Feelings of Fear Read Online Free Page B

they tried to approach him they were pushed forcefully away. A glossy black Lincoln slid up to the curb and they climbed inside, where it smelled of leather upholstery and very expensive perfume. Then the door was closed and they were swept behind darkly tinted windows into the night.
    â€œWhat kind of a guy is your husband?” asked Jack.
    â€œJeff? He’s a TV producer. Very hard-working.
Too
hard-working.”
    â€œIs that why he slapped you?”
    Susan blushed and said, “How did you know that?”
    â€œA beautiful married blonde sits alone in a bar at eleven o’clock at night with a red mark on her cheek and her mascara all blotchy – what conclusion do you draw?”
    Susan hesitated for a moment. Then she said, “He was late home. His supper was ruined. I’d been working all afternoon to make it special.”
    â€œYou should humiliate him. A guy like that needs to be humiliated.”
    â€œI don’t want to humiliate him. I just want him to pay me more attention. Everything centers around
him,
and what he’s doing. I could have been a good actress if he’d let me. Tony Scott said I was one of the most promising young personalities he’d seen for years.”
    Jack laid his hand on her knee. “And I agree with him. And that’s all the more reason that you should make your husband feel small. Do you know what you should do?”
    â€œTell me.”
    â€œYou should come to bed with me, and then, when you go back home, you should tell this Jeff of yours exactly what happened, in every microscopic detail. Tell him how big my schlong is. Tell him how you screamed when you came.”
    She said nothing. She had already decided that she wanted to go bedwith him. But she knew that she would never tell anybody, ever – not even Hazel. She wasn’t out to make Jeff feel bad. She was looking for reassurance that other men found her sexy and arousing and interesting, and that six years of marriage hadn’t washed all of her personality out of her, like ink out of a handkerchief.
    They turned into a steeply-sloping driveway in Bel Air. Automatic wrought-iron gates opened, and they drove inside. On top of the hill ahead of them, surrounded by flowering shrubs, stood a huge white Italianate house with a red-tiled roof. Lights shone from every window.
    â€œWelcome to my humble abode,” said Jack, and gave Susan’s thigh the lightest of strokes.
    He was waiting for her on the bed when she came out of the bathroom. He was wearing nothing but black silk pajama bottoms and a black bandana. He was watching one of his own movies on a television the size of a small building.
    â€œI switched it on and there it was,” he told her.
“The Cloud Riders.
It must be an omen.”
    She was wrapped in his black silk bathrobe. She approached the bed and knelt beside him, watching him. The bedroom was all white: white carpets, white drapes, white lilies in white vases on top of white-painted tables. A large original oil-painting hung on the wall opposite the bed – a white-skinned girl with bone-white hair. Her thighs were wide apart and the only color in the room was a single brushstroke of fuchsia pink.
    Jack switched off the television’s sound but not its picture. On the screen he was riding a horse across the spine of a mountain-range in Montana. On the bed he reached up with his left hand and unfastened the loose silk tie around Susan’s waist. Then he sat up and slid the robe off her shoulders, so that she was completely naked.
    Her skin was almost as pale as the girl in the painting, apart from the blue tracery of veins in her breasts and her nipples the color of fallen rose-petals in a rainswept garden. Her blonde curls shone in the lamplight.
    Jack pulled her down beside him and kissed her. It had been so long since she had been kissed by another man that she found it deeplydisturbing, but electrifying, too, and she could feel