Shakespeare's Trollop - [Lily Bard 04] by Charlaine Harris

Author:Charlaine Harris [Harris, Charlaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-12-27T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

I was sickened by the world and the people in it, most of all by myself. I did something I hadn’t done in years. I went home and went to bed without bathing or eating. I just stripped, brushed my teeth, pulled on a nightgown, and slid between my clean sheets.

The next thing I knew, I was peering at the bright numbers on the digital clock next to the bed. It was seven minutes after three. I wondered why I was awake.

Then I knew there was someone in the room with me.

My heart began that terrible pounding, but through its rhythm I heard the sounds of clothing being removed, the zipper of a gym bag, and it came to me that I was not attacking the intruder because on some level I had already recognized who was in my bedroom.

“Jack?”

“Lily,” he said, and slid under the covers with me. “I took an earlier flight.”

My heart slowed down a little, to a rhythm that had more to do with another kind of excitement.

The smell of him, his skin and hair and deodorant and cologne and clothes, the combination of scents that said Jack filled my senses. I’d planned on making him wait to come down to Shakespeare, wait until I’d talked to him, told him I’d been unfaithful to him—sort of—so he could decide without seeing me whether or not to leave me for good. But in the private dark of my room, and because Jack was as necessary to me as water, I reached behind his head, my fingers clumsy with sleep, and worked the elastic band off his ponytail. I ran my fingers through his hair, dark and thick, separating it.

“Jack,” I said, my voice sad to my own ears, “I have some things to tell you.”

“Not now, okay?” he murmured in my ear. “Let me just. . . just let me . . . okay?”

His hands moved purposefully. I will say this for us; we put each other under a spell in bed together. Our troubled pasts and our uncertain future had no place in that bed.

Later, in the darkness, my fingers traced the muscles and skin and bones I knew so well. Jack is strong and scarred, like me, but his is visible all the time, a single thin puckered line running from the hairline by his right eye down to his jaw. Jack used to be a policeman; he used to be married; and he used to smoke and drink too much, too often.

I started to ask him how his case, the one that had taken him to California, was going; I thought of asking him how his friends Roy Costimiglia and Elizabeth Fry (also Little Rock private detectives) were doing. But all that really mattered was that Jack was here now.

I drifted off to sleep, Jack’s breathing even and deep by my side. At eight, I woke up to the smell of coffee perking in the kitchen. Across the hall I could see the bathroom door opening, and Jack stepped out in his blue jeans and nothing else.

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