Free Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald

me with her dark brows raised. "What are you trying to do? Turn me into bait?"
    "On a very small chance, yes. It took him two months to come looking. Maybe you'd have spent the hell out of it by now. And anyway, we can still report it. Leave a few drawers messed up."
    She nibbled at the edge of her thumb. "But it might make things happen faster if we don't?"
    "There's that small chance. And I'm not going to let anything happen to you, Nina."
    She stood up. "So okay. Anyhow, nothing would happen, I mean about getting my mink money back. Lois downstairs, they really cleaned her out a year ago. Some of the furniture even. She was on her vacation."
    She shrugged, turned in a slow circle of Greek dance, popping her fingers, and twirled on off into the bedroom. In a little while I went in and hauled the spilled mattress back up onto the bed. She finished a sandwich, licked I her fingers, tried to give me a big wicked wink. But she wasn't a good winker. She couldn't close one without nearly closing the other. It made made her look squinty and nearsighted.
    When we had to pass in a narrow space, doing the chores of reassembling the place, she contrived to bump me with a round hip. She hummed with the music. She looked bemused and tricky and smug, darting her blue and challenging glances. When she would come to show me where something went, she would manage to press the heat of a mellow breast against my arm. She built the big awareness of girl. We were in the girl house, perfumed with girl, with blue eyes everywhere. The infrequent small-talk bore no relation to what was going on, to what she was causing.
    Finally she managed to trip and turn, and be caught just so, gasping, a silky weight, breath warm, eyes knowing, lips gone soft and an inch away, and not enough air in the room.
    I straightened her back up and gave her a little push. "Now, Nina, damn it, just one goddam minute, damn it!"
    "Oh boy," she said. "Ethics and everything. The little sister. You talk so many bold games, it gets confusing for a girl. I guess you think it would be a lousy thing to come here to take care of me, and then take care of me too many ways, huh? But there are all kinds of lousy things. How lousy is it you should be so stuffy you make me seem sort of cheap and obvious?"
    "Don't get sore."
    "I'm getting mad to keep from crying. I mean you're so stuck on this role you have to play. My God, I suppose I am the little sister, but I am also an adult, Trav. I told you before I've run into some doors.and had my share of black eyes. I had a disaster marriage and a very very fast annulment. But you have some kind of a boy scout oath with my brother, and… Now I feel degraded and… Damn it, get out of here!"
    I laughed and caught her. She yawped and leaped about, saying in effect that the precious moment had passed, and the hell with it, and we couldn't retrieve the situation, it was spoiled etc etc. I stilled her mouth and each time she talked it was with a little less conviction, and finally she stood docile, trembling, taking huge noisy inhalations, her strong pale neck bent forward while, with clumsy fingers, I unlatched the little hook and eye at the back of her dress and stripped the zipper down.
    "This is n-n-nutty" she whispered.
    I told her that indeed it was. I made a silent excuse to Big Brother. I told him to give me credit for trying.
    And then there was the sweet drugging time of resting, all unwound, all mysteries known, somnolent there in a narrow wedge of light from a bathroom door open a few inches. Time moves slowly then, as in an underwater world. She had hitched herself to rest upon me, so distributed that she seemed to have no weight at all. She had her dark head tucked under the angle of my jaw, her hands under me and hooked back over the tops of my shoulders, her deep breasts flattened against me, used loins resting astraddle my right thigh, a spent mild whiskery weight.
    From time to time she would take a deep breath, and let it out