Read Whispers of the Flesh for Free Online Page B

him for how long it had taken him to apologize, but what purpose would that serve?
    “I know you’re sorry,”she said softly, “but you did bring this on yourself, and I . . .” Her voice breaking, she said damply, “I’m hurt, Elic. It stung, you deceiving me like that. Of all the people to do that to me . . .” A spasm gripped her throat, choking off the rest of her words.
    Elic stroked her arm, saying softly,
“Mins Ástgurdís . . .”
    “Please don’t call me that, not now,” she said, flinching away from him.
    He sighed.
    She said, “If you decide to turn the tables on me by transforming into Elle and taking him before I’ve had the chance to—”
    “I won’t do that.”
    “If you do, the cold shoulder will be the least of it.”
    There came a long moment of awful silence, and then he got up and left—through the door this time.
    She scrubbed the scalding tears from her cheeks, drew in a breath, and let it out in a long, shaky exhalation.
    Even when Lili yearned for a human man as she yearned for the handsome, quietly intense David Beckett, her beloved Elic always occupied the deep, warm center of her heart. He was the other half of her, her bedrock, her one and only
Khababu
.
    He should know that. He should have enough faith in her, in them, to know that her feelings for Beckett, springing as they did from her bodily needs, were trifling compared to her feelings for him.
    But he didn’t have that faith. He didn’t trust her to keep her passion for this
gabru
in perspective. His jealousy had impelled him to stage that tableau of ersatz lovemaking as a demonstration to his imagined rival of his possession of her.
    He truly had deceived her. It was the first time he’d ever done anything like that.
    It would be the last.

Five
    L ILI LEANED AGAINST a massive oak late that afternoon, watching David Beckett, his back to her, drawing in a sketchbook propped on an easel he’d set up facing the château on the West Lawn. She was more than a quarter mile away from him, at the edge of the sprawling woods surrounding the castle, but by concentrating her vision, she could see him as clearly as if he were standing right in front of her.
    Upon his return around noon from Clermont-Ferrand, Beckett had changed into the same wide-brimmed hat, brown frock coat, loose nankeen trousers, and scuffed, utilitarian boots that he’d worn during his moonlight stroll the night before. He’d spent most of the afternoon touring the castle and grounds with the sketchbook, in which he’d recorded his observations in the form of notes and quick drawings, with Lili watching from time to time at a discreet distance.
    About an hour ago, he’d set up his easel on the carriage drive out front in order to sketch the gatehouse and the drawbridge spanning the last remaining section of dry moat, the other three having been filled in long ago. He’d then moved the easel to its present location so that he could capture the castle’s western aspect and the rose garden that had been there when Lili first came to Grotte Cachée in the spring of 1749.
    She’d arrived with Sir Francis Dashwood’s infamous Hellfire Club, their Black Masses and orgies serving to satisfy her incessant sexual cravings without subjecting her to social stigma and the wrath of the Church. Elic, beautiful golden Elic, had captivated her from the first. Like her, he was a slave to his sexual passions, an enslavement that had doomed them both to an interminable lifetime of physical intimacy with strangers and emotional intimacy with no one. It had taken very little time for them to develop a deep communion of the soul. Communion of the body, true communion, they would experience only in their dreams.
    Lili shifted her gaze from Beckett to the distant castle, peering through the double glass door that led from the rose garden into the dining room. She had to squint to penetrate the glare of sunlight on the myriad leaded panes, which painted a stream of radiant