High Bloods Read Online Free PDF Page B

gushing in. He was the kind of luckless gambler who would have bet against the Trojan horse, so a lot of the wealth had gushed right out again. Maybe he’d have succeeded in getting us into receivership, but a faulty heart valve put an end to his high-rolling ways when he was one month shy of fifty.
    I’d always liked him. We had fun together. He taught me, by example, never to draw to an inside straight.
    It had never occurred to me to wonder what had attached my mother, whose name was Penelope but who liked to be called Pym, to my father. She was probably a genius, and he had coasted through an Ivy League school with a gentleman’s C. They were both nearsighted, liked Boodles gin, and liked Sinatra.That was about it. Opposites do attract, of course. And once Pym had said to me, “He doesn’t mean any harm and he never hurts my feelings,” probably the only serious examination of their relationship she ever undertook.
    I opened the front doors of the
minka
, which were never locked, for Beatrice. Clapped the recessed lighting on as she walked in, looked around, looked at me with a tense expression.
    “Bathroom?” I gave directions.
    She didn’t forget to slip out of her boots before going briskly down a hallway floored in black slate. The hall separated a large minimally furnished living room from the tea room, each with twenty-five-foot bamboo ceilings. The post-and-beam construction mimicked that of Japanese farmhouses, but the posts were steel, better to handle seismic events. I went on to the kitchen, untypically modern: stainless steel appliances, a cooking island with a ceramic range top.
    I pulled two bottles of Killian’s Red from one of the side-by-side refrigerators, where I chilled the beer to a couple of degrees above freezing. Lord Killian probably would’ve had a fit, but that was how I liked my brew. I held the cold bottle against the bump over one ear, then drank the Killian’s slowly, giving Bea the privacy she required.
    The WC and separate spa were on two levels, walled in teak, skylighted, floored in big rectangles of rough-finished red quarry tile. The spa contained a sauna, a cold plunge, and an open-front shower I could lie down in should I be in no shape to stand.
    Beatrice had turned on the water walls on two sides of the shower, along with the spectrachrome overhead lighting. I knocked on one of the
Shoji
doors.
    “Cold beer here.” I could see through a translucent door panel her ghostly shape in drifting warm mist.
    I had expected her to reach out discreetly. Instead she slid one of the doors all the way open. She was neither bold nor shy about her nakedness. She drank most of the beer I handed her inthree long swallows, her small breasts taut as she tilted her head back.
    I stepped inside, closed the door behind me. When Beatrice had finished off the bottle she smothered a burp with one hand, shrugged in childlike embarassment, then turned and walked through the mist into the shower, a rainbow of lovely skin in the spectrachrome lights. While I was throwing off my clothes she played with jets spurting at all angles, luxuriating in the massaging sprays, dancing a little, coming fully alive. When I stepped in with her she was into my arms at a touch, holding me very tightly.
    There wasn’t much foreplay. Just high-burn sex, that urgent desire to banish, for a little while, dark and frightful images from our conscious minds.
    Beatrice had had a few lovers before me, but she wasn’t sexually experienced. In the shower her body had been telling her what she wanted, had to have, as quickly as possible.
    But we made love again—in the best sense of those words—on the double futon in my bedroom, taking time for a leisurely appreciation of each other’s bodies. The humanness of sexual need.
    Once I thought, from the slow, deep rhythm of her breathing, that she had fallen asleep, I started to get up from the futon platform.
    But Beatrice quaked in alarm and took a fierce grip on