Page 41 of Iron Blade

But Kira Kekoa was something else entirely.

Unraveling her would be like peeling back the paint of one masterpiece, to find another painted underneath. Like Rembrandt’s Old Man in Military Costume, which was revealed to have a portrait painted underneath the final work - a portrait of a woman. Except Kira was a masterpiece after masterpiece, layer upon layer, ad infinitum. A lifetime of study would never reveal all that went on beneath the surface.

Even as these thoughts swirled in my mind, there was a string of melody that kept coming into my ears. I was humming it, before long.

Black is the color of my true love’s hair…

But the words kept changing in my mind. My mother’s lullaby turning somber, into something more like a funeral march. The words shifted and different lyrics popped into my mind.

Her lips deceive, her eyes despair. Mask so serene, with graceful hands, and I love the ground whereon she stands.

Despite her confession about her father, there was more that she had yet to tell me. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was lying, at least by omission, if not lying outright. It didn’t bother me, as such. Everyone had secrets, me included. But I knew that hers would blow up in my face.

I accepted it with surrender.

I relished the tragedy of it. All the world's great love stories are tragedies, aren’t they? I saw nothing different for her and me.

Fate. Tragedy. Love. All three words were one and the same.

When the rude, jarring light of day went from a pleasant glow to a harsh slant that crawled up the floor, to the couch, and up to her eyes, her lashes fluttered and she stirred.

She stretched, her beautiful body pulled taut, her breasts to the ceiling as she yawned. Her bleary, tired eyes looked around, resting on me as she smiled.

A smile so radiant, it rivaled the sun itself.

“Well, that’s a pleasant view to have in the morning,” I said, with a sigh, leaning against the coffee table and letting the sketch in my hand fall onto my lap.

“Did you sleep at all?” she asked, sitting up, pushing her hair from her face.

“No, my little muse. I was busy.” I indicated the papers on the table. Several had fallen onto the floor beside me. Black charcoal on a white, textured paper.

She leaned down to pick one up. It was an early sketch, where she was sleeping beneath a bower of branches, orchid blossoms hanging white and perfect, as if they were reaching to blanket her in their warmth. She was nude, of course, resting on her side, one leg curled over the other, as her hair formed the bed on which she rested.

“You’ve made me into a Celtic Goddess!” She almost looked offended by that fact.

“Greek, actually. As Shakespeare’s Titania.” I smiled, when she looked at me with shock in her dark eyes. Eyes as dark as my own. “You and I both know that Titania was modeled after Hera, the Queen of the Gods.”

“Titania wasn’t meant to look like me.” She let the paper fall from her fingertips.

“Why not?”

“Because… I don’t exactly have Greek features.”

“You are such a darling little muse,” I chuckled, as I placed my sketchpad on the floor, and crawled my way to her. “You are Isolde, Boudica, Juliet, Joan of Arc, the Virgin Mary, Penthesilea, Freyja, Catherina Sforza, and Aphrodite. You are Queen Liliuokalan, Catherine the Great, Eleanor of Acquitaine, and Ching Shih. From now, until the day I shut my eyes, they will all bear your likeness in my mind, and in my art.”

She looked at the drawings, and though she was a fairy queen in every single one, I knew that she would become every woman I named, and every great woman I hadn’t. Every legend, and story, every great beauty would bear her face.

“You’re insane,” she said, pulling her legs down from beneath the blanket, and laying her bare feet on the ground. “I look nothing like any of those women.”

“That is their loss. Not yours.”

It was hard to read her expression, when her dark eyes flashed towards me, her lips slightly parted as her chest rose and fell.

I was curious, though, to know what was crossing through that active mind of hers. What did she think? What did she feel? How did my worship affect her? Not that I would change my ways.

I was nothing, if not an honest man. Maybe I withheld the truth, but I did not lie. Not like she did.

She threw herself into my arms, her lips covering mine in a searing kiss.

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