Laura Saunders gazed out the large picture window of her new home in Park Palisades, California, watching the sizable breakers sweeping in off the sea to thrust themselves in a flash of frothy white spray against the gigantic rock formations that ran the entire length of the coast as far as the eye could see. In this section of California, with its starkly emergent coastline, the young wife had the constant feeling that the sea meant to destroy the land. Lord knew it tried hard enough. Every other day there was a report of some additional section of Highway 101 sliding into the ocean and being devoured in the water's bottomless depths.

Did this mean necessarily that everyone then promptly moved further inland in fear. No, of course not, she thought. People around here simply waited for their own house to go – occasionally with them in it. You just weren't anybody in California if your home wasn't occasionally washed into the sea or destroyed in a roaring forest fire. But they always came back, to build again, didn't they? Like lemmings moving resolutely toward destruction, in the exact same area. It was so beautiful here, though, with the sloping hills before windy, wave-broken, steep-cliffed terraces. So beautiful.

Laura sighed. She pushed her fingers into her long blonde hair and threw her head back and to one side as if to smooth out the waves of shimmering gold which ran all the way down her back to the sensual up-curve of her nicely rounded buttocks. In the Quaker home where Laura had been brought up, it was considered a rather serious moral offense for a girl to cut her hair. And consequently hers was as long as a young school girl's.

She smoothed her hands voluptuously over the flare of her well-rounded hips and thought about her new life in this community. Ever since she and her husband had come to Park Palisades there had been one distraction after another, what with Ralph setting up his new practice as one of the town's few physicians, and now being called out suddenly time after time.