'This is going to be a pleasure!' He laughed aloud.
Fifty yards below the drift where the road crossed the stream
Shermaine found a shallow pool. There were reeds with fluffy heads
around it and a small beach of white river sand, black boulders,
polished round and glossy smooth, the water almost blood warm and so
clear that she could see a shoal of fingerlings nibbling at the green
algae that coated the boulders beneath the surface.
She stood barefooted in the sand and looked around carefully, but the
reeds screened her, and she had asked Jacque not to let any of his men
come down to the river while she was there.
She undressed, dropped her clothes across one of the black boulders and
with a cake of soap in her hand waded out into the pool and lowered
herself until she sat with the water up to her neck and the sand
pleasantly rough under her naked behind.
She washed her hair first and then lay stretched out with the water
moving gently over her, soft as the caress of silk.
Growing bold the tiny fish darted in and nibbled at her skin, tickling,
so that she gasped and splashed at them.
At last she ducked her head under the surface and, with the water
streaming out of her hair into her eyes, she groped her way back to the
bank.
As she stooped, still half blinded, for her towel Wally Hendry's hand
closed over her mouth and his other arm circled her waist from behind.
'One squeak out of you and I'll wring your bloody neck.' He spoke
hoarsely into her ear. She could smell his breath, warm and sour in her
face. 'Just pretend I'm old Bruce then both of us will enjoy
it.' And he chuckled.
Sliding quickly over her hip his hand moved downwards and the shock of
it galvanized her into frantic struggles.
Holding her easily Hendry kept on chuckling.
She opened her mouth suddenly and one of his fingers went in
between her teeth. She bit with all her strength and felt the skin break
and tasted blood in her mouth.
'You bitch!' Hendry jerked his hand away and she opened her mouth to
scream, but the hand swung back, clenched, into the side of her face,
knocking her head across. The scream never reached her lips for
he hit her again and she felt herself falling.
Stunned by the blows, lying in the sand, she could not believe it was
happening, until she felt his weight upon her and his knee forced
cruelly between hers.
Then she started to struggle again, trying to twist away from his mouth
and the smell of his breath.
'No, no, no.' She repeated it over an dover, her eyes shut tightly so
she did not have to see that face above her, and her head rolling from
side to side in the sand. He was so strong, so immensely powerful.
'No,' she said, and then, 'Ooah!' at the pain, the tearing stinging pain
within, and the thrusting heaviness above.
And through the pounding, grunting, thrusting nightmare she could smell
him and feel the sweat drip from him and splash into her upturned
