تأليف : Christopher Wood

The girl lay back against the pillow and looked out on to the balcony. The man was still leaning against the balustrade, his hands spread wide and his head tilted forward as he examined something that was happening on the beach. He was naked except for a light-blue towel hitched round his waist. Although in repose, there was a quality of tension about him, like a baited trap. His body was not conspicuously muscled, but lean and hard. The girl knew that.<br> She pulled the sheet up about her own naked body and willed the man to turn round. He did not move. She turned and looked at the mans watch beside the bed. It was a Rolex Oyster Perpetual. The slim antennae hands showed four o'clock; an afternoon when the heat still clung persistently, sulkily refusing to give way to the inevitability of evening. The girl dabbed her cheek with the sheet and changed her position against the pillow. She wanted him to come back to her, but she was a proud girl and she did not want to ask. Nothing that she could think of saying sounded anything more than an attempt to make conversation. And conversation was a way of asking. The girl looked down at the innocent swelling of her breasts beneath the sheet and blushed. Was it obvious? Could anybody tell at a glance that she had been making love, wild, beautiful love? She pulled her fingers through her hair trying to find how tangled it was. There had been a Greta Garbo film about a queen who was trapped in a wayside inn with a man. He did not know that she was a queen and as the snow separated them from the outside world they had stayed in a room and made love. And the queen had wandered round the room touching the now familiar objects and consigning them to her memory. For she would never come back to this room and nothing with the man would ever be the same again.<br> What in this room was to be stored away? It was a sad room the furniture heavy and ill-matched as so often in hotels, and the lining of the tall curtains beginning to drift away at the seams. No paintings hung on the heavy wood panelling and the carpet was an unlovely grey.

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