The Saint on the Spanish Main Read Online Free PDF Page B

ago.”
    “Was I the only real test? You’d never
seen any other suspicious characters lurking around, with your own eyes?
Nobody ever had tried to actually do anything to him?”
    “Not that I ever saw.”
    The Saint slowly and carefully created a
perfectly formed smoke ring.
    “Then it certainly does look as if your
husband is at least mildly squirrelly,” he said. “If it’s any comfort
to you, I can give you my word that I had no designs on him whatsoever when I met
Patsy.”
    “It doesn’t matter now.” She
stirred with a sudden restlessness. “I was going to have to
get away from him anyhow. You can’t go on looking at a man twenty times a
day and wondering how blind you can have been to marry him. I already told him
I’m taking the plane back to Nassau tomorrow. The only difference now
is that this’ll probably be for keeps. Maybe it’s not very noble of me, but
I don’t want to be around when his delusions get worse. How do I know when he
might start suspect ing me?”
    “I can see how that might make you
uncomfortable,” said the Saint, with an absolutely straight face.
    “I’m even more glad I came to see
you.”
    “Pardon my curiosity,” he said,
“but if Clinton had you half believing in his hallucinations,
especially after I showed up—why did you come to see me?”
    “You invited me, didn’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “And right there on the dock, you knew
I wanted to accept.”
    “But suppose I’d told you, yes, I
really did have some thing unpleasant in mind for your husband?
What did you
figure on doing then?”
    “I was going to offer to help you.”
    In his position, Simon was cushioned against
falling down; but he lounged a little more limply, and he was glad that he had
no need to pretend that he was completely unsurprised.
    “That was certainly very friendly,”
he remarked, with prodigious moderation.
    She stood up, and again her dark eyes had the
same veiled amusement that they had held when she first came in.
    “I’m sure it isn’t the first time that a
woman’s wanted to team up with you.”
    “Well, no,” he said.
    She picked the remaining third of her
cigarette out of the holder and held it up for a moment.
    “You see? No lipstick. No incriminating
evidence.” She stubbed the butt out in an ashtray and dropped the holder
into the pocket of her robe. “I could be useful. I’m very competent. I
think of things.”
    “I’d noticed that.”
    She came closer to the bed, near enough for
him to have touched her if he moved a little.
    “I suppose I should be coy,” she
said. “But my time’s so short. I’m sure you know what kind of
husband I’ve had
all these years. I need a man. Don’t you want to make love to me?”
    It had been coming to that ever since she
knocked on his door, and he had always known it, but it had seldom been said
to him so forthrightly. He met her unwavering gaze with a tinge of
utterly immoral admiration, before his eyes were involuntarily drawn down to
the valley where
the green robe had fallen open to her waist.
    “Yes, they’re real,” she said.
    She made an almost imperceptible supple
movement, and the robe slipped off her shoulders and down to her elbows.
Her breasts were like alabaster where they had been covered when
she sunbathed, and the startling pink-tipped whiteness of them against the rest
of her bronzed skin made them look more shamelessly naked than any
breasts he had ever seen. And perhaps this was also because they
would rank among the most beautiful.
    He would always remember it as one of the
most fabulous feats of self-control in his life that kept him looking at her without moving.
    “Don’t you at least think you should
lock the door?” he asked steadily.
    “Yes. No. Oh, I’m a fool!” She
twitched the robe over her shoulders again, wrapping it tightly
around her. “But
you’re so right. And you do things so gracefully.
    Of course it’s impossible here. We’ve got to
get away first, where we won’t have