As I suspected she wasn’t one to hold back and the sound of the last four strikes resounded around the otherwise silent room. She dropped the paddle...noisily on the floor as a signal that it was all over, and I could see Yvonne’s body visibly relax. I swung my legs toward Yvonne and, using a handful of hair lifted Rose’s head up. She quickly grasped what I wanted of her and lay a lingering kiss on each of Yvonne’s battered cheeks.As Mo gently lifted Yvonne up I swung my legs back out of the way.. Into the ensuing silence as that morsel was digested came the muted conversation between Orville, Cedric and Derrin. Absent cerebral cortices into which the Companions could tap, Derrin had to rely upon speech or electronic connections to receive information. Clare had caught a bit of the conversation and politely invited them to share their thoughts causing a short embarrassed silence which was broken by Derrin."We were discussing my origins and how, when you ... ah, found(?) me, I was being. I had two hundred gallons of gas with stabilizer though I had a small, portable pump in the truck that I used to keep the truck's tank filled every time I went into town. I figured that power outages would affect more areas as time went on with no maintenance and no repairs.Spring had turned into summer and the loss of power caused more things to fail or deteriorate into uselessness. I still saw few signs of people. My cell phone no longer received a signal at the farm or much anywhere else. I. ” Push her off? Nah, there was no way she’d cross that line and try and start something with him, not without Antoinette here. If his girlfriend was here, sure, Elaine would do everything in her power to seduce him right in front of her. And Jack might even let her do it, just to see if he could make his girlfriend jealous, cause so far she was immune to the emotion.But she wasn’t here. Nothing Elaine could do would break him.“Though you seem utterly infatuated with breasts.”“Yeah, I can’t deny.