And Teleman was not an unobserving man. Though he hated himself for it he could not stop staring, for her firm young breasts, suffused with a tender rosiness, her white and beautiful throat and her even more beautiful face excited him physically. It was the face of a young girl just blossoming into womanhood, a face of such unusual loveliness that his breath caught in his throat and he could only stare in enraptured silence.
Her long, unbound hair, pale auburn with glints of gold, descended to the pillow at her back, fell partly over one white shoulder and nestled in the cleavage between her breasts, each strand a shining glory. Those magnificent breasts were swollen with love, the tips standing out dark and proud, and there was a red mark on her lovely throat that could have been made only by a love bite. Her lips were slightly parted and though her eyes were wide with fright there was about her still an aspect of drowsiness, as if she had just awakened from a dream of love—a sleepy-eyed nymph in a forest glade resting on a bank of snow-white flowers, half-asleep and yet aware in her inmost being of love's rapture and more desirable than any completely awakened woman could ever be.
He stood for a moment entranced, unable to move or speak, and that strange paralysis of all his faculties except one, the wondrous miracle of enraptured sight, almost led to his undoing.
The man leapt from the bed with a cry of rage and advanced upon him. There was no escaping the outraged lover's fury or the first grazing blow of his fist, which sent Teleman reeling backwards. There was no escaping the second blow either, delivered just as quickly or the third, which landed squarely on Teleman's jaw and made him sway dizzily for an instant.
But the man had been aroused too quickly from drowsiness and love's languors to bring all of his strength into play, and Teleman was able to back away and keep his distance until a favorable opportunity presented itself.
For a brief instant the other lowered his guard and gave Teleman an opening and Teleman took full advantage of it. He stopped thinking of his opponent as a man whose anger he could understand, a man he could have liked and respected if circumstances had been less harsh and unrelenting and thought of him only as a threat to Alicia's safety.
He saw him as a danger that had to be removed, as an automaton with flailing fists, soulless, mindless, and no longer a man of flesh-and-blood with a just grievance who had every right to attack him with fury.
His fist became a magnet and his opponent an iron robot with swiftly moving appendages and when the magnet crashed into the iron the appendages jerked convulsively and the robot figure went toppling backwards.
It was a swift, terrible blow, delivered with such force that it tore the flesh of Teleman's knuckles, and half-paralyzed his arm from wrist to shoulder, producing a temporary numbness. It caught the other on the point of the jaw and took him so completely by surprise that his face, as he collapsed backwards, did not contract in pain, but bore only a look of stunned bewilderment.
His expression may have changed as he lay sprawled out on the floor at Teleman's feet. But his face was turned away and as he neither groaned nor stirred Teleman felt convinced that he had lost consciousness and swung about to face the woman. He was breathing harshly and there was a throbbing fullness at his temples and he could not quite shake off a shock-produced, almost nightmarish feeling of unreality.