Blood Rules Read Online Free PDF Page B

while, as they continued to force a path through the weeds. “There’s a bit of cash, thanks to Father’s will and so on. Nothing much.” He glanced sideways at his companion. “No rich wife in the offing.”
    Mark laughed. He’d just become engaged to the girl he’d fallen in love with during his first week at Magdalen; her father owned casinos, a ceramics factory, and much else; soon, Colin thought privately, he would own Mark Stamford.
    “You’re priceless,” Mark said, still laughing. “You’d find life easier if you’d only stop fooling around and find the right person.”
    “I’ll take your word for it. There’s a place near here where we can get some tea…. ”
    When Colin deviated left, plunging into the meadow, Mark followed blindly, trusting his friend even though here the grass was chest high. On the other side of the copse that fringed the field lay an overgrown space, half public and half private, by the look of it; two overflowing litter bins suggested that Oxford City Council had a not very effective say in what happened here, but the single narrow outlet to the highway was blocked by a couple of oil drums and two logs laid to form an elongated X.
    “No girl’s good enough for you, that’s the problem,” Mark was saying as they entered the copse.
    “One might be,” Colin said. He stopped, causing Mark to cannon into him and half turned, laying a hand on the other man’s chest. “Don’t move.”
    For a moment, Mark could not make out what Colin had seen. They were standing about five yards back from the clearing, invisible to anyone in the open space. Then a girl crossed Mark’s field of vision. A turn of the head showed him a white Ford parked back from the road; evidently the girl must have driven in and then rearranged the barrier, for there was no other entrance.
    “Gosh.” The word escaped from Mark’s mouth in a dying fall. “Do you know her?”
    Colin pulled Mark back into the copse. “No,” he whispered. “But I’d like to.”
    The object of their attention showed no sign of having seen either of them. She was wearing a pair of clinging white pants and a dark blue tank top, not tucked in at the waist. As she walked up and down she kept her hands thrust deep into her pockets, stretching the material tightly over her bottom in such a way as to remind Colin of a peach. When she turned he caught a glimpse of her face, already familiar to him after many a surreptitious scan in the past; she was fair-skinned, but he would have known she wasn’t English even if he hadn’t managed to discover her name through one of her fellow students at St. Anne’s. The girl with peach buttocks was called Hanif. Leila Hanif.
    Leila meant darkness, in Arabic, and
hanif
meant true believer. Or so the acquaintance said, claiming to have received this information from the mare’s mouth. Colin could believe it. This girl, glimpsed on the other side of smoky bars, at the next counter in Blackwell’s bookshop, in a punt going in the opposite direction, had started to come between him and his sleep.
    She was beautiful, not least because she so obviously cared about herself. She wore her wavy hair, black with the glossiness of a newly developed monochrome photograph, at shoulder length, with a hairband, or sometimes just white-framed sunglasses pushed back to keep the tresses from falling over her eyes: so unlike your typical female undergrad, with unkempt rats’ tails drooping to the waist. She wore clothes that amounted to a proper wardrobe too, discarding the uniform of faded jeans and baggy sweaters in favor of designer pants, like the ones she was wearing now, and tailored shirts; even the tank top she wore this summer’s afternoon was by Mary Quant.
    Leila’s cheekbones were high and ever so slightly concave, bringing out a sexy contrast with lips that tended to pout. Colin did not know about her eyes; he’d never gotten close enough to find out what color they were. All he knew was that