Power of the Sword - Smith Wilbur - Страница 137

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Tara. She was tall, only a few inches below his own six foot, but her legs were like willow wands and her waist was like a reed.

Tara. She had the face of a madonna, a serene oval, and her complexion was a mixture of cream and flower petals, almost too perfect, yet redeemed from insipid vacuity by the smoking chestnut hair, her father's wide strong mouth and her own eyes, resilient as grey steel and bright with intelhgence and determination.

She greeted Centaine with the correct amount of deference and then turned to look directly at Shasa.

Shasa, you too remember Tara, Blaine told him. She came out to Weltevreden four years ago. Was this the same noisy little pest? Shasa stared at her the one in short skirts with scabs on her bony knees who had embarrassed him with her boisterous and childish capers? He could not believe it was, and his voice caught in his throat.

How good to see you again, Tara, after so long. Remember, Tara Malcomess, she cautioned herself. Be controlled and aloof. She almost shivered with shame as she remembered how she had gambolled and fawned around him like a puppy begging to be patted. What a callow little beast, I was. But she had been smitten by a crush so powerful at first sight of him that the pain of it still lingered even now.

However, she managed to display the right shade of indifference as she murmured, Oh have we met? I must have forgotten, forgive me. She held out her hand. Well, it's pleasant to meet you again, Shasa? 'Yes, Shasa, he agreed, and he took the hand as though it were a holy talisman. Why haven't we met again since then? he asked himself, and immediately he saw the answer.

It was deliberate. Blaine and Mater made damn sure that we never met again in case it complicated their own little arrangement. They did not want Tara reporting back to her mama. But he was too happy to be angry with them now.

Have you made your table reservations? he asked, without relinquishing her hand.

Daddy is sitting at the captain's table, Tara pouted lovingly at her father. And we are to be left all alone. The four of us can sit together, Shasa suggested quickly.

Let's go and talk to the Maitre. Blaine and Centaine exchanged relieved glances, it was all going exactly as they had planned, with one twist they had not foreseen.

Mathilda Janine had blushed as she shook hands with David Abrahams. Of the two sisters, she was the ugly duckling for she had inherited not only her father's wide mouth but his large nose and prominent ears as well, and her hair was not auburn but ginger carrot.

But he's got a big nose too, she thought defiantly, as she studied David, and then her thoughts went off on a tangent.

If Tara tells him I'm only sixteen I'll just die! The voyage was a tempest of emotions, full of delights and surprises and frustrations and agonies for all of them.

During the fourteen days of the passage to Southampton Blaine and Centaine saw very little of the four youngsters, meeting them for a cocktail beside the ship's pool before lunch and for a duty dance after dinner, David and Shasa each taking a turn at whirling Centaine around the floor while Blaine did the same to his daughters. Then there would be a quick exchange of glances between the four young people and they would make their elaborate excuses before all disappearing down into the tourist class where the real fun was, leaving Blaine and Centaine to their staid pleasures on the upper decks.

Tara in a one-piece bathing costume of lime green was the most magnificent sight Shasa had ever laid eyes upon. Her breasts under the clinging material were the shape of unripe pears and when she came from the pool with water streaming down those long elegant limbs, he could make out the dimple of her navel through the cloth and the hard little marbles of her nipples, and it took all his control to prevent himself groaning out loud.

Mathilda Janine and David discovered a mutual zany and irreverent sense of humour, and kept each other in convulsions of laughter most of the time. Mathilda Janine was up at four-thirty each morning, no matter how late they had got to bed, to give David raucous encouragement as he made his fifty circuits of the boat deck.

He moves like a panther, she told herself. Long and smooth and graceful. And she had to think up fifty new witticisms each morning to shout at him as he went bounding past her. They chased each other around the pool and wrestled ecstatically below the surface; once they had managed to fall in locked in each other's arms, but, apart from a furtive pecking kiss at the door of the cabin that Mathilda. Janine shared with Tara, neither of them even considered carrying it any further. Although David had benefited from his brief relationship with the Camel, it never occurred to him to indulge in the same acrobatics with someone as special as Matty.

Shasa on the other hand suffered under no such inhibitions. He was vastly more sexually experienced than David, and once he had recovered from the initial awe of Tara's beauty, he launched an insidious but determined assault on the fortress of her virginity. However, his rewards were even less spectacular than David's.

it took him almost a week to work up to the stage of intimacy where Tara would allow him to spread suntan oil on her back and shoulders. In the small hours of the morning when the lights on the dance floor were dimmed for the last dance and the band played the sugary romantic Poinciana', she laid her velvet-soft cheek against his, but when he tried to press his lower body against hers, she allowed it for only moments before she arched her back, and when he tried to kiss her at the cabin door she held him off with both hands on his chest and gave him that low tantalizing laugh.

The silly little witch is totally frigid,, Shasa told his reflection in the shaving mirror. She probably has an iceberg in her knickers. Thought of those regions made him shiver with frustration, and he resolved to break off the chase. He thought of the five or six other females on board, not all of them young, who had looked at him with unmistakable invitation in their eyes. I could have any or all of them instead of panting along behind Miss Tin Knickers, But an hour later he was partnering her in the mixed doubles deck quoit championships, or smoothing suntan oil on that flawless finely muscled back with fingers that trembled with agonized desire, or trying to keep level with her in a discussion of the merits and demerits of the government's plans to disenfranchise the coloured voters of the Cape Province.

He had discovered with some dismay that Tara Malcomess had a highly developed political conscience, and that even though it was vaguely understood between him and Mater that Shasa would one day go into politics and parliament, his grasp of and interest in the complex problems of the country was not of the same calibre as Tara's. She held views that were almost as disturbing to him as her physical attractions.

I believe, as Daddy does, that far from taking the vote away from the few black people who have it, we should be giving it to all of them. All of them! Shasa was appalled. You don't really believe that, do you? Of course I do. Not all at once, but on a civilization basis, government by those who have proved fit to govern. Give the vote to all those who have the right standards of education and responsibility. In two generations every man and woman, black or white, could be on the roll. Shasa shuddered at the thought, his own aspirations to a seat in the house would not survive that, but this was probably the least radical of her opinions.

How can we prevent people from owning land in their own country or from selling their labour in the best market, or prohibit them from collective bargaining? Trade unions were the tools of Lenin and the devil. That was a fact Shasa had taken in with his mother's milk.

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