A Calculated Risk by Katherine Neville (best time to read books .txt) 📗

into the sea. Wildflowers and succulents clambered over the surrounding cliffs in brilliant colors and diverse shapes reminiscent of a tropical jungle, though this was a dry Aegean rock.

Georgian, discarding her purple-and-yellow-striped caftan, had slipped into the black pool. The water churned foamy about her, and beads of water sparkled in her silvery hair. With the brilliant sapphire sea and darkly purpled Turkish cliffs in the distance behind her, she looked like a siren luring sailors to these rocks.

As I stood there on the path above I suddenly had an awful flash of reality. I saw the bank—the fluorescent lights, forced air, controlled humidity, security passes, mantraps, and bullet-proof glass walls—in short, all the makings of a model prison environment. How had I spent ten years of my life that way, when this existed, too?

“Stop daydreaming, lazybones, and get in,” Georgian was calling up to me. “This water comes from the volcano. When we got here, it was still winter—I bathed in the steamy hot water as cold rains pounded on my head—yin-yang.”

“I hope you took pictures,” I told her, coming down to dabble my toe in the water.

“You can’t photograph magic, as I learned long ago,” she told me. “That’s your problem—you want everything white and flawless and perfect. And frozen in aspic. Thor and I have agreed the time has come to rattle your chain a bit.”

“Oh really?” I said, yanking off my own robe and slipping into the bubbling pool. “Just what have you two cooked up?”

“Why don’t you ask him? He’s stumbling down the hill just now.”

I glanced up the slope, and sure enough, Tor was picking his way down the uneven terrain, looking out of place in a business suit and elegant Italian shoes that slipped on the rocky trail.

“I’ve come upon a couple of ondines,” he called down to us, letting his eyes wander out over the vista. “I never knew this place existed! Lelia dropped me off from the boat and told me to go along this path. I must say—it was worth the hike. What a breathtaking sight!”

This last he directed to me—not just the landscape—and I flushed a bit. I had to admit he looked lovelier than I’d wanted to remember these past lonely months. And now he was tanned and golden, his coppery hair tumbling to the collar of his white silk shirt. He was loosening his tie as he spoke.

“I’ll join you if you promise not to peek. I must confess, I’m modest to the extreme around pretty young girls.…”

Georgian, pleased at this description of herself, turned away with hands over her eyes as Tor undressed and slipped into the pool along with us. I wondered what she and Lelia had learned from Pearl about the change in Tor’s and my relations. It seemed clear they’d spent plenty of time plotting behind my back.

“Look what I found coming along the trail,” Tor was saying, moving to me through the hot steamy water. He held a small wild orchid in his hand, and twined it in my hair.

“How marvelous,” I said. “Perhaps I could transplant a few to my place in San Francisco when I return.”

Tor looked at Georgian in mock puzzlement and raised his brow. “She thinks she’s going back there,” he said, “and you’ve let her proceed with this fantasy? Doesn’t she know she’s been kidnapped to Treasure Island?”

“It’s your turn to deal with the gray flannel mind,” she told him. “And it’s your turn not to peek—I’m getting out of this hot tub.”

We turned away, and after a moment heard Georgian calling from the upper slope, turned to see her purple-and-yellow robes fluttering about her like a butterfly.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” she called with a grin, and disappeared over the rim.

“What wouldn’t Georgian do?” Tor asked with a smile.

“Very little that I can think of,” I said.

“Perhaps then, we should try one of those things she would do,” he suggested. “Hmm. I suppose we could float around here and talk about sex all day.”

I laughed, but I was having trouble concealing the fact I was quite upset, seeing Tor suddenly like that on the trail—after my isolation all these months. My emotions were jumbled together and tangled like skeins of yarn, and I knew why.

For twelve years the two of us had had a mental rapport so powerful that, I had to agree with Tor, it often seemed like a psychic umbilical cord. Then two months of heady competition and danger, followed by a weekend of lovemaking so powerful—so magnificent—I could hardly bear even now to think of it.

And then nothing. No phone call—no letter—no cheery card: “Having a swell time in Bora-Bora; wish you were here.” He’d abandoned me to a plot of my own devising, and gone about living his own adventure as if I’d never existed. Now all at once, I thought furiously, with one third-person phone call, he’d expected me to come running back into his arms. I was even angrier with myself, that I’d done as instructed.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived,” he said, as if he’d read my mind. “There’s no place I’d rather have been—but something urgent happened.…”

He came over to me, moving through the black waters, put his hands on my face, and bent to kiss me, pulling his wet fingers through my hair and sliding his hands down my back.

“Your skin is like silk—I can’t bear not to touch you,” he said softly. “You’re like a slippery golden eel.…”

“An eel?” I laughed. “That’s not very seductive.”

“You’d be surprised what the thought does to me,” he said with a smile.

“I can tell what it’s doing to you,” I assured him. “But you were going to tell me about something urgent in Paris.”

“It’s the hot water,” he said, closing his eyes. “All thoughts have fled—strength is seeping from my mind.”

“Yes, I can tell where it’s marshaling its forces,” I agreed. “But shouldn’t we climb out of here and find some mossy spot to lie down? Or