The Doomsday Testament(60)

‘I’ll remember that. OK, it’s interesting, but where does it take us?’

‘Precisely nowhere,’ she admitted. ‘I can’t find anything about Goethe meeting up with Mephistopholes. What we need is a really good biography. I doubt if the hotel will have one.’

‘No, but there’ll be a library in town . . . I think one of us should stay here and keep checking online, while the other finds the book.’

‘I’m the one who graduated summa cum laude. I’ll take the library,’ she said grandly. ‘You can stay here with the laptop, but no peeping at my Facebook page.’

He opened his mouth to say something, but she put a finger to his lips. ‘I know. I’ll take care.’





* * *


It was three hours before she reappeared. ‘Remind me never, ever to volunteer again. When I got there, this greasy librarian looked down his nose at a pesky foreigner speaking lousy German, but after I asked him for books about Goethe he couldn’t get enough of me. I’d get started on one, then he’d come along with another. Have you seen the size of German biographies? I could have built a cabin. He started talking and boy that guy could talk. Goethe and politics, Goethe and philosophy, Goethe and religion. When he got to Goethe and sex, I was outa there.’

Jamie waited patiently, familiar enough with her now to know she was toying with him. ‘But?’

She grinned. ‘But I got it. Walter Brohm was a little cavalier with the facts. Goethe never actually met Mephistopholes, but he decided to write Faust after a scary encounter in the mist on a big ol’ hill somewhere in the Harz Mountains.’

‘The Brocken?’

‘Now how did you know that?’

‘Because I found a version of the Faust play on the internet. The Harz Mountains were where Mephistopholes took Faust to see the devil. Listen to this: The witches hie to the Brocken top, yellow the stubble and green the crop.’

‘Avoid the witches’ trail, huh.’

‘I think we should pack.’

She looked at him a certain way and he felt something melt inside.

‘I have another idea.’





XXIX


SEX, WHEN YOU’RE new to each other, can sometimes be awkward. It all gets hot and heavy a little too quickly and unless you’re a proper Casanova, no one’s quite sure what to do precisely when. The result is that you spend so much time wondering if the other party is having a good time that you don’t have a good time yourself. It wasn’t like that at all.

Jamie was astonished at the emotions Sarah stirred in him; a raw carnality he’d never experienced before, allied to a profound tenderness that couldn’t be far short of what he presumed was love. Her lips tasted somewhere between sweet cinnamon and heather honey and her skin was as soft and downy to the touch as his imagination had told him it would be. They had been sharing kisses for a few minutes when she drew in a deep breath, her eyes opened wide and her body gave a long shudder.

‘No,’ she said, loosening her grip on him.

Inwardly Jamie groaned. Christ, what had he done wrong?

‘Not like this. Like this.’ Her fingers flew to the buttons on her black cotton shirt and with remarkable speed they were undone and the shirt thrown aside. As he watched with his heart pounding somewhere in his throat, her hands reached behind her and with a single movement her bra was gone. She stood before him for a second, allowing his eyes to feast on her body and his mouth felt as if it was filled with sand. The clothes she wore had camouflaged the full wonder of her breasts, which were heavy and rounded for such a slim figure, with small dark nipples engorged to the size of ripe blackcurrants. Her eyes were wild and amused and inviting all at the same time. He moved towards her.

‘Wait!’

Now her hands were at her belt, and the button of her black jeans. She bent and slipped them over her hips, sliding one leg down at a time and kicking them off. Her underwear was black and silky and he wondered if she’d been prepared for this to happen and cursed himself for not making it happen sooner. Now she teased him, half turning while she slid them down her long legs so that it wasn’t until she turned back that he had a view of her sex, which was blush and swollen and partially hidden by a thin line of sparse dark down. She stood before him, hands hanging loose, hips thrust forward as if she was offering herself. He found he could barely breathe. Again he moved, tugging at his shirt, but she shook her head and glided across the silk map and the tracing paper, which crinkled beneath her feet with each step. She wrapped herself around him, like a beautiful python coiling itself around its prey, and drew him to the floor on top of her.