The Avenger. Matthew Blood
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 to his face.
They reached the top of the stairway, and still without a backward glance or a spoken word Priscilla unlocked a door and crossed the threshold. Morgan Wayne followed her without hesitation.
Chapter Three
PRISCILLA ENDICOTT stopped in the center of the long room and stood there without turning her head. Wayne closed the door quietly and stood with his back against it, taking in vague details of the pleasant warmth of the room while his gaze was riveted on the tall, gingham-clad figure standing so utterly motionless before him.
Priscilla’s hands hung limply by her sides. Somehow, there was hopelessness and uncertainty in her stance. She was waiting—and Morgan Wayne waited. He felt his pulse leaping uncontrollably, and was suddenly aware that he was holding his breath.
It was Priscilla’s room, warm and alive with color and pattern. Chartreuse draperies hung low to the floor from a wide window at the far end. The room was thickly carpeted from wall to wall with a pattern of dull reds and yellows, and not cluttered with furniture.
But it was cluttered with a man’s white shirt lying rumpled and conspicuous just inside an open door leading into the bedroom. Hake Derr’s shirt! A mute reminder to Wayne that he was alone here with another man’s woman.
Past the rumpled shirt and through the open door, Wayne could see half an oversized Hollywood bed with the covers thrown back, one pillow and the sheet wrinkled. Past the bed was a low, glass-topped vanity almost bare on top. Cut-glass stoppered flagons and powder container on one side; a pair of silver-topped military brushes on the other.
Another mute reminder of Hake Derr. And there was a third. From where he stood, the large oval mirror above the vanity reflected its glass-topped surface. There was a light sprinkling of powder over the center area and the mirror reflected the four letters of an obscene word evidently scrawled by a blunt fingertip in the powder; scrawled on the top of Priscilla Endicott’s dressing table by a man with the puerile mind of a nasty adolescent who has just learned a new word. You see it furtively scrawled sometimes on city sidewalks and on the white walls of a latrine.
Morgan Wayne felt sudden and inexpressible pity for Priscilla.
Priscilla still stood motionless with her back toward him. But the fingers of both hands began to tighten into fists by her side. They relaxed and tightened again. Then they were lifted savagely to both sides of her head, fingertips thrusting into the silken strands of her incredibly lovely hair and mussing it as Wayne’s fingers longed to muss it.
She turned to him like that, and her face was pinched and bloodless, haunted with terror and with passion. Her breath came fast between tight lips and her breasts rose and fell rapidly.
She stared at him for a long moment as though it were the first time she had seen his face.
She said, “Are you going to take me?” and it was spoken as casually as though she had asked, “Would you like a drink?”
Wayne moved toward her across the heavy carpet, his eyes searching her face. When they were close enough he saw the perspiration of excitement wetting her temples, the pulsing tremors in the rounded softness of her throat beneath the lifted chin; could feel the hot breath coming to him from slightly parted lips.
Morgan