Venom: A Thriller in Paradise (The Thriller in Paradise Series Book 3) by Rob Swigart Page B

shrugged and smiled at him apologetically. “Deceptive?” she said with a laugh.
    He started for a moment, as if he suddenly sensed a danger. “How so?” he asked softly.
    “Oh,” she made a helpless gesture, sliding her palm up to his bicep. “Ι don’t really know. It’s just that under the surface that looks so peaceful, so much like paradise, it must be like everywhere else. People have passions, fears, worries. They fight, get sick, give birth, die. You know? Yet from here it looks absolutely changeless and peaceful.”
    “Ah,” He said, relaxing. “You are a… thoughtful woman. That is very nice. I like that.” She felt a warmth she had not felt in a long time.
    They walked on. It was clear now that they would not talk about what they were going to do, though they both knew. When they stopped to examine something in the upper gardens, he looked out over the ocean, allowing the sun to shine into his eyes so he had to squint a little, hooding the gray clarity in them. His profile was clean, with elegant lines.
    Later, when they were in a broad one-story building that housed several rooms containing row upon row of aquariums, he put his arm around her waist. They had drifted through a room with a shark exhibit and another of tropical fish, and had finally come to one with shellfish and snails.
    “You see that?” he said, indicating a horizontal spiral shell moving slowly along the sandy bottom of the tank. The shell was about five or six inches long. “A cone snail. A geography cone, because the pattern looks like a map, very lovely shell, yes?”
    “Yes,” she said. Her voice was a little thick. She leaned against him, hugged his arm to her with her own, letting him cup the soft ample flesh of her breast.
    “Watch,” he said, pointing with his free hand.
    The snail stopped moving and allowed a slender, pale worm-like organ to emerge. A school of blennies formed, darted here and there, in perfectly coordinated quick turns and shifts. They rose as one to the top, nuzzled the undersurface, darted suddenly to the far end, then returned. As suddenly as their pattern had formed, it dissolved.
    One fish drifted away and, nosed at the rock, its small oval mouth working at invisible particles. The snail did not move, but the proboscis extended an inch or so and waved slowly, as if wafting back and forth by the current.
    The fish darted an inch or two in the direction of the snail, then a fraction away. The snail slithered a bit out of its shell. The blenny, unaware, moved another inch, settled to the sand, and did not move.
    The snail’s proboscis extended toward the fish so slowly it did not appear to move at all. Cupped around the base of the serpentine organ was a sheath. There was about it such an air of animal sexuality that Narni shivered against him, despite the heat. She was not wearing a bra under her light jersey, and she could feel her nipples tighten against his fingers.
    “What’s he going to…?” she began, but the proboscis suddenly darted the fraction of an inch remaining between it and the fish, the blenny thrashed briefly, seemingly attached to the snail, then fell still, paralyzed.
    She watched in fascinated horror as the snail’s mouth distended and moved behind the fish, engulfed its tail, and millimeter by millimeter swallowed it. The mouth itself, much longer than the proboscis, now lay on the sand as the snail began to digest its meal. It looked like a miniature python extended from the shell.
    “It shoots a barbed dart called a radula into the fish,” he said softly. She trembled against him, her breathing shallow and fast. “Propelled, how do you say, hydraulically by a very effective venom, a paralytic. Fish cannot move, cannot… breathe.”
    “It’s awful,” she said.
    “No. It is the Bounty of Nature.”
    He said it without apparent irony, and her nervous laugh stopped abruptly. But her breath tightened, and their return together in her rental car was confirmed,