And what a man he was, she had to admit, a secret tingling of excitement spreading through her loins. He stood in a lord-like, animalistic splendor, not arrogance or cruel maliciousness – only with the innate healthiness of an earthy, hedonistically-oriented male. He took his women, a modern-day Ghengis-Khan or Viking; from his flaxen, wavy hair down to his strong, muscular legs, he was the conqueror. No, she couldn't turn him out or deny him his physical pleasure any more than the maidens of Rome could do anything but melt to the ravishments of the Visgoth barbarians. She couldn't, because the pure and basic magnetism between a man – a true man – and a healthy woman wouldn't allow it. She felt this without knowing it, without admitting it.

Her mind, a product of puritanical society, was no match for her body, the evolution of hundreds of thousands of years of instinct. Adam and Eve didn't worry about proprieties, only about the heat and needs of one another, and their mingling seeds had been refined and sophisticated, but were still the foundation for both Marleen and David.

Dizzily, she heard herself reply in a way which an hour ago she would have labeled as impossible. From a mouth which seemed not her own, came the echoing words: "I'm an adult, David, and once was happily married. Have your visitors as often as you like, but all I ask is that you be discreet. Not for my sake as much as for my daughter's."

"I understand," Preston said huskily.

Marleen returned to managing the shop after David Preston left. She took care of the customers in a peripheral, dazed way, her mind still charged with the emotion of meeting a man who attracted her tremendously, who had awakened her drives and needs and made her aware that she was a woman. It was a tremendous jolt to her nervous system, and though she had no intention of throwing herself at him, or even of being other than the distant, courteous, and civil neighbor and landlady that she had always been with her tenants, she still couldn't get the piquancy of his masculinity out of her nostrils or the tight band of jealousy from around her chest.