"What's the matter?" she said, unzipping her jeans and stepping out of them. "I thought we were going swimming."

"I thought you'd be wearing a bathing suit," the shocked young man had said, his glasses fogging up even in the clear light of that sunny afternoon.

"You said it was a deserted beach," Blair said, "what's wrong with a nude swim?"

She stood staring at him, her hands thrust up to her hips and back arched bravely against the salty air.

"What if…" the startled lad began, "what if somebody sees you?"

"Then they do, I suppose," Blair shouted back. She was getting pretty fed up with Owen Divers and they'd only been together an hour.

"Does your father know you go around like that?" he asked, carefully lowering the zipper of his linen pants.

"My father doesn't much care how I go around," she said, shaking her head in disbelief that anybody could be so fucking dense as to object to a little nudity in such a private setting.

Owen stroked his razor-clean face and smiled a cautious, edgy grin, "maybe you'd like me to go in like that, too?"

"Do whatever you like," Blair called back to him as she kicked the sand up behind her heels and headed toward the noisy surf.

She didn't much care what Owen Divers did. Nor any of the men she had seen in the last few years. But there had been one… when was it… a long time ago. How far back was that?

It was in Ceylon. Sri Lanka, they called it now. In the jungles. She had only been twelve years old at the time. But it was a thing she had never forgotten.

Funny how some memories lingered and others just drifted off like fog in early morning. But this was one memory that stood out in her mind. One she couldn't forget, and didn't want to let go of.

There had been a temple. A kind of gold and ivory thing. Huge, forbidding, and completely overgrown with thick jungle foliage. Her father had set up his base of operations there, along with two of his associates and some local hands.