"Quintin, Jardine - Gallery Whispers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Quintin Jardine)

Her husband shook his head. 'DCC Skinner is many things, but he
ain't that subtle. He doesn't like being tied to a desk, and he never
will. I'm his executive assistant. I know this.'
'What if the Chief doesn't come back?' she asked. 'What would he
do then?'
'Ah, but the Chief will be back. It was only a mild heart attack.
They've put him on light medication and given him a diet.'
He paused, and she seized her chance. 'Speaking of diets, Neil
Mcllhenney; you could do with losing some weight.'
Elbows on the table, shoulders hunched, head bowed, he looked
across at her; his look this time, out from under his heavy, beetling
eyebrows with a secret smile that went right into her soul, and told
her, far more eloquently than the words which now they used to each
other only occasionally, how much he loved her.
'Christ,' he rumbled in his slow, deep voice. 'She sits there with
bloody Bailey's in her coffee, and tells me to lose weight!'
2
He watched her as she slept. She lay on her right side, and although he
could not see her face, he knew that her hand would be on the pillow,
the thumb gently brushing her lips in an unconscious gesture which
he had always guessed was a relic of a childhood habit. Her dark hair,
thick and wavy, tousled at the ends from their energetic lovemaking,
clung to her neck and shoulders.
Her back was to him as he looked at her, admiring the curve of
her hip in profile against the street light which shone outside their
curtained window. He had lain like this often before, sometimes
unable to keep from touching her, from running a finger-tip softly
down her spine, knowing what it did to her and that within a few
minutes she would be awake and they would be locked together
again.
Yet on this night her turned back seemed to him to be a rejection,
for all her commitment in their coupling only a few hours before. It
had been satisfying for each of them, yet there had been none of the
sense of spiritual union which they had known at the beginning of
their partnership. That was one of the things which had set her apart
from the other women who had lain in his bed, before he had found
her and she had tamed him. Yet now it was, at best misplaced, or
worse, he feared, lost.
'What's the matter?'
She did not stir as she spoke her question, but her voice was clear,
and wide-awake.
'Nothing,' he answered, softly. 'I'm just thinking, that's all.'
'About what?'
'Och, just the job. You know.'
'But the job's been quiet for the last wee while.' She paused. 'Are
you still having flashbacks to that man with the gun?'
He shook his head at once. 'No. Absolutely not. That's only
happened to me that one time, a couple of days after it happened.'
'Something else then?' She rolled on to her back and looked up at
him, frowning. 'Not Ariel, surely.'