She remembered one case in particular--it flashed across her mind in that instant of wild folly completely unbidden. Three young hoodlum girls had captured a man at the point of a gun, taken him for an auto ride and forced him to make love to them. What she'd just said was like telling Roger that, in circumstances like that, he wouldn't have been more than eager to oblige, or found the experience less than exhilarating. "I asked you to take off your dress and get comfortable," Roger said, still looking at her in that frightening way. "What's got into you, anyway? What makes you think that Helen Lathrup would be so much more attractive to me than you are? Right at this moment I'll waive the soft lighting and the abstract paintings and even the gold-and-onyx bathroom. I'm just a plain guy with plain tastes, anyway. In room decorations, I mean. I like my women to be a little on the special side, decorative and all that. I'm speaking in the plural, because you insist on it so strongly, and seem to feel that I should have a lot of women chasing after me. You probably wouldn't believe me if I told you I've had only three serious affairs in my life and one of them ended in divorce and the two I didn't marry I would have married under ordinary circumstances, but death can move in fast sometimes and make even marriage impossible. "No--I didn't poison them. I'm not a bluebeard, whatever else you may think me. One died in my arms and it kills me even now to think about it and I'll probably never get over it. Died in my arms with the blood running out of her mouth, in a hospital with an incurable disease and she was glad that I could be there. There was one parting, years later, on completely friendly terms, with a girl who didn't think I'd make too good a husband, because we just happened to be temperamentally poles apart in our thinking. And that's the whole of it--until I met you." Ordinarily what he'd said would have moved her, and completely changed the way she felt. Banished her fear even, all of it, made her willing to forgive him. But she was beyond herself with anger still, too confused to think clearly. "I'm going to leave you," she said. "This is the end. I'm going right out of here now and I'm not coming back." "Sit down!" he said, his voice suddenly harsher than she'd ever known it to be. "You love me and you know it. You're just being a stubborn little fool. Sit down and relax. And drink this cocktail. It will do you good." "No," she said. "I'm leaving right now." What he did then was totally unexpected, she wouldn't have thought him capable of it. He stepped forward, grasped the top of her dress and ripped it all the way down her back to her waist. Then he half-swung her about and planted a kiss in the middle of her back, so fierce a kiss that it bruised her flesh, causing her to cry out in protest.