CHAPTER TWELVEFor long after Lydia had left him Gerald stood beside the river.
He had no regrets for the lack of control that had made him confess his love to her, he knew that he could not have stopped himself had he tried.
His pent-up feeling and emotions had burst from him with a violence like that of tropical rains blotting out reason, logic and even thought.
He knew too that his desire for Lydia, for her coolness, her sanity and her reserve, was not only physical but something that had become a part of himself.
From the moment that he had first seen her, he had known that he wanted her and, while she had stirred and reawakened the memory of all that was past, his present and his future seemed bound to her.
He had not really been aware until he had seen Lydia how cruelly he was st
