Chapter 1
AS THE TRAIN approached her destination, Nola Pilgrim sat up expectantly in her seat, displaying a body of utter witchery and a face to match, the face having the advantage of big hazel eyes and a frame of eddying corn-gold hair. None of this was lost on a young man across the aisle. A few minutes later he hastened to assist when Nora stood up to retrieve her bags from the overhead rack. She gave him one of her smiles, which he considered reward enough, and in his stunned condition he stammered regrets that she would be getting off at the next stop.
"Have to," said Nola. "I'm going home."
On the rocking platform, waiting for the clacking train to halt, she noted that her arm Was still tingling where the young man had briefly touched it. What, she wondered, made her so susceptible to males? She reveled in their glances, their touches, the pleasure they showed when she gave any of them her company. Not that she permitted them to go too far; she was a well-brought-up girl and, besides, knew her way around. But, of course, there had been occasions. Like that one yesterday morning, she reminded herself, and had the grace to blush.
The patient had been a stalwart boy, brought into the hospital with a progressive nerve deterioration that could only end in paralysis and death. As his nurse, Nola had come into the most intimate contact with him daily. His hunger for her had been so obvious, his humble yet pleading eyes so melting, that in her pity she had locked the door-and had ministered to him with her warm silky body. Well, she was not sorry, thought Nola, lifting her chin. She had not got anything physical out of it. In fact, the episode had left her stinging with unfulfilled need. But she had given that poor lad the last and only experience of love he would ever know.
Nola felt the train start to slow down. Too bad there had been so little chance for fraternization at the hospital. It was a huge place, handling every type of patient, and the student nurses had been kept too busy to do much playing. But she was grateful to the venerable institution. She was leaving it as a fully qualified graduate nurse. Soon she would be joining her brother, Bridge Pilgrim, who managed a quite large farm. A plantation, they called it in these parts. She would help out as his housekeeper, but meant to find a job at some clinic in the area or with a busy physician. She hoped she would like it around here. She and Bridge, who had been very close since the death of their parents, had been raised in the wheat country hundreds of miles to the north.
The train jerked, squealed, jerked again and stopped. In a few moments, Nola was standing alone with her bags, the only passenger to disembark. The train pulled out. Nola peered about her anxiously. Bridge was not in sight.
Then a man walked up to her. A man still quite young, hardly more than twenty-one, tall and rather thin, with a bony face that bore a sparse, ridiculous chin-beard. "Nola Pilgrim?"
"That's right."
"My name is Barry Norton. Your brother asked me to pick you up. Come on, I'll drive you home."
He lifted her bags and walked to his parked station wagon. It was an expensive model, quite new, and Nola got into it without question.
Normally Nola was pretty careful about things like that. But there was a peculiar hypnotic quality to the man's pale-blue eyes that had disarmed her. Now, as they rode along in silence and he cast repeated sidelong glances at her face, her rounded bosom, her legs, that quality began to disturb her. Furthermore, there was a strange animal vitality about the fellow, a kind of magnetic force that seemed to tug at her; this was even more disturbing.
"Bridge is busy?" she asked uneasily.
"He's castrating calves this afternoon," said Barry.
"What!"
"Making steers out of bulls." Barry licked his lips.
Nola fell silent. The miles sped under the wheels. She had no idea how far off the farm was, but it seemed to her that the trip was taking an inordinately long time. After a while, Barry pointed the station wagon into a narrow dirt road. It threaded dense forest that hardly looked to Nola like farmland. When the road became little more than a dusty, rutted track, she moved herself as far away as possible from Barry on the seat.
"Where is the place?" she asked. "Have we much more to go?"
"Oh," said Barry, giving her one of those glances, "we're stopping at my camp first. It's right on the river. People in these parts, you know, keep a shack somewhere for hunting and fishing."
"But-"
"You'll like it," said Barry. "My camp. Barry Norton's camp. No woman has ever been there. You would not be going there, either, if it weren't for the poetry of your walk-the way your hips sway and bend, the silky motions of your waist. God, I'd like to see all that in the nude. May I?"
Nola was speechless. She glared at him, meaning to tell him off in no uncertain terms.
But his gaze, meeting hers, seemed to hypnotize her. Pale eyes. They seemed to transmit to her own eyes a vision of herself standing nude before him. She could not shake off the picture.
Then he returned his attention to the road and the spell was broken, at least to a degree. She was about to protest, to scream, when unexpectedly the track widened into a clearing.
He stopped the car and turned off the ignition. Before she knew what he intended, his hot devouring mouth was covering hers. His animal spirit seemed to smother her and her will trickled away like water from a broken bottle. He bent her inward to him and clutched her ravenously, then suddenly released her.
When she could think, she realized he was staring at her. Her lips felt as if needles had punctured them. A shuddering wave of air suctioned into her lungs. Those eyes of his were drilling into her brain and collapsing her resistance.
He began to stroke the length of her exposed thigh. Electricity leaped. All her animal instincts soared to meet his. She was helpless. Not only couldn't she stop him- she didn't want to.
