her incredibly slender waist, giving her breasts what you knew was an unbrassiered uplift that made you think of a pair of hands cupped beneath them. Your hands. But on her it wasn’t lewd, somehow. Beneath the bodice, a wide skirt flared to just below her knees. If she moved fast you’d expect it to show flashes of a peek-a-boo petticoat playing tag with sheer nylons.
Wayne was close to her now. She had stopped humming and was just standing there. Watching him. He didn’t know what he was going to say. But he didn’t think it was going to be difficult to get started.
It wasn’t. She cued him with coolly perfect lips that had been lightly touched with pale lipstick that hadn’t ruined the contour:
“Don’t look now, mister, but I think you’re being followed.”
Wayne stopped in front of her. He didn’t look around. He said, “Tell him to go away.”
She said, “Go away, Willie.” Her eyes smiled at Wayne.
Wayne had always thought that only girls in fiction had green eyes. But this girl was real. And her eyes were green. Limpid sea green, with bluish depths that invited him to sink into them and drown deliciously. Wayne did a double take on that one. When you begin to get lyrical about a cellar wren’s eyes . . .
But, goddamnit, they were green. Limpid sea green. With bluish depths. . . .
A cold kill with her red hair. Because the hair wasn’t just red. It was unbelievably red. But you wanted to believe it. On her it was easy to believe. Pouring in a smooth flow to her shoulders, alive and vibrant and with a tinge of gold. It couldn’t be real, but you knew it was.
He heard Willie Sutra’s voice behind him, disappointed and sullen: “But this here goop—”
“I said to go away, Willie.”
Wayne lifted his gaze to her face again. “They’ve got the wrong girl in the picture outside.”
She made a bashful-girl curtsy, and an honest-to-God dimple dented her left cheek. “Thank you, sir, she said. But don’t you think it might be a mite egotistical, since I own the joint? Pardon me—my highly paid promotion man is trying to teach me to call it an establishment.”
“My God,” said Wayne softly. “Of course. The Gingham Girl, they called you when you first turned up as a warbler for Lon Kagle’s band. And six months later you ended up by owning the joint. Pardon me, Miss Endicott. Establishment.”
“Sordid success story, isn’t it?” She smiled like a little girl explaining away childish mischief. “And why don’t you call me Priscilla?”
Wayne’s blue eyes were hooded now, his strong face set in lines of harshness. “My God,” he said again, more softly now, “I’m beginning to remember . . . a lot of things.”
“And?” Her chin was lifted proudly and he saw a pulse leaping at the base of her lovely throat.
“Hake Derr.” He pronounced the two words slowly, as though tasting them dubiously. He shook his head briefly and angrily and looked into her eyes again. “Do you know what you did to me, Priscilla? When I walked across the room to you?”
Her slender body stiffened as though to defend itself against physical onslaught. The piano man was hunched on his stool half turned from them, cigarette drooping from slack lips, loose fingers brushing the keys softly as though seeking an unborn melody.
Priscilla Endicott said, “Yes.” She paused, lowering golden lashes and catching a seductive lower lip indecisively between her teeth in maidenly embarrassment, or the best facsimile of it that Wayne had ever witnessed. “The same thing you did to me.” Her voice was a whisper, throaty and full of promise.
He steeled himself against it. This was Priscilla Endicott! And there were the rumors about Hake Derr. About other men, too, but none of them mattered. Hake Derr did matter.
Wayne moved closer to her. He said, “But it’s too late for that. Isn’t it, Priscilla?” He put urgency into the question.
She lifted her lashes to invite him again to drown in the bluish depths of her limpid green eyes. “Is it ever too late for that . . . between a man like you and a woman like me?”
Wayne reached forward to touch the cold fingers of her hand, which rested on the piano. He said gently, “I’m Morgan Wayne.”
A convulsive tremor rippled through her taut body. Her fingers tightened into a fist beneath his hand. He knew the name meant something to her—knew he was on the right track. The key was here. She could give it to him, if . . .
She said slowly, “You came here looking for Hake?”
“And found the most beautiful woman in the world.”
She shuddered and closed her eyes. “Go away, Morgan Wayne. Fast. Don’t ever come back.”
“Then it’s true?”
“What?”
“What they say about Hake Derr . . . and the Gingham Girl.”
“Yes.” She opened her eyes and attempted a derisive smile. It wasn’t a good effort. It ended up in a pitiful appeal that tore at his heart. Again, he wondered whether she could be that good an actress.
She tightened her lips and made her voice hard. “So you see why you’d better beat it fast, Morgan Wayne.”
He shook his head. His voice remained gentle, but there was a thread of steel in it. “I’m not very good at running. I won’t until you say you want me to, Priscilla . . . privately.”
She appeared to go listless then. She withdrew her fingers from beneath his hand and straightened with a suggestion of a shrug. Perhaps it was a shrug of defiance, or of desperation.
“Perhaps I had better tell you . . . privately.”
She moved away from him and Wayne followed her. The piano player did not lift his head as they passed behind him. His fingers continued to brush the keys lightly and the haunting sound followed them down a corridor to a flight of narrow stairs that led upward.
Priscilla Endicott climbed the stairs unhesitatingly. There is something about a woman going up a stairway and a lone man close behind her. Something for both of them. Disturbingly intimate. Something atavistic, perhaps. Buried deep in the subconscious of both. An intimate awareness of each other and of animal instincts that have been glossed over and submerged by centuries of civilization. Yet never wiped out. Still the dominant instinct in man and woman.
As he followed Priscilla closely on the stairway, Wayne’s face remained level with her, moving loins. Her woman perfume came back to him in a warm wave, and there was the rustle of her taffeta skirt. Something, always, between a man and a woman climbing single file on a narrow stairway.
Climbing upward to . . . what?
Morgan Wayne didn’t know. Probably to an apartment she shared with Hake Derr. Quite possibly to meet Hake himself.
It didn’t matter. Right now, it didn’t. There were the two of them climbing a narrow stairway. There was the smell of her, and the proud tilt of her head, and the small movements of her buttocks so close
