«I suppose it's possible, Richard, and yet I find it very strange in a big handsome brute like you. Something is dreadfully wrong. Do you suppose it could be me? Something about me, in your subconscious? You detest me? You don't really want me?» Blade tried to laugh it off and felt like all the fools in the world. «Of course I want you, Meg. I don't love you, and I certainly don't hate you, but I certainly do want you.»

They were sitting at the little bar in her bedroom suite, both naked. Meg French-Taylor was a tall woman, just thirty, with firm high breasts and the long sinuous legs of a dancer. She had an Irish skin, moist and creamy; her mouth was voluptuous and her nose patrician. Before her marriage to doddering old Sir Hugh French-Taylor, she had been plain Maggie Kirkbride. She was a successful model and was seen monthly in the ladies' slick magazines. What the ancient knight contrived to do with her was a puzzle to her friends, as well as to the vulgar public, but she did not enlighten them. The truth was that she had married Sir Hugh for his money; he had married her for her beauty. They had made a bargain, each to go his own way. The knight to pursue his young workmen and waiters, she to quench a sexual appetite that had been long abuilding, for she had been chary of giving herself freely until she had status and money. Now that she had it, and her lawyers had all the proper papers signed by the old man locked in their strongboxes, she had let herself go. She was known as the lay of London and didn't care a whit. There was a lot of the natural aristocrat in Meg and now she could afford to let it show.

So now, as she toyed with Richard Blade's penis and got no response, she was not so much frustrated as puzzled. With her beauty and skills, she would have wagered on provoking a response in any man under eighty. Her husband was seventy-odd and she had stirred him on their first night. It had not happened again because he did not really like women sexually, but it had happened. And now from this gorgeous man, Blade, absolutely nothing.