Hazard Read Online Free PDF Page B

ice-cream vendor’s.
    Any doubts he’d had about recognizing her were immediately gone. She was outstanding. With her were two small black children, both girls, about four or five years old, hanging on as though their lives depended on her. That set Hazard back a bit. Her children she’d said. It was possible.
    Nevertheless, he went over to her, expecting more of the brush-off he’d gotten the day before, so he was surprised when she smiled at meeting him again. She asked amiably if he’d won his bet. He lied yes and she laughed that she’d lost. He tried to think of some tactful way to ask about the children, decided he didn’t have to the way she was mothering them. He pushed the bike along to walk with them up the park side of Fifth Avenue. She let him believe whatever for a whlie and then told him the children were from the New York Foundling Hospital. She was officially treating them to a day out, a voluntary once-a-week duty on her part.
    He helped by carrying the two little girls on his shoulders while Keven pushed the bike. He bought balloons that wanted to get away. And more ice cream.
    That was the start of them.
    He learned right off that Keven wasn’t a model and didn’t want to be one. She couldn’t handle the day-by-day possibility of rejection, she admitted. She’d been on her own for eight years, nearly nine, since she was sixteen.
    When she told Hazard that, he immediately imagined her running away from an adequate home and love to make a lot of young mistakes, a girl this pretty. But then, without a trace of self-pity or bitterness, she explained with a smile that she’d been what was called an unwanted child. Her grandmother had come over from Ireland to be someone’s maid in San Francisco. Her mother was somewhere, she said vaguely, not noticeably resentful.
    Hazard couldn’t see how she could ever have been unwanted.
    Especially now as she came from his bathroom with the ends of her hair wet, the robe loosely tied, and her remarkable eyes looking forward to pleasure. She brought him a glass of water and a handful of vitamins and minerals.
    â€œWhat’s the little yellow one?” he asked.
    â€œTake it.” She was standing above him. She smelled of fresh tangerines, a natural extract she used instead of perfume. Unexpectedly arousing.
    â€œI only want to know what it is,” he told her.
    â€œFolic acid.”
    It sounded ominous. He took all the others.
    â€œFolic acid helps your body utilize—”
    â€œYou think I need help?”
    â€œCome on.” She exaggerated her impatience.
    â€œYou don’t like the way I utilize?”
    His hands were on the backs of her legs, moving slowly over the silk, feeling through, knowing her skin, the same fine texture all over.
    â€œPlease take it,” she said.
    â€œI will,” he promised.
    And a moment later she tossed the little yellow pill anywhere to free both her hands.
    After lovemaking they held together for a long while in the lingering float of what they’d felt, a natural sedation that should have taken them easily to sleep. But it was only one thirty.
    Hazard reached under his side of the bed for the remote-control switch while Keven got the television schedule from under her side. He clicked the set on. She consulted the listing and announced, “ The Barkley’s of Broadway, I Am a Fugitive, or The Mummy’s Hand. ”
    â€œYou pick.”
    She took a moment to decide she was more in the mood for Astaire than Paul Muni in chains or Dick Foran in a pith helmet.
    Hazard clicked to Channel 2 and there was Ginger in her chiffon prime and the suave Fred creating centrifugal force on a surface so shiny and perfect that they seemed to be dancing on still, black water.
    It was only the second or maybe third time Hazard and Keven had seen this particular movie, so it was comparatively fresh, considering they’d seen most of the late-night films