Become tense

Usage examples of tauten.

The moment, as I raised my hand to stroke her flesh and her nipple tautened, was charged as some secret guilded ritual.

To the women at the Miramar every dawn patrol hinted at a twilight return, and the distant Fokkers or P-38s or F-87s seemed appropriate emblems for their own hopes, the suspense a fitting shape to place on the tautening stomachs, the straining ears, the dread of the telegram.

She twisted and murmured to herself, and then abruptly tautened, and began a series of awful grunts, louder and louder, until at last she reached the summit of her agony, and shrieked once more as I had heard her do from the fall.

He freed one hand, grabbed at the tautened rope to steady himself, heard a thud as if someone had fallen heavily, felt someone else brush by him and heard steps running up towards the bank, clenched his teeth against the pain and limped up the shingles as quickly as he could.

The trucks of the carriage clattered as they ran back over the rocky surface and the rope breeching suddenly tautened and stretched as it absorbed the recoil and then thrust the carriage forward again a few inches.

Every move the lad makes tells Trotts more, fills out the tactical map, What the boy reacts to, what makes him hesitate, tauten, withdraw.

The grandmother clock in the hall was just striking ten when the front door bell shrilled, tautening every nerve in Ilona's body, her stomach muscles contracting into a tight ball.

I gave my palm branch a wave or two, for luck, and then I tautened up my harp-strings and struck in.

The first rope bridge was being tautened within twenty minutes, and a security team went swarming across it.

I dropped, felt the straps tauten, winced as the loop snugged around my left wrist.

Unhappily there was no time for blacking the yards, but at least everything that should be taut was tautened with tackles, Spanish buttons or just plain heaving staves, while the dirtier midshipmen were sent below to wash, while all were desired to brush their hair, change their shirts and put on gloves.

Snubbing gently at the tautened cable, the pirate submarine swung round head to tide within two hundred yards of the Falmouth lugger owned by the redoubtable Cap'n Silas Porthoustoc.

Not daring to let go, they hung on, holding their breath until the iron chain tautened again, lifting them both waist high out of the water.

With the port propeller going hard astern, and her cables tautened like harp-strings, she began to swing into her former position.

The wind howled dismally through the tautened shrouds, and shrieked over the top of the tightly-strained bridge-screens, behind which bent the oilskin-clad officers and men who cursed the atmospheric conditions in no uncertain voices.