expect you and the Marvelous Mite?”
Doyle looked at his wristwatch. “It’s a quarter of ten now. Give us
forty-five minutes for supper . . . We should get to the house around
three in the morning, if we don’t get too lost.”
She gave him a noisy kiss via telephone.
“Until three, darling.”
At eleven o’clock George Leland passed a sign which gave the mileage to
San Francisco. He looked down at the speedometer SATURDAY and did some
figuring. He was not as quick about it as he once would have been. The
numbers were slippery. He could not seem to add with even a
third-grader’s skill. And he was not as sure of himself as he had once
been, either, for he had to refigure the thing three times before he was
satisfied with the answer.
He looked at the shimmering golden girl beside him. “We’ll reach your
place by one o’clock. Maybe one-thirty,” he said.
Twenty-one Courtney gathered up the stacks of trash that had
accumulated from moving and taking delivery on new furniture-empty
wooden packing crates, cardboard boxes, mounds of shredded newspapers,
plastic and paper wrappings, wire, cord, rope-and put it all in the
guest bedroom, which had not yet been furnished. It made quite a large,
unsightly hill of rubble in the center of the carpet. She stepped into
the hall and closed the door on the junk. There. Now they wouldn’t
have to look at it or think about it until Monday, when it would become
necessary to haul the whole lot away somewhere to make room for the
guest-room furniture. It was a bit like sweeping dirt under a carpet,
she supposed.
mole p But as long as no one lifted up the carpet to look, what was
wrong with that?
She went back to their bedroom and stood in the doorway, surveying it.
The dresser, highboy, nightstands, and bed were all of matching heavy,
dark wood which looked as if it had been hand-carved and hand-polished.
The carpet was a deep-blue shag. The bedspread and drapes were a rich
darkgold velvet that looked almost as soft and horned as her own skin
when she had a good tan. All in all, she thought, it was a damned sexy
room.
Of course, the spread didn’t hang perfectly even all around. And there
was a cluster of perfume and make-up bottles on the dresser. And maybe
the full-length mirror needed polishing . . . But all these things were
what made it a Courtney Doyle Room. She left her mark of casual,
minimal, harmless disarray wherever she lived.
“Remember,” she had warned Alex on the night before their wedding, “you
aren’t getting a good housekeeper.”
“I don’t want to marry a housekeeper,” he said. “Hell, I can hire
housekeepers by the dozen!
“And I’m not a really terrific cook.”
“Why did God make restaurants?” he asked.
“And,” she had said, scowling at the thought of her own sloppiness and
slothfulness, “I usually let the laundry pile up until I either have to
do the wash or buy all new clothes.”
“Courtney, why do you think God invented Chinese laundries? Huh?”
Remembering that exchange, how they had broken into fits of laughter and
giggled helplessly, holding each other and rocking on the floor like
silly children, she smiled and went over to their new bed and sat down
on it, testing the springs.
She actually had tested them before. She had stripped off all her
clothes and jumped up and down in the center of the mattress, just as
she had told Alex on the telephone. It had seemed a splendid idea at
the time. But the exercise and the cool air on her bare skin had given
her ideas and an appetite for loving. She could hardly get to sleep
that night for wanting him. She kept thinking of Alex, of what it was
like with him, kept thinking how perfect they were together and how
bedtime with him was unlike anything she had ever known with anyone
else.
They were good together in many ways, not just in bed. They liked the
same books, the same movies, and usually the same people. If it was