Free The Only Girl in the Game by John D. MacDonald

Miss Dawson.”
    “If it wouldn’t be showing too much familiarity with the hired help around here, you could make me more comfortable by calling me Betty.”
    “And Hugh, if you please.”
    “Hugh when we meet in the corridor. Mr. Darren in front of the troops, sir.”
    “I like your work, Betty.”
    “I know you do.”
    “How?”
    “You laugh at exactly the right places. And you keep coming back for more. So it hasn’t been any secret. So thanks, Hugh. And this is just about all the mutual admiration I can take at the moment. Seventy-one seconds from now I either fall into bed, or flat on the floor. It’s a delicate problem of timing. And a good morning to you, and a good night to me.”
    From then on it was very easy to talk to her, so easy and so pleasant that he found himself making little adjustments in his schedule so that it would happen more often. He learned the likely time to find her out by the pool, or in the coffee shop, or having dinner in the Little Room. His was a lonely job and a hard job, and she was the only person he could talk to in an unguarded way. He learned that she was observant, and he found it to his advantage to check some of his conclusions about members of his staff with her. In one way it surprised him that she should know so much about the personal problems, the domestic situations of bartenders, bellhops, waitresses; she seemed to have little time to learn such things. But on the other hand she was a warm and sympathetic person, and her interest in other people was not forced, and so they talked about themselves to her. He found himself doing the same thing.
    By Christmas their friendship was close and comfortable, and very probably it would have leveled off at that point had she not decided he was looking a little too drawn and weary. She did not work on Wednesday nights. She talked him into taking a Thursday off, and she was most mysterious about the whole project. They left the hotel early in the morning on the seventh day of January, in her stodgy, elderly Morris Minor which she called Morris in a way that turned the designation into a personal name. There was a giant picnic basket resting on the back seat. She drove thirty miles out of town, and then three more miles over a track so primitive the small car moaned and sighed at each hump and dip. They were in the burned and ancient land on a morning clear and bright, dazzlingly new.
    In country where for reasons unknown even the shacks of the desert rats are fashioned of boards brought from far away, the place where she stopped, at the end of the road, wasof the red-and-brown native stone. It was a small place, which blended against the lift of a small, angular hill.
    She had a key for the crude, heavy door, and she was very much at home in the place. There was wood stacked for a big fireplace. There was a deep well gasoline pump with manual controls and a big pressure tank, a gauge to be watched carefully. There were propane tanks for a small stove and a gas refrigerator. There were gasoline lanterns.
    Most of the interior was one big room—living room and bunk room, with the kitchen at one end, and a small bath. She enlisted his aid in getting the utilities operating. When all chores were done she looked at him with a pride in this feat, in this special place, and said, “See? Like for hermits.”
    She stood, smiling at him, wearing pale tailored whipcords, a bulky white cardigan, and soft desert boots, her black hair ponytailed with a thick white length of yarn. Mirrored sunglasses made her eyes unreadable.
    “It’s exactly ten thousand years from the Cameroon,” he said.
    “And so it is exactly what we need, Mr. Darren dear. And first comes the picnic-type breakfast, and you build a fire to take the chill off this place, and then comes a walk to places I know, and then back here for drinks, and then lunch out on the picnic table in the sun, and a nap for the weary ones, and more drinks and the final eating, and some