Chapter 1

"Ann Walker trudged wearily from the front office of the Bay Construction Company, and turned down Market Street to begin the four block walk to her car. San Francisco screamed around her in the throes of its rush-hour convulsions, spewing people and cars and dirt and noise out of its belly in frenzied, hysterical haste. The sky was low with the smog that had settled in from the bay, and a half-ridden sun broiled the sweating city mercilessly. It was hot, noisy, cramped and stinking. It was Progress.

"Hey, get the hell out of the way!"

Ann Walker jerked her head up, and stepped quickly back up onto the curb. An irate cab driver squealed around her, blasting his horn at the same time, and staring at her as though she'd insulted him personally by having delayed him the two-and-a-half seconds she'd been standing in the gutter. Ann glared back at him, angered by his anger, feeling the tension of the day suddenly wash over her. Then she was pushed off the curb by the mass of humanity pressed up behind her, as the traffic light turned green and the mindless herd began to swarm across the intersection. She stumbled, caught herself, and hurried ahead to keep up with the flow. She finally reached the parking lot that held her car, and waited while the attendant tried courageously to find her small Ford Falcon in the endless sea of parked automobiles. She slumped down onto a bench, and tried to close her mind to the maddening frenzy that possesses a city between 4:30 and 6:00.

Ann was 36 years old, and had lived in San Francisco for the last two years. But she could never adjust herself to the city's rush, the tension, the nerve-wracking tempo that others seemed to take for granted. She was a beautiful woman, with dark brown hair which lay in soft curls on her shoulders, and an almost naive face, which was betrayed only by a pair of intense, almost smoldering eyes. She affected a somewhat cool manner, and often gave others the impression of aloofness, and perhaps even conceit; but this was only a defense, a rein that held her frustrations in check. It was only in her eyes that one could perceive the fire that burned inside her, could even guess at the wild animal that lay imperfectly concealed behind that cool exterior. It was this combination of aloofness and yet the hint of some insatiable desire that served to make her irresistibly magnetic to men, who flocked to her like flies to honey. And the more they flocked, the more aloof she became, her defenses barely able to hold in check the intensity of her inner passions.

Ann's car finally came sputtering out of the parking lot, adding more than its share to the poison in the air around her. She quickly paid the attendant, and slid her slender body behind the wheel. She eased out of the parking lot's driveway, and began to make her slow, agonizing way out of the city. This was the part of the day she hated most. Even the morning rush hour was not this bad, because then she was fresh, still untouched by the day's trials and tribulations. But now, after a day's frustrating monotony...

Ann blasted her horn at a Lincoln Continental which was trying to force its way into her line of traffic. She eased the accelerator toward the floor, cutting him off and forcing him to brake with a jerk. He glared at her, she glared at him, and the traffic slowed around them like a river flowing around song unseen obstruction. Then Ann scooted ahead of the Lincoln, victor in this round of her fight to escape the city, and made her way toward the Bayshore Freeway, southbound.

She lived in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in South San Francisco, which had no advantages except that it was relatively inexpensive. But that was enough. Her job as secretary for the Bay Construction Company certainly didn't pay very well, and to think of moving into something closer to her work and therefore more expensive, was out of the question. Ann tolerated her work, but didn't enjoy it. Still, it was something, and the best she could find with her work record. She had moved all around the country in the last 18 years, seldom staying in one place more than a few years, usually staying far less. The cities she had lived in were so numerous that she often lost track of them, and her past was filled with certain periods of time she couldn't even account for. But she didn't think about that often: to her, one city was like another, one job was like another, and except for periodic changes in setting, her life followed the same pattern with frustrating sameness.

It hadn't always been that way. In high school Ann had been quite a participant in the school's social scene. She had been a cheerleader, class vice-president, homecoming queen, all of the things that typify a young girl's high school success story. Boys had swarmed around her, inviting her out, walking her to classes, begging for some of the attention she gave to those she liked. But, that had all changed, abruptly, her senior year... had changed with a finality that still drove her from place to place in an unending attempt to escape its irrevocable consequences.

The lovely secretary tried to force her mind onto some other subject, but it returned every time to the pain of that last year in school. She hadn't really even known Tom well. She had only accepted his offer of a date in order to attend a last minute beach party with some friends, and had not even found him that attractive. Tom had been very attentive, and Ann had had much too much wine to drink, and before sloe knew it she was wrestling with him on the beach, separated from the others, at first resisting and then, aroused beyond endurance by his sexual foreplay, finally accepting his body with an abandon that took Tom completely by surprise.

Ann passed a trembling hand across her soft brown eyes, and tried to focus on the traffic. But the cars ahead of her slowed until they came to a complete stop, and while she waited for the metal river to start flowing again, she tried to remember what it had been like, that first time.

