Free Lips Touch: Three Times by Lips Touch; Three Times Page B

so he might have the chance to dance with Anamique.
They touched for the first time, first delicately and decorously, fingertips to
waist and hand to shoulder in the pose of the dance. But by and by James's lips
brushed softly against Anamique's earlobe as he whispered something to her. She
blushed furiously at the intimate touch, and a look of wistfulness and hope
came into her eyes.
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    "I love you," he had whispered, and it seemed to him as
she pressed her lips together, that she was imagining whispering it back.
    She was imagining it. She thought she could taste the
words, all ginger and chili and sugar, fiery and sweet, and she held them in
her mouth like candies. It would take more time than this to coax them from
her, but something began to happen at that moment. An idea fell like a seed,
and over the next weeks it went on growing like a fig vine, lush and
conquering, twining round her old beliefs and covering them in new growth until
they were as invisible as a tiger in a thicket -- and just as deadly.
    There were more musical evenings and more letters, furtive
hand-holding at dinner, duets at the piano, more dancing, more whispers in her
ear that raised goose bumps on Anamique's neck and sent shivers down her spine.
They were never alone, but may as well have been, the way they looked only at
each other. Sitting apart from the crowd at whatever party or gathering they
were at, James spoke, and Anamique wrote on her tablet small notes that James
saved and kept with her letters. She even began to teach him some of the
simpler signs of her gesture language, such as those for "thirsty"
and "dance." He asked her, eyes merry, how to sign "I love
you," just so he would recognize it if she ever gestured it to him, and,
blushing, she showed him.
    Anamique grew radiant. Other men began to wonder why it had taken
that damned James Dorsey to make them see that, silent or not, Anamique was
quite the loveliest creature in Jaipur, if not all of India. None of them
bothered to court her, though; they couldn't even catch her eye, and she
demurred from dancing with anyone but James.
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    And while they danced, James whispered to her. He urged her to
sing for him, to tell him that she loved him. "How can I ever believe
it," he asked, his brown eyes pleading, "unless you tell me so
yourself?" He knew about the bird in the cage, and he imagined it
languishing there like a sad animal in a roadside menagerie. "Birds
shouldn't be kept in cages," he told her, his lips warm against her ear.
"They should fly."
    By and by Anamique formed a resolution: If James asked her to
marry him, she would answer him. The first word she would ever speak aloud
would be yes.
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    SEVEN The Gloating Demon
    Crouched in the garden muttering, Vasudev saw the light in
Anamique's eyes and gave a loathsome gloating chuckle.
    The girl was in love! Nothing could scatter caution like love.
Nothing could turn a girl silly half so fast as a handsome soldier whispering
in her ear! And a soldier begging her to talk, no less! It was so
perfect it almost made Vasudev believe in Providence, but he knew the way the
cogs worked and whirred in the winding up and down of human lives. Gods though
there might be, they cared little for the minutiae. If an English soldier had
lived through the bloodiest war the world had ever known and made his way half
around the planet to fall in love with this particular girl and goad her into
fulfilling her curse, well, Vasudev had only that mad bastard Chance to thank
for it, and he did.
    It came in the nick of time too. The old bitch wouldn't last much
longer. Vasudev gave her a week at the most. He chuckled again. Estella had
missed their tea that morning for the first time ever. He had waited for her in
Hell, his smile widening with each passing moment that didn't bring her tall,
spare silhouette down the black tunnel.
    He had her tonic in his pocket now, and went whistling up to her
ornate, filigreed palace to deliver it. "Good day to