Eighty Days Red Read Online Free PDF

screen blinked in and out of existence, taunting him.
    After New York, Lauralynn had made it her job to put Dominik back on the straight and narrow. Without her encouragement, he would probably not have stuck to the task and completed his Paris novel, and would have effortlessly drifted back into his quiet routine of teaching and nostrings-attached seductions when the possibility arose.
    She knew he was attracted to her and lost no opportunity to keep him on the boil sexually with her nonchalant attitude to nudity and sex. It was as if his arousal and interest was a form of fuel necessary for him to keep churning out the words and reach the end of his manuscript, without feeling sorry for himself and relying too much on memories of his times with Summer, even though the lead female character in his semi-historical book was undeniably based on the red-haired violin player.
    ‘You need distractions, my dear Dominik,’ she had said to him one evening, that playful glint in her green eyes a prelude to mischief.
‘Do I now?’ He knew her intentions were good, but part of him still felt as if he was in mourning and it was much too early to go out playing again.
But Lauralynn would not take no for an answer and convinced him to dress up for the occasion, even jokingly rejecting his choice of patterned casual shirt as distinctly too middleaged, getting him to wear a blue Tommy Hilfiger dress shirt with a button-down collar; something he was often reluctant to do unless the occasion was particularly formal, which he was quite certain this evening was not about to be by a long stretch.
‘You won’t regret it,’ Lauralynn had said.
‘I’d better not.’
Lauralynn was a woman with plans, and her tastes were deviant to say the least. He’d once joked she had a little black book full of names and addresses she could call on at a moment’s notice to entertain her, just some like suburban Don Juan. But Lauralynn, with a broad, impish smile, had gleefully responded that this was not the case. She stored all the names and numbers in her mind, she declared.
‘All carefully divided into columns,’ Dominik suggested. ‘Subs, slaves, swingers, crossdressers, simple bottoms, switches, and whatever other categories an ignorant soul like me might not even be aware of. No doubt all pretty and sitting in a row, waiting to be picked off and played with?’
‘Of course,’ she had triumphantly confirmed. ‘A girl must have a sense of organisation in these troubled times …’
‘So what’s on tonight’s menu?’ Dominik had asked her, as they waited for the minicab he had ordered earlier. It was still only late in the afternoon and parking restrictions in town would have made it awkward to drive his BMW into the West End.
‘Just wait and see.’ Her perfume swam across his face, a delicate blend of green notes and citrus. Lauralynn had an arsenal of fragrances at her disposal, each a distinctive weapon for different species of prey. When she openly hunted for other women, she went for sweet and musky, dark with aggression. Today’s early evening, more nuanced, touch presaged a different sort of hunt, he guessed.
The meeting was in the basement bar of a pub on Cambridge Circus in the centre of town. Dominik had never been a pub person. The fact he didn’t drink, purely for reasons of taste, didn’t help, but there was something about pubs, the smells, the unclean, torpid air, that always made him uncomfortable.
‘Couldn’t you have arranged another place?’ he’d asked Lauralynn as they descended the wooden stairs.
‘It’s where they felt safer to meet,’ she said.
‘They?’ he enquired with an arch smile.
Her grin broadened.
‘Just a nice, married couple, probably from the suburbs, so I thought suggesting your club or a posh hotel bar might put them off.’
‘A married couple?’
‘Nice, no?’
The basement was only half full and they quickly spotted the man and woman sitting nervously in one corner and, respectively,