Seductress by D. L. King

Author:D. L. King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cleis Press
Published: 2012-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

THE GIRL ON THE EGYPTIAN ESCALATOR

NJ Streitberger

Spencer could hear her from the top of the escalator. Having spent a frustrating hour trawling the china and glass department for a glass bowl to replace the one that had recently been sent to punchbowl heaven, he was irritated, tired and somewhat in need of a drink.

It was his own fault. Sale season was rarely conducive to effective decision-making and he regretted entering the building almost as much as smashing Laura’s bowl.

He had encountered Laura at a charity ball held at the Natural History Museum a year earlier. She had been accompanied by an American hedge-fund manager whose swarthy appearance and pit-bull aggression had seemed entirely out of keeping with the pale, willowy blonde draped languidly on his arm. Spencer had been in a party of colleagues from the bank who were some of the charity’s biggest patrons and had found himself sitting next to her during the lavish dinner. Her companion, whom Spencer had immediately dubbed “the Neanderthal,” had eaten little, perspired a lot and absented himself from the table more times than was strictly necessary, leaving Laura alone with a wobbly, apologetic smile and an unspoken but evident entreaty to be rescued.

Spencer had done the honorable thing and seduced her. When she had taken him home to meet Mummy and Daddy he detected less a sense of approval than relief at the fact that he was Anglo-Saxon, British born and had decent prospects in a more respectable branch of the much-maligned world of high finance.

Consequently, he had felt himself evolving into the kind of man that his relentlessly middle-class mother had always wondered why he couldn’t be more like. He had even adopted their way of referring to their local store as the “corner shop” run by that “loathsome little rug merchant.”

Now this. A frustrating, panic-induced trip to the “rug-merchant’s corner shop.” He had just managed to secure a place on the top step, having narrowly escaped castration on one of the poles placed strategically for that very purpose at the head of each escalator, after a double-wide American woman had tailgated him like a Mack truck, when her voice scoured his ears.

“What are you thinking of? You are a complete loser! I don’t know why I bother. You’re a total waste of space. How can you be so fucking stupid all the time?”

Intrigued in spite of himself, he stared down at the ascending escalator, trying to find the creature responsible and the poor sap to whom the torrent of abuse was directed. Finally, after peering past swarthy men in designer stubble and bottle-blonde broomsticks, he saw her.

Uh-oh.

She was standing on the step above her victim, with her back toward him. He could see the wild, raven hair, tossing around as she spewed her verbal venom without surcease, her shoulder blades tensing and shifting beneath her skintight jacket like a wild animal struggling to escape a net. He watched as her hands gesticulated wildly, taking in the crowded escalator like the audience in a packed theater.

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