Linnear 02 - The Miko Read Free Page B

melancholy mood. He felt his love for her like a gently purling river in the night, hidden from sight yet present nonetheless. “Anyway, don’t you think it’s better that we’re both so busy before the wedding? No time to get cold feet and back out.” He was joking again but she lifted her head and he stared into her extraordinary eyes, highly intelligent yet possessing an odd kind of naivete he had found so alluring when he had first met her. He still did. He watched the several crimson motes floating like a hint of her soul in the midst of her left iris. Her eyes were hazel, that day more green than brown, and he found himself feeling grateful mat the harrowing events of the past year had not altered the essence of her. For through those eyes he could still see her heart.
    “Do you ever dream of it?” he asked. “Do you ever find yourself back in the house with the dai-katana in your hands; with Saigo in your mind?”
    “You took all that he didthe strange kind of hypnosis away,” she said. “That’s what you told me.”
    He nodded. “That’s what I did.”
    “Well then.” She took his hand and led him from the chilly curling wavelets up above the high-tide mark, strewn with the dark wrack of sea grape and odd bits of ashy wood, as perfectly smooth as stones. She turned her face up toward the sun. “I’m glad winter’s over; I’m happy to be out here again with everything returning to life.”
    “Justine,” he said seriously, “I just wanted to know whether there had been any” He broke off, searching for an English equivalent to the Japanese thought. “Any echoes of the incident.
    After all, Saigo programmed you to kill me with my own sword. You never speak of it.”
    “Why should I?” The light turned her eyes dark, concealing all their delicate colors. “There’s nothing to say.”
    There was silence for a time, and they were engulfed by the rhythmic suck and pull of the sea along whose edge they had begun to walk again. Near the flat horizon a trawler hung as if suspended in a gulf of piercing blue.
    She was looking out there, as if the ocean’s expanse contained within it her future. “I’ve always known that life isn’t safe. But up until the time I met you, I had no reason to care one way or another. It’s no secret that I was once as self-destructive as my sister is.” Her eyes broke away from the glitter of the horizon. She stared down at her laced fingers. “I wish to God it had never happened. But, oh, it did. He got hold of me. It’s like when I had chicken pox as a kid. It was so bad I almost died; it left scars. But I survived. I’ll survive now.” Her head lifted. “I must survive, you see, because there’s us to think about.”
    Nicholas had stared into her eyes. Was she keeping something from him? He could not say, and he did not know why it should worry him.
    She laughed suddenly, her face becoming that of a college girl, innocent and carefree, the light dusting of freckles over her creamy skin catching the warming sunlight. She had a pure laugh, untainted by sarcasm or cynicism. There were no danger signs in it as there were in many people.
    “I won’t have you here beside me tomorrow,” she said, “so let’s make the most of today.” She kissed him tenderly. “Is that very Oriental?”
    He laughed. “I think it is, yes.”
    Her long artist’s fingers traced the line of his jaw, pausing at last to touch the tender flesh of his lips. “You’re more dear to me than I thought anyone could ever be.”
    “Justine”
    “If you’d travel to the ends of the earth I’d find you again. That sounds like the unrealistic statement of a little girl, but I mean it.”
    To his astonishment, he saw that she did. And he saw in her eyes at that moment something he had never seen there before. He recognized the determination of the samurai woman that he had encountered years ago in his mother and aunt. It was a peculiar combination of fierceness and loyalty that he