"Now I'll show you my camp," he said, and the pale eyes were suddenly opaque.
They left the car. Taking her hand, he led her across the clearing to the cabin on the far side.
It was an old affair, rather capricious, but had been put together originally with care, stout lumber and a good eye. Unfortunately, a couple of generations of neglect had ravaged it. Boards hung loose, panes were broken, nails had rusted. The roof was sway-backed and the steps humped. Ivy and creepers invaded even the doorway.
Beyond the cabin, the meandering river could be glimpsed. Dazzling sun slanted over the treetops, blinding Nola, so that inside the cabin all seemed dark at first. Then she adjusted to the diminished light-and cried out in wonder.
For the cabin's interior, though as decrepit and dusty as the outside, was a riot of flaming color and fascinating pattern. Every wall was blanketed by unframed paintings, some small, others huge, all startling in their power.
"Exhibited in New Orleans before I was out of high school," said Barry. "Had a show in Dallas last year. And I took first prize at the Mississippi art festival." These utterances were made without pride or any other emotion. They were simply statements of fact. "Could have sold every canvas, if I'd wanted to." He laughed. "I'd rather keep 'em."
Nola knew nothing of art. But she felt the enormous vigor of the paintings she beheld-landscapes, still lifes, nudes, all done with clear, thundering authority. "That's why this shack means so much to you?" she asked. "You do your work here?"
"Nope. I work at my house. I have a secret place in the attic." Again he laughed. "I like secrets, don't you?"
"But," she persisted with a kind of desperation, "isn't this the reason you asked me to undress? You need someone to pose-"
"I told you I do no work here. You know the reason I want you naked." The hypnotic eyes were searching her again. "Don't you? Well, don't you?"
Nola nodded mutely. What manner of man was this who painted like a genius, fixed her with his eye like a snake hypnotizing a bird, filled her with the overflow of his magnetic animal spirit? Or was it none of these things, really, that had her blood racing, her nerves quivering? Was it just the piquant danger of the situation, the knowledge that she was in this man's power, that he could ravish her if he wanted to? Was it, alternatively, the unsatisfied longing left in her by the embraces of that sick boy the day before-a longing so intense that any man, even an odd stranger, could trigger it? She had better be on her guard. She had better not encourage this Barry person further.
"So go ahead. Undress," he said.
"Absolutely not. And now that I've seen your paintings, it's time you took me to my brother."
His response was simple. He stepped closer to her, seized her.
She was so shocked she forgot to struggle, and he succeeded easily in stripping off her yellow summer frock without damaging it.
Nola snapped back to awareness, then. She twisted, fought. To get her out of her undergarments, he had to rip them to pieces.
He threw her on the dilapidated bunk in a corner of the main room. Sun found chinks in the walls and sent spears of gold to splash on the floor, on the couple struggling under tiers of color-wild canvases.
Barry did not strike her as she clawed at him and writhed. It was as if he knew that soon her defenses would dissolve. Gasping for breath, wracked by her own mounting impulses and desires, Nola wrestled crazily, screamed as his hands gripped her thighs and inexorably forced them apart. But the first sharp contact stilled her completely.
As he forced his lust upon her, nobly she tried again to throw him off. But all her healthy juices were boiling. Her twistings and twitches, tokens of her resistance, ingloriously ceased. Willy-nilly she gave herself up to the all-consuming fire, the blistering delight, that possessed every cell of her supple young body.
Sensation served, joy fled quickly. For a few seconds Nola lay still, trying to recapture the steps that had brought her to this rapturous but totally shameful madness. Suddenly violent reaction seized her. With a furious flounce, she dispossessed him and bounded to her feet. She glanced at her torn panties, decided to abandon them. As she shrugged into her dress, she felt violently ill.
"Please take me home," she said tightly.
"What's the hurry?"
She looked down at him. "You're rotten, do you know that? Any man who forces a girl-" Barry swung off the bunk. "You wanted it as much as I did."
"Yes, and if you were man enough, you might have induced me to choose to give it to you. But you're no man. You had to force me-force me-" Her voice wailed hysterically.
He stared at her for a moment in pale-eyed silence. Then he raised his right hand, slammed it backhanded across her face with force enough to knock her sprawling. He stood over her while she climbed slowly to her feet, fingers pressed to her bruised left eye. Could such things actually be happening to her or was she dreaming them? A sense of total unreality possessed her. She was too dissociated even to be frightened.
"Take me home," she said mechanically.
"Sure," he said in a pleasant voice.
And he did take her home, chattering cheerfully all the way as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
When Barry dropped Nola at the cottage, her brother was nowhere in sight. For this she was profoundly grateful. Barry made no attempt to help with the luggage, watching amiably as she unloaded it herself.
But as she started for the house, he said, "I wouldn't mention our fun to anyone. Let's keep it our secret. I told you I like secrets." He started the engine. "Some day I'll be back for you."
"You'd better not," she told him with bleak earnestness.
"Sure I will." He waggled a forefinger at her. "You were the best girl I ever had. Delicious. And so easy!"