Ричард Деминг - She’ll Hate Me Tomorrow

“He wouldn’t. He earned a Silver Star doing it the second time. I don’t suppose he mentioned that either.”

She shook her head. “He only talked about you. He thinks a lot of you.”

“It’s mutual. We’ve been friends since nineteen fifty-two. Sam was managing a restaurant in Miami at the time he was dragged back into service as a reserve. After Korea ended, he decided to stick with me.”

She nodded. “He told me how you started the club here, and how shocked everyone was when you made it a casino.”

“By everyone you mean local high society, I suppose. I disgraced the fine old name of Ross.”

“Why did you become a professional gambler, Clancy? Sam says you inherited both money and social position. You could have been almost anything you wanted.”

“This is what I wanted. It’s in the blood. My father and grandfather were both gamblers.”

“Sam said they had an investment business,” Stella said in surprise.

“Sure, and if you think stock-market speculation isn’t gambling, drop in on the stock exchange some morning when trading is brisk. I just picked a different form of gambling.”

“What does your family think of your career?”

“My father’s all that’s left. He’s retired and lives in Miami Beach.” Suddenly he grinned. “Dad says it’s more honest than the investment business. It’s only our former social set which looks down its collective nose. And most of it appears here regularly to contribute to my vice.”

She looked at him curiously. “Still, it seems odd that a scion of high society would enter a business like this, particularly in his own home town.”

“Where else? I like St. Stephen. I started gambling at five, when I learned to play marbles for keeps. I’ve been doing it ever since and I love it. At sixteen I could hold my own in a poker game with anyone. By eighteen, when they let you in local casinos, I knew enough to spot every rigged device they had, from fixed wheels to shaved dice. When I came back from Korea I opened the Rotunda so I’d have an honest place to gamble.”

“Sam says you did it to get under Bix Lawson’s skin.”

“Partly,” he admitted. “He controlled all the crooked houses. He wasn’t exactly pleased.”

“I’m surprised he let you get away with it.”

“So was Bix,” Ross said dryly. “In the beginning he tried to force me into his organization. After a while he gave up.”

“Sam implied you’d had some past trouble with him.” Hugging her breasts, she looked into his face. “He also said something while we were talking in the office which has been bothering me, Clancy. He said that if you had decided Whitey Cord had some justification for killing me, you would have turned me over to those men.”

“Sam talks off the top of his head.”

“But suppose I had been some kind of racket moll who was in this situation through her own fault.”

Ross shrugged. “It’s an academic supposition. You aren’t.”

“But just suppose,” she insisted. “Would you have gone to all this trouble?”

He frowned. “If you’re trying to analyze me, stop it. I don’t care to be analyzed by women. Just accept me as I am. I’m not very complicated.”

“I think you’re tremendously complicated,” she said seriously. “I think you’re probably as ruthless as Sam says you are, but I also think you can be as soft-hearted as any man I ever knew. There isn’t a man in a thousand who would go to all this trouble for a girl he hardly knew.”

“It’s just a matter of principle,” he said. “I consider a pass at one of the club personnel the same as a pass at me. I’d take the same action for the downstairs colored dishwasher.”

“Ouch,” she said ruefully. “And I thought I’d just decided on a way to show my gratitude.”

“Oh? How?”

A tinge of color touched her cheeks. “The way in which women have always expressed gratitude to men they liked.”

He studied her delicate features, then deliberately dropped his gaze to the soft outline of her white breasts beneath the black nylon. “I have a peculiar code of ethics,” he said. “I wouldn’t make a move to seduce you, simply because you’re here under my protection and more or less at my mercy if I got insistent. But I’m totally amoral. If you throw out any voluntary suggestions, you’ll quite likely be taken up.”

A flush ascended from her throat to suffuse her whole face. She stared at him steadily and silently.

“On the other hand, I wouldn’t accept your soft white body merely as a token of your gratefulness,” he said dryly. “It would be a little too much like handing over a twenty-dollar bill.”

Her flush deepened. “You’re certainly blunt.”

“You wanted to analyze me,” he said reasonably. “Now you know how I feel about sex. It has to be a co-operative thing, with the woman having the same selfish urge for gratification that I have. I won’t settle for accepting it as a payment for favors.”

“It isn’t just gratefulness,” she said. “Of course I’m grateful, but if Sam had done what you have, I’d just thank him. I’m almost twenty-four, which is quite old enough for a girl to know her own mind, so you would hardly be taking advantage of my youth. And I’m as capable of human desires as you are.”

“You mean you have hot pants?”

This turned her flaming red. “You certainly make it as difficult as possible for a girl.”

“No,” he denied. “I just don’t believe in skirmishing when it comes to sex. You can’t have polite sex relations. If you think I’m blunt now, wait until we get in the bedroom. In public you can expect me to treat you like a lady whether we ever get to bed together or not. But in bed you’ll be treated like a whore. Take it or leave it.”

Her eyes remained fixed on his face for a long time. Finally she barely whispered, “I’ll take it.”

Setting down his drink, he drew her away from the bar and held her by both elbows, looking down into her eyes. “Not just because you’re grateful?”

Her body began to tremble. “You know damn well it’ll be a favor to me, too.”

Stepping back from him, she jerked savagely at the tie cord holding together the upper part of her nightgown and it gaped open nearly to her waist. Slipping it off her shoulders, she let it shimmer down around her ankles and stepped out of the massed nylon into his arms, stark naked.

Effortlessly scooping her up to a cradled position, he carried her to his own bedroom. She lay as unresisting in his arms as a rag doll, head lolling back and eyes closed. In the doorway he paused to flip on the overhead light with one elbow, then stepped toward the bed and unceremoniously tossed her into the center of it.

Her eyes popped open when she hit, but she lay exactly as she had landed, arms and legs sprawled. Her eyes began to assume a glassy look.

As he tossed clothing onto a chair, she began to shake uncontrollably. When he finally dropped next to her and took her into his arms, hers went about his neck in a viselike grip and her lips moved against his greedily.

A moment later she emitted a sharp gasp, then began to moan in a rising cadence which grew higher and higher until it reached an excruciating peak, abruptly fading away into a long-drawn-out sigh.

“If I wasn’t grateful before,” she murmured into his ear, “I certainly am now.”

Placing his hands beneath her hips to draw her body tightly against him, he said, “If you’re under the impression that that’s all, this is only a momentary rest stop. You’d better start reaching for your second wind.”

An instant later she emitted a second gasp and her arms and legs involuntarily tightened about him. Again her passion rose to a crescendo, but this time she was granted no respite when its release came. Four more times he drove her to the peak of ecstasy before his own body stiffened and he crushed her so savagely to him that she groaned.