Read Online Sarah's Window by Janice Graham - Free Book Online Page A

felt himself whisked silently and painlessly along that old Wilde current.
    Susan Blackshere, National Merit Scholar and Phi Beta Kappa, had graduated summa cum laude from the University of Kansas, gone on for her MBA at Wharton, and immediately taken up a high-paying job with a prestigious Kansas City brokerage firm as an assistant portfolio manager. The fact that her father, although deceased when Susan was only five, had seen fit to make her trustee of her own estate upon her majority, and with title to a little land and more than a little wealth, showed either extreme folly or extraordinary insight on the part of the old man. The latter turned out to be true.
    John was quick to recognize how Susan's many qualities complemented his own. She was cool, tempered reason to his energy and animation. When he tended to leap blindly ahead, she would calmly reel him back, settle him down, and start him off again. She was almost five years older than he, and she was the first woman he had ever met who held his attention past the third date. Her physical attributes were certainly not lacking, but their lovemaking was only a preliminary hurdle to be negotiated so they might proceed to the far more stimulating realms of the mind. For John, who had never had difficulty finding women who wanted to sleep with him, it was only natural that he confused this cerebral infatuation with love. It would take many years for that other side of him to be awakened.
     
    John took Susan home to meet his parents one Saturday evening in June. Kansas summers are notoriously muggy, and that evening, like most summer evenings, the Wildes kept to the cool confines of their bay-windowed sitting room while Nancy's pot roast simmered away in the kitchen. John had taken the club chair while Susan stood at the bar next to Armand, who was ceremoniously mixing Bloody Marys, which they always drank in the summer, although John never really liked the drink much. Susan, it turned out, was truly fond of them, liked a sharp dash of Tabasco, which she boldly requested from Armand Wilde while she rattled off a complicated formula for managing the withdrawal of retirement funds. What John liked above all was the way Susan seemed to just step in and take over for him, like a human shield. She deflected all that terrifying focus of attention that had dogged him since his childhood. Now, for the first time in his young adult life, he sat in his parents' home, drank a gin and tonic instead of a Bloody Mary, and relaxed.
    When Susan turned in mid-conversation and, seeing there was no seat beside John, lowered her long legs to the floor and settled comfortably at his feet, hiding her size-ten shoes artfully in the drapes of her black silk pants, John imagined he saw a glimmer of lust in his father's eyes. Then, a little later, while still in the throes of balanced portfolios, John dangled his empty glass next to Susan's ear and ever so discreetly rattled the ice cubes, a gesture he had watched his father repeat over the years to his mother who would, without batting an eye, step over and pick up his glass and refill it. John was waiting for a pause, waiting for her to turn a bemused eye on him and lance him with a dry smile, but she did not. Instead, she set down her own drink, rose to her full five-foot ten-inch height, removed the glass from his hand, and whisked across the room with a rustle of silk to the bar where she mixed John another gin and tonic as if she had been doing it all her life.
    There could be no surer test of authenticity than this.
    But the Wildes saw even more; they saw a potentially powerful ally, someone with a faultless guidance system, a characteristic Armand Wilde appreciated in humans as well as in defense systems. Her career, in one form or another, was viable in every region of the world, in every economic climate. She could follow John to Stanford, Columbia, even Copenhagen. She would be more than succor and balm; she would lay down the track upon