Free The Ghost Orchid by Carol Goodman

Latham for a god of any sort.
    “Did anyone see you come?” he asks, already pushing away her cloak and pulling her down into his lap.
    She thinks about the girl in the white chemise but tells him no, because it’s what he wants to hear. He’s holding her breast with one hand and with the other parting her legs. Corinth straddles him and lowers herself down, letting out a gasp that Milo takes for pleasure but which is really the pain of her knees scraping against the rough stone bench. She braces her hands against the wall to lift herself up and feels herself soaring above him—she is the winged god swooping down to take whatever she needs—but when she closes her eyes, she sees the girl in the white chemise standing at the window. No, no reason to tell him about her. The window she was standing at was Corinth’s own. Corinth stretches her arms high above herself on the wall, finds a crack in the stone, and digs her fingers into it until she can feel the stone scraping away her skin.

 
    Chapter Five
    “The third line is the prisoner of the rhyme,” Zalman announces at breakfast.
    “Why is that?” I ask.
    “I should think it would be obvious,” Bethesda says, lifting the silver serrated spoon (part of the original silverware Aurora designed for Bosco when, at the end of her life, she was planning the estate’s conversion to an artists’ colony) from the edge of her grapefruit and pointing it in my direction. “It’s the first line that has to conform to one of the other lines. It has to rhyme with the first line if you’re writing an Elizabethan sonnet—”
    “And with the second if it’s going to be a Petrarchan sonnet,” Zalman finishes for her, beaming across the table at Bethesda. “You’re a fan of the sonnet, then, Miss Graham?”
    Bethesda saws a sliver of grapefruit onto her spoon and chews it thoughtfully before answering. I realize I’m holding my breath, afraid that Bethesda will unleash one of her critical storms on poor Zalman, who looks so innocent, from his gleaming bald pate to the sprig of rosemary in the buttonhole of his pale blue Mexican wedding shirt.
    “When it’s done well,” Bethesda answers, when she has swallowed her mouthful of grapefruit.
    “I don’t see the point of it,” Nat says. “Why write in an antiquated form? Isn’t it a bit of an affectation?”
    “My teacher, Richard Scully, always said that there was a discipline to working within a form,” I say, anxious to defend Zalman.
    “ Dick Scully?” Nat asks, taking a sip of his black coffee. “Is he the one who encouraged to you to write a gothic romance?”
    “I’m not—” I begin, not sure what to be more hurt by—the disparaging way he’s referred to my mentor or his calling my novel a romance.
    “Isn’t everything a form of some sort?” David Fox puts in. I give him a small smile, sure that he’s trying to defend me, but wishing he’d leave it. It’s foolhardy, really, considering he’s the only nonwriter at the table. In the first week of October all the artists and composers in the outlying cottages left; only the four of us writers and David Fox have remained in the main house for the winter residency. “The thriller, the gothic romance, the novel of manners,” David continues, “the angry-young-man bildungsroman? Isn’t that your genre, Nathaniel?”
    A deathly silence falls over the table that only Zalman, humming to himself as he butters his toast, seems oblivious of. Has David really just called Nat Loomis a genre writer? Although I know he’s only trying to speak up for me, I’m afraid he’s gone too far.
    Finally, after taking another sip of coffee and assembling his features into the patient mask of someone dealing with a very young and not very bright child, Nat answers. “Some writers are slaves to the form. They’re called genre writers. And some endeavor to explode the form. They’re called artists.”
    “I see,” David says, “and so what exactly in your novel