Enthusiastic Paddling

CHAPTER ONE   There was, however, no doubt that Pamela Thornton would have drawn looks of frank and unabashed carnal desire no matter in what part of the country she had been born, and indeed there were a number of young men in Durwent who believed it to be their mission in life to enjoy her mouthwatering charms. Thus far, however, their rather clumsy and obvious efforts had met with no success whatsoever. Indeed, her derisive disdain of their amateurish attempts to fondle her magnificent bosom or bottom, to slip their hands under her skirts to caress her stunningly rounded ivory thighs or to touch that sacrosanct cleft at their apex which was still virginal to the male, had earned her the sobriquet of "The Icebox Princess." At eighteen, Pamela Thornton had outgrown the possibilities of emotional happiness in this farming community, just as she had outgrown the drearily unimaginative education which was all that Durwent had to give its young. Her marks had been exceptional at the James Durwent High School (named like the town itself, after a post-Civil War plantation owner who had settled here in about 1868 and built a small cotton acreage into a highly prosperous community). She longed to go to a college, perhaps the fashionable girls' institution at Oxford, but the bare facts of life were that her parents were extremely poor. Not only that, her father, Walter Thornton, was heavily in debt to Ernest Lattemeyer, the elderly vice president of the Durwent Bank and trust Company. Walter and Minerva, Pamela's mother, owned a produce farm a few miles south of the little town, raising yams, string beans, corn, squash and tomatoes. They had managed over the years to provide food on the table for their two children, the other being Pamela's eighteen-year-old sister Sally, to pay their taxes and to have a few comforts but that was about all. In the past two years, their land showed signs of needing to lie fallow, so Walter Thornton had approached old Ernest Lattemeyer for a substantial loan to buy farm equipment and to process his land for eventual soy-bean growing. The banker had dealt with him for twenty years and knew him to be hardworking, reliable and honest, so at the present time there was an outstanding debt of seven thousand dollars on which Walter Thornton had been able to make only obligatory interest payments over the past twelve months. It was a subject of constant conversation in the Thornton household, and Pamela was growing oppressed by it. Never before had she wanted to be free of Durwent and the monotonous regularity of her days there. Now that it was July and high school was over and the prospect of college looked more distant than ever in view of her father's indebtedness, she was restless and unhappy. Auburn-haired, slightly more than medium height with her stature of five feet six and a quarter inches, she possessed that indefinable quality of sensual sulkiness and insolence calculated to rouse an astute member of the opposite s*x ferociously eager to conquer her. Her face was oval, the cheekbones somewhat highset, and her uptilting aquiline nose with its thin, widely flaring wings as well as her ripe, insolently curved mouth bespoke a rebelliousness and arrogance of spirit which had more than once sent her would be suitors home after an unsatisfactory date muttering to themselves, dreaming of riotous scenes in which she figured prominently. Since, however, most of the young males were already the rather dull-witted byproducts of a sleepy little town, their nocturnal fantasies were rarely complicated and sadistic only in the fact that they envisioned themselves mounting the ivory -skinned beauty and plundering her maidenhead. Not one of them would have had the creative intellect to project her as an ideal candidate for voluptuous sadism. And yet subconsciously, perhaps, in her indecisive concern about how to spend this oncoming, boring summer on her parents' little farm and how to manage in spite of the impoverished state of her father's finances to break away completely from Durwent, Pamela Thornton yearned for something to happen, someone to appear out of a clear sky, to change the dull, irritatingly repetitious pattern of her days and nights, and bring at last vigorous energy and decision into her life. She could hardly know that fate was planning to do exactly that.