Read Linnear 03 - White Ninja for Free Online Page B

body was that of a mature adult, her face, a perfect oval, had an odd purity, bordering on innocence. Branding was at a loss to understand why until, with an unsettling lurch, it occurred to him that she had the kind of androgynous perfection of beauty only a child could possess.
    Watching her, he was reminded of a night when his mother had taken him to see Peter Pan on Broadway. How enthralled he had been with the young, dewy perfection of Mary Martin, how secretly ashamed he had been of that feeling because she had been playing the part of a male
    - albeit a magical one.
    Now, in this restored Revolutionary farmhouse in East Bay Bridge, he felt anew that odd, almost compulsive quickening of his blood that was so disturbing, and all the more intense for that forbidden component.
    It was not merely the youth - Branding was as sexually unmoved by young girls as he was by homosexuals - but rather what that dewy freshness represented, a kind of ultimate, malleable state. Though he did not yet know it
    - and perhaps never would - Shisei's face, in the flicker of a heartbeat, by turns encompassed all that the female represented to the male: slut, virgin, mother, goddess.
    Who could fail to fall in love with one such as she? Certainly not Cotton Branding.
    'Is it possible we haven't been introduced?' he said in his most affable tone of voice.
    Shisei looked af him with the wide apart eyes of a fawn. 'Anything's possible. But you look to me like an old friend.' She told him her name.
    He laughed. 'I believe I would have remembered that.'
    She smiled, as if drawn in by his ironic amusement. 'Then I must be mistaken,' she said. 'Perhaps it's because I have seen you on television. I feel as if I already know you, Senator Branding.' Her voice was light, musical, and it pleased him, despite an accent so heavy that he had at first thought she had said, I feel as if I already own you.
    'Call me Cook,' he said. 'All my friends do.'
    She looked at him quizzically, and he laughed. 'It's a nickname,' he said. 'I grew up in a large family. We all took turns with the chores, but I was the only child who enjoyed cooking or was any good at it. I kept that chore, and got the name.'
    A band was playing, out on the brick deck, amid the Tuscan terracotta pots filled with Martha Washington geraniums and globular English yews, and they went out into the star-filled darkness. The night was typically wet but, because of a breeze, not uncomfortably so.
    'Do you think,' Shisei asked as they danced, 'that these are desperate times?'
    The band was playing a tune Branding did not recognize, something with a sinuous beat. 'Desperate in what way?'
    She smiled sweetly, showing him just a bit of her tiny white teeth. 'One need only look to the Middle East, to Nicaragua, to the Midwest here in the States where it is said another dust bowl is forming or to the oceans here and in Europe where it is no longer safe for fish to live or for humans to swim. Already I have read a dozen reports about restrictions on consumption of seafood and fish.'
    'You're talking on the one hand about ideological antipathies and on the other about ecological catastrophes,' Branding said. "The only thing the two have in common is that they've been part of our world virtually since the dawn of time.'
    'But that is my meaning,' she said. 'Desperation is
    only dangerous when it is looked upon as commonplace.'
    'I think you've got that wrong/ Branding said. 'It's evil that is most dangerous when it becomes commonplace.'
    'Are we speaking practically,' Shisei asked, 'or morally?'
    Her body had become entwined with his, and Branding felt her flesh through her thin clothes. He was especially aware of the muscles of her legs, and the heated juncture of her thighs as she rubbed against him like a cat.
    He looked down at her, was struck again by the innocence of her face. Its sunny, careless expression belied her body's actions. It was as if he held two people in his arms, one who existed before the