After the divorce I found myself a much smaller house. It didn't look like much and the walls were like paper, but the rent was low and the landlord absent. Livingroom, kitchen, shower, two bedrooms. All that was needed, really, for one thirty-nine-year-old divorcee plus his eighteen-year-old daughter and the trunk-load of painful memories of a failed marriage.

She was most distraught, very tearful, and she cast herself into my arms. I was deeply moved and all my former anger evaporated at once. Although aggrieved, my delicious daughter was still beautiful, slim and shapely, and as we hugged each other I could feel her youthful body from bosom to ankle. She sobbed inconsolably, her face was buried in my chest; I felt her breath moving my shirt, the warmth of her cheek upon mine, and when she embraced me something inside me stirred.

"Father! Oh, Father!" she cried, "What are we to do? Why is this happening to us?"

There were no words of comfort that came to me, only the desire to remove her tear-stained face from my shirt. Yet, as I stood holding her trembling body, I knew beyond all question that here was my mate, my lover and, yes, my child as well.

"Elizabeth," I said soothingly, "Whatever shall happen, I will be strongly at your side. We'll face it together as we have done in the past." Her heart fluttered like a frightened bird, she bit her lip, looking up at me with shining chartreuse eyes. I swallowed. Yes, Elizabeth was eighteen and a grown woman, but she still was my little girl. I tried to comfort her as a father would, but her embracement left me stranded in an awful state of amorous excitement which demoralized me, and drove from me all sense of paternal duty and fitness.

With an almost insolent abandon she snuggled against me and, thrusting her bosom forward, rubbed it against my chest in a way she shouldn't have done. We were locked in a whirlwind of indecency which neither of us could have anticipated. Like animals in heat we were incapable of