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Author's note:  The story becomes third-person at this point for no other reason than that I wrote this part first, before deciding to expand the story to encompass the first eighteen days in the relationship.  Then I was too lazy to go through this and change it to match. 

He builded better than he knew;--

The conscious stone to beauty grew.

Clarice sauntered past him, not touching him, just close enough to disturb the air around him.

She was very much aware of the sensuous image she presented, with the flowing length of champagne satin billowing behind her calves as she swept across the broad expanse of marble to stand at the open French doors.  One shoulder casually propped against the doorframe, she watched the sea froth, fighting the gravity of its keeper, even as she fought hers.  She felt him watching her, her form clearly backlit in the pool of sunlight pouring through the spot she chose with deliberation.

But he did not come.

But she knew he wanted to.

And that was almost winning.  Turning her head ever so slightly, she sent a look in his direction.  Yes.  He was very much aware that she was aware.  She waited, breath bated, curved iron wills glancing in silent engagement. 

And then he was gone. 

Victory was a quiet, hollow necessity for Clarice Starling.  She turned her far seeing gaze back out to sea, and the zephyr hand dried her sheen of remorse.  Confused at her own unwillingness to explore her impetus to prolong this deadly…Armageddon…of theirs, she found herself gravitating towards the elegant wingback he favored in the mornings. 

Ensconced in its prim-plush hold, she closed her eyes and inhaled his scent, and though her conscious self still foundered, a primal awareness existed as to why she stayed with a man who had decreed that she should not live.

*  *  *

It was dark when the front door swung silently on its hinges, and the master of the house entered just as silently.  He was immediately aware of the heart beating within his home, of the woman breathing the short, even breaths of sleep.  The stairs were no obstacle to his fleet passage as he approached the room through the shadows. 

A pause at the door.  A moment, breathless, a throbbing at the temple, and he seemed to burst through an invisible barrier into the moon kissed room. 

Touching was a miraculous experience.  His very cell particles sought something from hers.  For eighteen nights, theirs' was the purest sexual relation humans could achieve, but with one look from her today, it had become something very different.  No longer did his awareness remain a spectral third in a baleful undertaking.  There was strange fulfillment in contact.  It was communication on a kinetic level of what he could not say, what she could not face.

*  *  *

The sea before him shimmered beneath the bright Pleiades, and Lecter allowed the water to gently lap at his feet.  It was not the cold that made him shiver.  He had spent the whole day quietly watching her some distance from the house, ready.  But she had not attempted to leave.

Things were not going as he'd planned.  Always ready and able to adapt to the unexpected, he'd even considered this possibility—however remote—but he hadn't accounted for his own reaction to her.  He'd let the drugs fade from her system.  Tonight was to be the night.  When she'd figured it out, he'd intended for her to do so.  What he had not accounted for was the equipollence of her game.  His muscles clenched in remembrance of their impassioned congress only minutes before.

He'd had her in every way over the weeks, but had somehow kept it impersonal, one could say, recreational.  He'd been so careful, keeping conversation to a minimum.  Yet for all his effort, she hadn't had to utter a word in the end.  She'd merely grasped him as he'd made to leave tonight, pulling him into her warm embrace, kissing his breast softly once before resting her cheek gently against his heart.

He'd fled the moment she fell asleep, possibly waking her—he did not know, he'd gone so quickly.

*  *  *