“I think you’d enjoy one of our favourite family challenges.”“Really? What sort of challenge is that?” “A race over four lengths of the po...l. The loser has to strip naked,” she said, grinning, ”and the winner stays in the pool to race the next challenger.”I blinked. This was turning into quite an unusual evening. “Okay, let’s do it,” I said and Andrea murmured, “Go,” and pushed off on her first length.It seemed Andrea thought she could win by cheating, making that early start, and I would have. I stripped slowly, realizing I was enjoying watching his face change. He looked for a moment the way any man does when a woman strips for him. I felt sorry for him, for a moment, the way he’d felt sorry for me. I could smell dirt, like an open grave. “Look,” I said, “you’ve had your feel and your strip-show, now let me go. You’re some woman’s son, somebody’s brother or cousin. You’ve only scratched and raped, not killed. Stop while you can.. "Fear and sadness turned to cold hate in Maria's eyes. "Mated? You mean..."Nodding, the colonel pointed at the photo of Wolf's mate standing with Yablonski having a smoke and a chat. "Gretchen." The bitch!" Soon," said the Colonel mysteriously."What are you talking about?" growled Karl. "What has this to do with Yablonski?" Absolutely nothing. I've been advised to place you in his midst, but we both know how that would turn out. Even with the promise of Maria and your own successful troupe. I laid her and covered her with the blanket. She remained nude inside the blanket.Then I fed her the medicine and went to the bathroom. I washed the cloths and hanged under sun to dry. This was seemed magic to me, I thought that I had dreamt. But it was not dream, it was natural. And amazingly she became cured in the afternoon. She was very weak; I fed her and dressed her with her own cloths. She had a good sleep in the next night. She did not hook her door and I enquired several times about.