eyes and tipped her face to the sun.

The contrast with Nancy Berger’s gesture three days earlier was striking—Sarah Grey wasn’t about to give a public moan of pleasure—but more than contrast, Stuyvesant was hit by a memory. The first time he’d seen Sarah was also in sunlight, the bright spring sunshine of an English garden in bloom: pale hair blazing, a tilt of mischief to her head, laughter in her eyes. A sight guaranteed to lift a man’s heart. Even a man not already inclined towards small, curvy, golden-haired women.

“So, Harris, what have you been up to all this time?”

Waiting for you. “Like I said, doing odd jobs for odd people. Right now I’m looking for Pip Crosby.”

“Without much success.”

“Unfortunately. Although at least it brought me to you.”

The feeble joke made her turn away from the sun; made her sit forward to scrape cigarette ash into the little tray. Made her raise her defenses against him.

He’d known since he saw her at Bricktop’s on Wednesday. He’d seen it last night, and it had been standing in front of him for the past hour. No, be honest: it had been in front of him for three years, in Sarah’s absence and Bennett’s silence.

This was not the sunlit young woman he’d fallen in love with. That Sarah was gone.

The Sarah Grey before him was someone else entirely, her personality as radically transformed as her poor body. He’d tried—he was still trying, like mad—to cling to that vision of Sarah, the shining, carefree, blaze of a girl; trying to look past the thin face and guarded eyes to the exuberance that had captured his soul.

And he failed.

Because her eyes? He’d seen that look before, in soldiers coming back from the Front; in the victims of violence; in those whose trust had been betrayed.

Sarah Grey had walked through dark places, alone. A part of her would forever remain in darkness.

Oh, God. If he’d moved faster, in April 1926. Just a little faster …

“Harris, you look unhappy. What’s wrong?”

He studied her face, and saw both fear of what he was going to say, and the determination to let him say it. Courage like that took a man’s heart and wrung it out.

So he smiled, and he lied. “There’s nothing wrong, honey. I just was thinking, I feel like I ought to introduce myself.”

Whatever she saw in his face gave her pause. After a moment, she set her defenses aside along with her cigarette, to extend her hand across the table.

“How d’you do,” she said in a posh accent. “My name is Sarah Grey.”

At the touch of her, that warm little paw in his, feelings threatened to spill back, but he forced them down.

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