" I'm sorry Amanda. It doesn't work that way. As much as I'd like to help, this is a commercial venture and we have to abide by our terms and conditio...s. Hopefully, Richard has pledged enough to secure you."Morbius paused. "The Baron will be here in two hours so that doesn't give us that much time. Have you had a shower?"Amanda nodded."In that case, I should prepare you to receive him. Take all your clothes off and give me your hands."Morbius attached a padded restraint around each wrist, then. I turn my head and gaze out at the dark sky and listen to the leaves speaking to me. My mind is pleading for him to touch me. I need to finish but he plays my body as if it were some musical instrument. The music he has orchestrated is lilting and slow, and his stroking fingers continue to play me. Now his mouth joins in. Though he hides in the shadows I know his presence. My legs part. My mind conjures imagined images as he begins to take me to another level. Then his breath touches my thighs. A revelation that hit me like a ton of bricks.I'm not a whiskey drinker. So the combination of Rachel's bourbon that I drank while hearing her confessions coupled with the stress of learning my wife had gone to the grave without telling me of her indiscretion was too much. I had to get away and get my head together.I went to my bedroom, shut the door behind me, stripped off and took a shower hoping the hot water would work its magic and relieve me of the pain my heart was feeling not to. One pamphlet, Common Sense, sold 500,000 copies, an unheard of number that meant nearly every house in the colonies possessed a copy. Agitators and lunatics wrote long treatises proclaiming the rights of man. Whereas in the thinkers I had read, these rights were natural, the agitators drew perverse syllogisms that the natural rights of man allowed a man to abrogate his duties to the Crown.It was about this time that my old friend sent me a new work. I read it gladly. Stunned, I began to see.