as never before. Watching, with a sense of wonder, how each breath
changed the shape of her heavily rounded breasts and how the nipples
firmed slowly and thrust out, darkening perceptibly until they were so
tight and hard that they pained her exquisitely.
She heard the crunch of his footsteps approach the tent, and her
breathing jammed, and she thought with a small shock that she might
suffocate and die. Then the flap of the tent swung open, and he
stooped through and stood tall, letting the flap fall closed behind
him.
Instinctively she covered herself, one arm folding across her chest and
the other hand spreading protective fingers over the mound of fine
fluff at the base of her belly.
He stood silently, outlined against the fire glow on the canvas,
and she began to breathe again, quick and shallow.
It seemed that he stood there for ever, silent and watchful, and she
felt the skin of her arms and thighs prickle with goose-flesh at the
slow steady scrutiny. Then he unbuttoned his shirt and let it slide to
the earth. The fire glow flickered on his finely muscled arms, they
rippled with a red gold sheen, like wet marble, as he moved.
He came at last to her bed and stood over her, and she wondered that
the body of a man could be so slim and supple, with such lovely line
and balance then she remembered how she had once stood before the
statue of Michelangelo's David with just the same depth of awe.
She lifted the hands that covered her own body, reached up like a
supplicant, and drew him down upon herself.
She woke once during the night, and the fire had died away outside the
tent, but a bright white moon had sailed up over the mountains and it
glowed now with a silvery light through the canvas above them,
striking down directly upon them.
The strange white light divested Gareth's sleeping face of all colour.
It was pale now, like that of a statue or of a corpse and
Vicky experienced a sudden revulsion of feeling. There was a small
dull weight at the back of her mind. When she examined it closely, she
found that it was guilt and she experienced a mild anger at a society
that had burdened her with that guilt. That she could not enjoy a man,
that her body could not be used as nature had intended without this
backlash of emotion.
She raised herself on one elbow, careful not to disturb the man beside
her, and she studied his face pondering this new sense of guilt, and
exploring her feelings for him.
Slowly she realized that the two were bound inextricably together.
There was no real depth to her feelings for Gareth Swales, she had been
carried along on a treacherous tide of fatigue and reaction from fear
and horror. The guilt she had experienced was a consequence of this
lack of substance, and she felt suddenly confused and sad.
She lay back beside the long fine length of his body, but now she had
moved slightly, so that they no longer touched.
She knew that after love, all animals are sad, but she thought that
there was more to her feelings than that.
Suddenly, without really knowing why, she thought of Jake Barton and
