The ancestral home of the young heir to a vast, hereditary fortune was located in the heart of the eerie, fabled Dartmoor Moors – the home of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous Sherlock Holmes tale. The Hound of the Baskervilles. It was isolated, the nearest neighbor being over four miles away, and while offering that hint of forbidden mystery intimated by its location, it also offered luxury and comfort and relaxation in its stately and baronial rooms and halls. Both attributes appealed to the young wife's nature, and she was looking forward to that afternoon and the drive to Dartmoor with Lena in the Alvaros new Jaguar 4.8 sedan – but she wished that her husband were going to be with them at Marlowe Manor for their entire stay there, and not just on the tag end of it.

Neal Court held his soft warm young wife for a moment longer, then stood her away from him gently and looked into her lovely face. He never tired of looking at her, at the fine, symmetrically formed features, the small pert nose and the wide, guileless blue eyes, the soft round mouth, the long cascading silkenness of her honey blonde hair falling about the shoulders of her plaid raincoat. Her full, firm, voluptuous breasts jutted forth with feminine allure even beneath the heavy garment, and the tight globular roundness of her buttocks were provocatively outlined as she stood in profile. She was a woman in a thousand, a million, he thought possessively; he was a damned lucky man to have a wife like Sharon, very damned lucky.

He chucked her lightly under the chin. "You'll have a wonderful time in Dartmoor, sweetheart," he told her. "But I don't want you going off by yourself on those moors. It can be dangerous out there, without someone along who knows his way around."