"Archer, Geoffrey - The Burma Legacy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Archer Geoffrey)

former SAS man was none of his business any more.
The good side of going home was that for the next few days he would
be with Julie. She'd sounded over the moon when he'd phoned her having
given him a hard time on the 1st of January for his silence on New
Year's Eve.
In the row behind him a child began to cry. Sam groaned and conceded
defeat, undoing the lap strap and standing up to extend his legs. A few
others were doing the same. They passed in the darkened cabin like
spectres seeking release from their earthly shackles. At the back of the plane
where the aisle was wider he paused for a stretch, raising himself up and
down on his toes. He looked at the rows of slumbering bodies. The
woman nearest was elderly, but had her head resting on her partner's
shoulder. It affected him.
It was a moment or two before he recognised the emotion fluttering
weakly in his chest as envy. He was nearly forty. Halfway to a natural death
and he'd still not experienced what these people had. A lasting partnership.
A sense of belonging with another human being. He wondered what had
united this particular couple. Brilliant sex? Or something mundane like a
fondness for country walks?
He let his eyes wander up and down the aisles. Most of the passengers
seemed to be travelling in pairs.
Settling into married life wasn't something he'd consciously avoided.
Simply that he'd met few obvious candidates. His ten years as a Royal
Navy officer had seen plenty of decent women putting themselves his way,
level-headed creatures longing to envelop his life in soft furnishings. But he
hadn't wanted them. The women who turned him on were the hard cases.
The ambitious and dissatisfied. The unhappily marrieds. Those with a past.
Julie was one of those. And in the next few days he would have to make
up his mind about her.
Sam knew that if he were to pop the question, she would say yes. And
the auguries weren't bad. They managed to spend time together without
getting on each other's nerves. They were more than compatible in bed.
And he was pretty sure he loved her and she loved him. What held him
back was the same thing that had stopped him in the past. The fear of
choosing wrongly and regretting it for a long, long time.
Something else worried him. His own inability to resist temptation. If
Midge had played along on New Year's Eve, he'd have felt no guilt.
Would have treated it as a bit of fun, irrelevant to his relationship with
Julie. But the state of marriage would demand different standards of him.
He looked down at the elderly couple again. The way their bodies
propped each other up said "trust'. And trusting anybody, particularly a
woman, was something he'd never mastered.
He drifted back up the aisle. The Scots appeared to be unconscious - the
alcohol had won.
Back in his seat, before he fell asleep again, it was Midge his thoughts
kept turning to. His desire to know her better felt like a dull ache begging
to be rubbed.
Julie had come into his sights fifteen months ago. She worked at a virology
lab in the centre of London. He'd gone there to interview her about the
murder of her father, an arms trader gunned down in Africa, and had been