She remembered a great deal of pain, her shame once it was all over, and her agonized waiting until her period came, but little more. And when her period hadn't come, she'd waited longer, praying that it was just delayed, her fears of pregnancy immobilizing her completely, until finally she was simply spending the entire day in bed at home. Finally, her mother had forced her to go to the doctor, thinking she might be seriously ill, but having no idea of the nature of her illness. The doctor easily drew the truth from her, and when his tests were completed, her terrible fears were proven true.

Ann felt a shiver run through her curvaceous body, still able to feel the effect that awful news had had upon her so many years ago. The doctor had told her mother immediately, and her mother, despite Ann's protestation, had insisted that the boy marry her. Ann hadn't wanted that, simply because she hadn't known Tom very well, but Mrs. Walker had insisted, and there followed a traumatic four months while Tom and his family were convinced, arrangements were made, and Ann herself grew steadily larger with the life inside her. They were married in her fourth month, and it seemed for a while that things would be all right. But then, even before the baby was born, they began to quarrel, she perhaps made more edgy by her pregnancy, and he unable to give her the patience and understanding she desired. They had even come to blows on one occasion, Tom knocking her down at the height of one of their arguments. But then he had apologized profusely, as he always did, and promised that it would never happen again. But, of course, it did, with increasing frequency.

And then the baby had been born, and it had seemed again that they might be able to function as a unity and live together, this time through the mediating influence of their daughter. But it was soon apparent that even little Lani could not act as a bridge to cross that chasm which lay between the two of them. For eight tempestuous months after her birth, they had made life miserable for one another, until finally Ann had discovered that Tom was having an affair with a woman in the same apartment building, and she'd decided to leave him. It hadn't surprised her that he was having an affair, because she hadn't slept with him for months, and yet that affair gave her the excuse she needed to rationalize in her own conscience the step she was taking.

The divorce proceedings had been short, and unprotected. Tom had been just as willing Ann to break off their obvious mismatch. She had been awarded a small alimony, but most important of all for her, she had been awarded custody of her child, Lani.

The insistent blaring of a horn gradually broke through the curtain of Ann's memories, and she looked up to see that traffic had again begun to move on the Bayshore. She quickly moved ahead, and gradually picked up speed until she was going a relatively brisk 45 miles per hour. Her mind was somewhat at ease now, pacified by the turn her thoughts had taken in the direction of her daughter.

Ann smiled again. Lani had been such a beautiful baby, had hardly ever cried, had walked before she was 18 months, and was talking by the time she was 2/ old. She was Ann's one joy in life, and had become gradually over the years her only real reason for living. After the trauma of her marriage, Lani had formed the cornerstone of her sanity, and for a year after her divorce, the two of them had constituted a self-sufficient entity, with little or no contact with the outside world. Without that time with her child alone, to recuperate from the wounds which her marriage had left upon her, Ann might very well have broken down completely.

But while Lani had been able to salve those wounds with the simple fact of her presence, she had not been able to heal the scars they left on Ann's personality, and on her sexual being in particular. Anything that remotely reminded the young mother of the traumatic experience she had been through with her immature husband was avoided, shoved into the far recesses of her mind to lie hidden behind an almost neurotic wall of repression. She had been hurt irreparably, and she had subconsciously placed the blame for all her troubles on the sexual side of her nature. She feared any kind of intimate involvement, and rejected coolly all advances made by the scores of men drawn irresistibly to her, with the result that, as the years passed, her sexual frustration increased. And as it increased, her fear of her own sexuality increased as well, and she expended more and more energy to keep that sexuality hidden, disarmed, incapable of leading her into relationships that might prove painful or destructive.

And so she moved from place to place, thinking she was avoiding entanglements that would divert her attention from her young daughter, but in reality simply trying to escape the undeniable pressures exerted on her by her own seething sensuality. She had begun by moving around the east coast, From Delaware to South Carolina, and then her fears had driven her west. Each time she would move into a city, find a dull and usually poorly paying job, and try to settle with Lani into some kind of routine that resembled stability. She knew, instinctively, that her daughter needed that stability, and that she herself needed it as well. She would slowly make a few friends, and begin to come out of her shell slightly, and then she would find herself being drawn to one of the many men who pursued her with stubborn persistence.

At first those men would seem content with a purely platonic relationship, and Ann would perceptibly bloom on the release of having someone to talk to, someone with whom she could break through the icy walls of her self-imposed aloofness. But then, inevitably she would find that those men began to make demands on her, sexual demands, demands that showed either an unwillingness or an inability to understand her reluctance to become intimately involved. And then would come the inevitable conversations that stretched painfully into the middle of the night, and then the arguments, and then the final break. Sometimes the break was clean, and Ann would be able to stay where she was, though more confused and frustrated than before. But at other times, the men in her life would not give up. They would be able to sense the restrained desire, the hidden but burning sexuality that twisted the young woman with its force, and would try to help her bring it out into the open, to deal with it, to come to terms with herself. And it was then that Ann fled, terrified, not only from their offers of help, but from herself as well.