Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

of flame and body. Jamie was a spangled djinn in counterpoint to the girl’s dark melody.
    Jessica, feeling as though she had a shard of glass caught in her throat bid her goodnights to John and Yevgena who absently replied without once taking their mesmerized countenances off the dancing pair. She fled for the security and comfort of the room Jamie kept for her occasional visits, the music in pursuit. Her suite, as misfortune would have it, looked out over the gardens. Fire and shadow flickered on the walls and Jessica, drawn against her will, looked down into the scene below.
    The music had taken a brief respite and she hoped Jamie had regained his senses enough to ask for it to be silenced. But then the lone, shattering note of a Celtic pipe began, wounding and strangling, killing ivy hidden within the couch of deceitful jasmine. The music of blood and winter and endless grief, purely, tragically Irish. Jamie, shirt half undone, leaned in exhaustion against the girl, pearls of sweat gleaming in his hair, eyes glittering in a way that spelled disaster. She saw his cheek move restlessly against the girl’s, hands in a hard caress with the bones of her face. She could feel the words he spoke then, knew them as they slipped the breach of tongue and lip, “Take me to bed for god’s sake,” he said, “take me to bed now.”
    Jessica, closing the draperies, felt the beginnings of a crashing headache.

    “God’s teeth, is this what you had in mind?” John asked as Jamie, sparing a glance for no one took the girl by the hand and went into the house, shutting the door with firm intent behind them.
    “John,” said Yevgena, “Jamie is not a man that should be without the company of a woman for long, particularly not,” she gave him a pointed look, “with his temperament. That silly girl he insisted on marrying has managed to tie him up so badly with guilt that I wouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t taken a woman to his bed since the last time she deigned to allow him into hers. That being said there are more practical reasons. In the last ten years, he’s lost three children, a wife and now a father. He’s carried the weight of Kirkpatrick Industries since he left Oxford and now he’ll have to decide whether to take up the political legacy his father’s left behind. And there are things,” she sighed deeply, “that even those of us who love him best don’t understand about his life.”
    “I don’t quite see how a half-naked gypsy girl fits into this picture,” John said peevishly.
    “Oh, I think you do John, besides there are reasons other than physical that she is here.”
    “Such as?”
    “You old curmudgeon, try to remember all that poetry you used to believe in before you took such glee in dissecting it for children.”
    He gave her a look of utter mystification.
    She leaned over and kissed him soundly on the forehead, “Destiny John, destiny. Now you old terror let’s go get good and drunk.”
    John thought that was, perhaps, the best idea anyone had had all day.

    “My kingdom for a button,” Jamie laughed in exasperation. He was trying without success, to locate a clue, however minute, on where to begin unwrapping his gift.
    “Scissors,” said the Gypsy Girl or Destiny if you preferred whose name was actually Pamela O’Flaherty.
    He groaned with feeling. “Bottom floor, don’t think I can negotiate the damned stairs again and I wouldn’t know where to find them anyway.”
    “Pathetic,” she said.
    “It is,” he agreed, pondering the feasibility of simply biting through the knot end.
    They were in his room now, a room done in all the shades of the sea, from deepest murky green to silver-shot blue and the white of sun-bleached sky. The effect of it was a bit, he’d been told, like drowning.
    “Well there’s only one thing for it then,” she said with equanimity.
    “Yes?”
    “Patience.”
    “Not my favorite virtue,” he said, black hair slipping and