had the driver return him to the bank parking lot off Palm Canyon Drive,
where the helicopter was still waiting for him.
Airborne again, heading for the Geneplan labs in Riverside, Anson Sharp
stared out at the night landscape as it rushed past below the chopper,
his eyes narrowed as if he were a night bird seeking prey.
LOVING Ben’s dreams were dark and full of thunder, blasted by strange
lightning that illuminated nothing in a landscape without form,
inhabited by an unseen but fearful creature that stalked him through the
shadows, where all was vast and cold and lonely. It was-and yet was
notthe Green Hell where he had spent more than three years of his youth,
a familiar yet unfamiliar place, the same as it had been, yet changed as
landscapes can be only in dreams.
Shortly after dawn, he came awake with bird-thin cries, full of dread,
shuddering, and Rachael was with him. She had moved from the other bed
and had drawn him to her, comforting him. Her warm tender touch
dispelled the cold and lonely dream. The rhythmic thumping of her heart
seemed like the steady throbbing of a bright lighthouse beacon along a
fogbound coast, each pulse a reassurance.
He believed she had intended to offer nothing more than the comfort that
a good friend could provide, though perhaps unconsciously she brought
the greater gift of love and sought it in return. In the half-awake
state following sleep, when his vision seemed filtered by a
semitransparent cloth, when an invisible thinness of warm silk seemed to
interpose itself between his hands and everything he touched, and while
sounds were still dream-muffled, his perceptions were not sharp enough
to determine how and when her offered comfort became offered-and
accepted-love. He only knew that it happened and that, when he drew her
unclothed body to his, he felt a rightness that he had never felt before
in his thirty-seven years.
He was at last within her, and she was filled with him. It was fresh
and wondrous, yet they did not have to search for the rhythms and
patterns that pleased them, because they knew what was perfect for them
as lovers of a decade might know.
Although the softly rumbling air conditioner kept the room cool, Ben had
an almost psychic awareness of desert heat pressing at the windows.
The cool chamber was a bubble suspended outside the reality of the harsh
land, just as their special moment of tender coupling was a bubble
drifting outside the normal flow of seconds and minutes.
Only one opaque window of frosted glass-high in the kitchenette wall-was
not covered with a drape, and upon it the rising sun built a slowly
growing fire. Outside, palm fronds, fanning lazily in a breeze,
filtered the beams of the sun, feathery tropical shadows and frost-pale
light fell on their nude bodies, rippling as they moved.
Ben saw her face clearly even in that inconstant light. Her eyes were
shut, mouth open. She drew deep breaths at first, then breathed more
quickly. Every line of her face was exquisitely sensuous-but also
infinitely precious. His perception of her preciousness mattered more
to him than the shatteringly sensuous vision she presented, for it was
an emotional rather than physical response, a result of their months
together and of his great affection for her. Because she was so special
to him, their coupling was not merely an act of sex but an immeasurably
more gratifying act of love.
Sensing his examination, she opened her eyes and looked into his, and he
was electrified by that new degree of contact.
The palm-patterned morning light grew rapidly brighter, changing hue as
well, from frost-pale to lemon-yellow to gold. It imparted those colors
to Rachael’s face, slender throat, full breasts. As the richness of the
light increased, so did the pace of their lovemaking, till both were
gasping, till she cried out and cried out again, at which moment the
breeze outside became a sudden energetic wind that whipped the palm
fronds, casting abruptly frantic shadows through the milky window, upon
the bed. At precisely the moment when the wind-sculpted shadows leaped
and shuddered, Ben thrust deep and shuddered too, emptying copious