Jezebel's Blues Read Online Free PDF Page A

infinity. “They’re so orderly,” she said.
    “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I never could conquer algebra. It drove me crazy. No matter what angle I came at it from, I couldn’t make it work, couldn’t see how to make it clear in my mind.” He shook his head slowly. “I really admire people who can.”
    She heard in his voice not the muddled who-cares-anyway attitude of many people regarding math, but the genuine frustration of one who had tried and couldn’t breach the language. “You probably had a teacher who made assumptions about how people learn that weren’t right for you, or—” she grinned “—you’re hopelessly right brained.”
    His heavy, dark eyebrows raised. “Had a good teacher, so you fill in the blanks.”
    “Right brained.” Her heart sunk a little. Right brained meant creative, which meant like her parents, which meant this man was poison. “What do you do?”
    He’d been open and fluent until that moment. Now his face shuttered with an almost audible slam of defensive armor. “Nothing,” he said, and stood up. “I don’t do anything.”
    Celia looked at his hands braced on the windowsill as he glared at the rain. His unspoken words echoed into the room as loudly and clearly as if he’d shouted them.
    Not anymore.

Chapter 3
    E ric thought if it rained one more hour, he would go crazy. All day, it had continued. Pattering, dripping, smacking, trickling. The incessant sound wore on him like torture.
    To make matters worse, the air in the attic room grew stale with their breathing and a stifling humidity. In spite of the storm, it wasn’t exactly cool, either, and Eric knew from experience what they’d be in for when the rain stopped and the flood abated: jungle weather.
    Restlessly, he prowled the perimeters of the room, pacing between the trunks at one end to the boxes and discards at the other, tapping the windowsill with his hand as he passed, flipping the doorknob on the other side of the room as he passed it.
    Celia stretched out on the mattress, reading a thick novel she’d brought upstairs with her last night. She was only halfway through it and had been reading most of the day, and she kept reading now in spite of his pacing.
    Part of his problem was the picture she made in that soft bed, her long, slender legs stretched out, her hip jutting up casually, a spray of silvery hair spilling over the hand that propped her up. Sometimes she flipped over onto her tummy and he had to contend with the high, round contours of her fanny—one of the prettiest rear ends he’d yet had the pleasure of admiring.
    It was clear that she was not the sort of woman who wore her beauty with knowledge and an edge of manipulation. He doubted she even knew that she was a beauty. He might have questioned the intelligence of a woman who had looked in the mirror at her face and body for twenty-plus years without coming to the obvious conclusion, but in this case, he was pretty sure he knew why. He’d seen pictures of her mother, the dancer. Dahlia had been full of breast and hip, with wide, erotic eyes that drove men wild. Her coloring had been vivid, her style polished.
    Eric tapped the doorknob on his way by, his fingertips registering the pattern carved into brass. He had known women like Dahlia, driven by a need for recognition from everyone. Retta, with her wild beauty, came to mind.
    Eric frowned and pushed the thought away, deliberately calling forth a picture of Celia’s mother. He’d seen too often how women like her had operated, and Celia had probably faded into the background a lot more than was good for a little girl.
    He glanced at her, sprawled unselfconsciously on the bed, the swell of one breast peeking demurely over the edge of her scoop-necked shirt. Instantly, he felt a restless pulse below his belt.
    Dog, he told himself, forcing his gaze back toward the window where rain splatted and patted and smacked against the glass. She wasn’t his kind of woman. There was a