Then she turned around, and I gave my instincts an A plus.
Her eyes were the deepest of blues, actually a purple tone, and they were wide, serious and shining. There was a certain determination about the set of her jaw that I liked, and her lips were like soft red velvet. A man could kiss those lips and sink slowly into warm crimson seas; lose himself in the heated softness of their gentlest pressures.
"Delvin!"
Baxter's voice shattered my reverie, and I tore my eyes from the girl, though the after-effects of dreaming left my mind in confused fragments. "Huh?" I said, looking at his face and almost failing to recognize it.
"I said—" Baxter's voice was impatient and over loud, "—that you had best, in the interests of open-space safety, not flash that Amnesty while you're aboard the Valkyrie. Passengers have a way of working themselves into a panic that is almost an uncanny gift! They'll all start suspecting their neighbors of treason, or worse, and—"
But I wasn't hearing his diatribe any more. As he'd spoken that first sentence, the girl with the shimmering cornsilk hair had been passing within a few feet of us, and I'd felt, rather than actually seen, her slender shoulders stiffen beneath the blue silken fabric of her blouse. And she'd hesitated for a moment in midstep, as though she were going to turn about and see which man in the universe was the one to whom the Amnesty had been given.
I watched her move out into the sunlight, crossing the field in brisk but dainty strides. Any second now, I told myself. She thinks she hasn't been seen. She's getting far enough away so that—Aha! Now!
Halfway to the ship, the girl turned, apparently busily concerned about the clasp of her handbag, as though it had come open without warning. I kept my head turned, to look as though I were watching Baxter. But my eyes were still on her. She looked at me. Then she turned and went on toward the ship.
"Had to see who I was!" I said to myself. "So now she knows I've got the Amnesty. And so—And so, what?"