The Revengers by Donald Hamilton Page A

when she’d made her escape in the end, diving overboard from her wrecked schooner yacht in the storm in which she was now officially listed as having drowned. It had pleased me to know for sure, later, when she was found living down here under a different name and in considerably different circumstances, that she hadn’t drowned after all. Not that I’d considered it much of a possibility. She wasn’t an easy girl to drown.
    So the long rough game between us had started there up north, where I had thus won Round One by frustrating her plans and those of the foreign associates she’d been angry enough to choose, making a fugitive of her. The second round, however, had been hers, down here, when in the course of a different assignment I’d received information from her that had saved my life, obligating us to do our best to make her secure in her new existence. One and one. Yesterday the bell had rung for Round Three; but as I looked down at her sleeping face I found myself entertaining strong emotions I did not care to identify. Their mere existence, however, indicated that some time during the night it had ceased to be a game. . . .
    She became aware of my presence, and opened her eyes a bit warily; then she turned lazily onto her back, remembering, and smiled to see me standing there.
    “Hey, spook.”
    “Breakfast is served, Captain Robinson, ma’am. The dining room steward wishes to be informed if you want your eggs fried or scrambled.”
    “How about poached, shirred, or coddled?”
    “We can only serve what’s on the menu, ma’am. No special orders.”
    She sat up and shook her tousled dark hair into place—it was short enough that it needed no more to discipline it—swung her feet to the cabin sole and restored a vagrant satin ribbon, pretending to be a shoulder strap, to its proper functioning position. It made her shoulder look very smooth and brown. I’d asked for a gift-wrapped lady and she’d given me one. The nightgown was white, long and graceful, with some discreet lace top and bottom. It was neither wantonly provocative nor innocently bridal; it was simply a handsome and becoming gown that raised the whole man-woman business to a much higher plane than simple, crude, nude copulation. Naked dames have their place, no doubt, and I’m not knocking nudity; but there’s something very special about being allowed the privilege of discovering, and lovingly uncovering as far as necessary, a beautiful woman within a decorative garment she’s put on specifically for the purpose of having her body admired and explored, and in the end, fully exploited, by you.
    Yet there was a sadness, too, in seeing her in her expensive gown. It was obviously something she’d bought on impulse, in a moment of weakness, to remind herself of what she had been and no longer was. It did not belong to her present incarnation as a tough female sportfishing captain living under rather Spartan circumstances on a forty-foot boat. When I kissed her I felt her cling to me for a moment, as if she needed the reassurance of some affectionate bodily contact even though we’d finished with passion for the moment. I’d never before thought of her as someone who might need reassurance and the idea disturbed me; but after a moment she laughed softly and freed herself.
    “Two, over easy,” she said.
    “Yes, ma’am. Coming right up, ma’am.”
    I was just placing our breakfast on the table, about to call her, when she appeared in the deckhouse wearing jeans, a short-sleeved jersey and brown leather boat shoes with white patent soles, the kind with the squeegee pattern that supposedly won’t slip on any deck no matter how slick and wet. I couldn’t see the pattern, but I knew the shoes; they’re worn everywhere around the docks. She looked lean and competent. The soft, clinging female in the fragile, lacy gown might never have existed.
    “What, no toast?” she said, seating herself. “You’ll have to snap into it, steward, we