The Only Girl in the Game Read Online Free PDF Page A

with people like Max Hanes, Al Marta, Gidge Allen, Harry Charm, Bobby Waldo, Beaver Brownell, Jerry Buckler and the rest of the hoodlums, just for the sake of the wonderful way his bank balance was increasing. Food and lodging were free. He could bank almost his entire salary, and the amount that remained after taxes was still impressive and comforting. Eight months were gone. Three full years would do it, and maybe an extra year could be endured if he wanted a better margin of safety.
    He had nothing to fear from these people. They could touch him in no basic way. He had a hotel to run, and run it he would. So that one day, sooner than he had ever dared hope, he would have his own to run in the good ways that would suit him.
    He signed his outgoing mail at a little after three, returned two phone calls, and then went to his room, changed to swim trunks, went down the rear stairs and through theservice alley and the big gate at the end of it, and across the perfect and velvety lawn toward the pool and the main patio, lengthening his stride with a pleasurable anticipation as he looked among the sunbathers for Betty Dawson.

• • •  two
    Betty Dawson saw Hugh Darren approaching the pool area, turning his head from side to side as he looked for her. Though she had been expecting him, and had expected him nearly every day since this pleasant routine had been established, something reached in and gave her heart a sly rude pinch in that moment of recognition. And, as always, it gave her a feeling of mixed tenderness and exasperation which, vocalized, would have come out, “ Now they tell me!”
    It was a damnable thing, she thought, that They waited so long before exposing me to this kind of a guy. They threw all the clowns at me. They paraded their battalions of bums, and They said, “Sorry, this is all we got in the store.” So I made the best of it, and the road was full of rocks all the way. So after They bounce me until my heart is all over calluses, then They wheel Darren in and say, “We just didn’t happen to have this sort of thing in stock when you first started to trade with us, Betty.”
    Today she had asked one of the pool boys to put the aluminum-and-plastic chaise over on the grass away from the pool apron, near but not shaded by a contrived clump of narrow trees, with a table nearby for drink, book, sun oil and cigarettes. She wore today the blue bandanna bikini, knowing well that it was the most demanding costume any woman could wear, and taking considerable justifiable pride in being able to wear one at twenty-seven. She knew she could take no credit for her basic structure—wide shoulders (almost too wide, almost boyish), high round breasts placed well apart, short waist, long legs, a straight and reliable framework of bone—but she felt damn well smug about keeping things the way they should be, devoting all the tiresome hours to keeping the waist limber and narrow, the belly tight and flat, the long thighs unpuckered.
    You had to earn the right to wear a bikini from age seventeen on, and no matter how confident you felt in it, youcould not afford to forget you must never never walk away from your beloved while wearing one. This angle of vision turned even a Bardot into a slapstick comic. And so a certain amount of tactical maneuvering was required.
    She was a tall brunette with unusually dark blue eyes, and a loveliness of face that was reminiscent of Liz Taylor, but without the flavor of self-satisfaction. It was a stronger face, and because strength breeds resistance, life had marked it here and there in small ways, bracketing the corners of the mouth, drawing little half-moon lines over glossy, quizzical brows.
    When Hugh Darren paused she raised her arm, and he spotted her and came over, smiling. She moved her legs and he sat on the foot of the chaise and said, “You look like an import—brought here by a rich guest.”
    “Ho! A week-end companion. A chippy, hey?”
    “Rich guest with good