A Perfect Stranger Read Free

thoughts again now and he stood there, looking at the view from the Baker Street stairs. They were carved steeply into the hillside joining Broadway to Vallejo Street below, and he enjoyed the view and the cool breeze as he decided to go no further and sit down on the top step. As he unraveled his long legs in front of him, he smiled at the city he had adopted. Maybe he'd never find the right woman. Maybe he'd never marry again. So what? He had a good life, a nice house, a law practice that was both enjoyable and successful. Maybe he didn't need more than that. Maybe he had no right to ask for more.
    He let his gaze take in the pastel-colored houses of the marina, the little gingerbread Victorians in Cow Hollow, not unlike his own, the rounded Grecian splendor of the Palace of Fine Arts well below him, and then, as his eyes left the dome Maybeck had created half a century earlier, he found himself looking down at the rooftops below him, and then suddenly there she was. A woman sitting huddled at the bottom of the steps, almost as though she were carved there, a statue like those on the Palace of Fine Arts, only this one far more delicate, with her head bowed and her profile silhouetted by the light across the street. He found himself sitting very still and staring, as though she were a sculpture, a statue, a work of art that someone had abandoned there, a handsome marble in the form of a woman, so skillfully fashioned that it seemed almost real.
    She did not move and he watched her for almost five minutes, and then, sitting up very straight, she took a long, deep breath of the fresh night air, and exhaled it slowly as though she had had a very hard day. There was a cloud of pale fur coat around her, and Alex could see her face and her features come clear in the dark. There was something unusual about her that made him want to see more. He found himself sitting there, unable to look away. It was the oddest feeling Alex could remember, sitting there, staring down at her in the dim light from the street-lamps, feeling pulled by her. Who was she? What was she doing there? Her presence seemed to touch him to the very core of his being as he sat very still, wanting to know more.
    Her skin looked very white in the darkness, and her hair was shiny and dark, swept softly into a knot at the nape of her neck. Her hair gave the impression of being very long, and held in place perhaps by only one or two well-placed pins. For a moment he had an insane desire to run down the steps toward her, to touch her, and to take her in his arms and loosen the dark hair. And almost as though she sensed what he was thinking, she looked up suddenly from her reverie, as though pulled back from a very great distance by a firm hand. She turned toward him, and started, her face turned up toward where he sat. And what he saw as he looked down at her was the most beautiful face he had ever seen. A face, as he had first suspected, with the perfect proportions of a work of art, tiny, delicate features, a flawless face filled with enormous dark eyes and a gently curving mouth. But her eyes were what captivated him as they looked at him unseeing eyes that seemed to fill her entire face, eyes that seemed to be filled with immeasurable sorrow, and in the lamplight now he could see two shining rivers of tears on the white marble cheeks. For one endless instant their eyes met, and Alex felt as though every ounce of his being reached out to the unknown beauty with the big eyes and dark hair. She looked so vulnerable and so lost as she sat there, and then, as though embarrassed by what she had let him see even briefly, she quickly bowed her head. For an instant Alex didn't move, and then suddenly he felt pulled toward her again, as though he had to go to her. He watched her, trying to decide what to do, and in an instant she stood up, enveloped in fur. It was a lynx coat that drifted about her like a cloud. Her eyes flew to Alex's again, but this time for only an