Spellbinder Read Online Free PDF Page B

San Francisco Bay, blue and sparkling this morning. The Oakland hills were purple in the background, with a scattered fleece of clouds clinging to the crests. In the foreground, huge cylinders of gas storage tanks combined with mantislike shipyard cranes to make a montage that could have come from a Diego Rivera mural. Overhead, a pair of jet fighters flew low over the Bay Bridge, coasting down for a landing at the Alameda Naval Air Base, across the Bay.
    “Two minute warning,” Peter called.
    “Two minutes,” she repeated. She pushed the bedroom door closed, slipped off the shorty nightgown and stepped before the full-length mirror. Feet together, arms at her sides, she took the inventory: eyes a little too small and close set, nose a little too uptilted, chin a trifle too sharp. At best, it was a heart-shaped face—at worst, an asymmetrical triangle. But the honey-colored hair falling naturally to her shoulders softened some of the angles, and the arch of dark blond eyebrows beneath a broad forehead was certainly a plus. With only a trace of makeup, the flare of the eyebrows balanced the close-set eyes. Altogether, it was a B-minus face. Sometimes, when she was rested and happy and working well, she rated the face a “B.”
    The slope of her shoulders was marginal, but her breasts were acceptable, round and still firm, with small nipples centered on the swell. Her waist was narrow, with only the suggestion of a midriff bulge. But her hips were a little too wide, especially seen full front. And, from the same view, her thighs were a little too skimpy, a little too hollow on the inside curve.
    “One minute.”
    “I hear you.” Quickly she took a maroon sweatshirt from the chair beside the bed, slipped it over her head, finger-combed her hair, then reached for her blue jeans, hanging on the same chair. After breakfast, she would shower and put on fresh clothes.
    In the kitchen, Peter was pouring orange juice into stem glasses. English muffins were stacked on a plate in the center of the table, buttered and steaming. He hadn’t told her about the muffins, or the strawberry jam beside them. He’d bought both at the corner store, along with the Sunday paper.
    She kissed him on the tip of his left ear, quickly stroked his Sunday-stubbled cheek and slipped into her chair, reaching for the paper. According to their custom, she would read the comics and the magazine section and the supplements while he read the main news section, the sports and the business sections, and the editorials. Then they would switch. Across the table, he was spreading strawberry jam on an English muffin.
    “What’s with the Hour of Power?” he asked. “Did I hear him say he’s planning to convert the Chinese hordes to the blessings of Christianity—with ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ playing in the background, for good measure?”
    “It’s not the Hour of Power. I keep telling you that. The Hour of Power is someone else’s.” She tasted the first forkful of scrambled eggs and livers. “This is delicious. Better than last Sunday’s.”
    He smiled at her, then turned to the newspaper, folding the front news section and propping it against the pitcher of orange juice. He was wearing a Japanese karate coat she’d given him for Christmas. Held together only with a belt, the heavily quilted coat was opened down to the waist. The hair of his chest and torso, exposed by the coat’s V almost to his naval, was thick and dark and curly, almost a caveman’s pelt. With his dark, longish hair uncombed and his face unshaven for the day and his eyes a dark, snapping brown beneath a thick bar of eyebrows, he could have been an Italian peasant, called in from the fields and incongruously dressed in the quilted white coat—perhaps to tryst with the honey-haired foreign visitor, overbred and neurotic, sexually unfulfilled, come from another country to meet him secretly, her forbidden lover. The place could be a villa that she’d taken for the year,