chin. "Oooh, bristle puss," she commented as she brushed her lips along his jaw.
Her words had a childlike timbre that unsettled him, quelling his growing desire. He placed his hands on her shoulders and put her at arm's length away from him. "Beth, you don't have to do this. I am not in the habit of playing house with hungry little girls. I should feed you and send you on your way."
Her lower lip set itself into a disappointed pout. With a puckered brow that made her look all the younger, she studied him. "I am not a little girl. What do you want, my birth certificate? You wouldn't be the first, if that's what you're afraid of."
Perhaps that was just the point. Without a word, Nicholas stood and picked his way around her discarded clothing to the bathroom, shutting the door in her face when she padded after him on her bare feet.
Her bath had made a shambles of his ordinarily shipshape bathroom. She had used no less than four towels and abandoned them in heaps on the floor. In the scum-ringed tub, the soap was softening in a puddle near the washcloth-blocked drain. The contents of her elephantine handbag had been spilled and scattered over the commode and countertop. Several clean and dripping panties and bras hung over the shower curtain rod. And there was no telling to what uses she had put his now-bedraggled shaving brush. "Damn," he grumbled and tossed it into the waste can.
Ignoring her tapping on the door, he shaved, using his fingers to spread the lather. When he found his toothbrush under a wad of crumpled Kleenex, he eyed it suspiciously, then yanked open the door and confronted her with it. "Was this anyplace other than your mouth?"
Beth stepped back, her hands on her hips. "I have my own toothbrush, sir. I wouldn't think of putting some stranger's in my mouth!"
"Hmmmph," he muttered, wondering at what logic allowed her to be a prude about her toothbrush and loose with her body. He shook his head and retreated to finish his tasks. The folly of his decision to bring her home weighed down on him, and he was determined to reverse it before things got out of control.
It wrangled Nicholas that she had made the approach. He wondered how many others had rejected her before he succumbed. How many other nights had she pulled the same routine? If she could say he was not the first, could she put a reasonable number to his ranking? Or had she already lost count?
No, he decided, he could not replace Janey with this one. He should not be thinking of replacing Janey at all. There had to be an end to it. If he fell into the trap of assuming that anyone, saint or slut, would do, then where was the mystery in it?
He was not being true to the magic if anyone would do, and that would make everything that had gone before more horrible than it already was. Janey was the last. He had to make her the last.
But when he emerged from the bathroom with her repacked satchel and with her wet undergarments rolled up in a clean, dry towel tucked under his arm, Nicholas knew it was too late. It was the sight of Beth tiptoed on a chair, reaching for a jar of peanut butter on a shelf far beyond the tips of her fingers, the effort raising the hem of the sweatshirt to the bottom pink curves of her rump that made it so.
They had two months. Though Beth said she had no experience with kindness, had never expected it from anyone, didn't quite know how to respond to it, for a while she had seemed to revel in it. The brittle edges of her undernourished body softened. A natural bloom on her cheeks belied her need for the rouge that was her addiction. Her hair, always her glory, acquired a deep, lustrous fire of its own.
He gave her money to buy clothes, and she spent her days shopping or watching television and regaled him with daily blow-by-blow descriptions of The Guiding Light and General Hospital.
And Nicholas hadn't suspected a thing until he found the photographs of Mitch in a roll of film he was developing.
"I don't know why you're so upset. I told you it's only sex with him. It's all he's capable of," she had informed him casually.
Nicholas wanted to threaten her with what he knew was in his