Free A Key to the Suite by John D. MacDonald Page B

hundred and five pounds. I’ll even tell you the forlorn dimensions. Reading from the top they’re thirty-one, nineteen, thirty-one. Symmetrical, no?”
    “Not exactly. Thirty-one, thirty-one, thirty-one would be truly symmetrical. Putting that crazy nineteen in the middle is what saves it. Anyhow, Jan has a hell of a good figure, said he with husbandly pride. She’s generally a placid gal, which works out fine because I’m inclined to blow up. Lately she hasn’t been so placid. That’s because I’ve had to leave her alone too much, and she has the idea I could get out of all this traveling. I could, but at the moment it doesn’t seem to be the smart thing to do. You didn’t ask for my problems. You asked about Jan. She is my nifty girl.”
    “It makes me feel like an urchin outside a candy store.”
    “You never feel sorry for yourself. Remember?”
    “Any time I start to, all I have to do is remember the delights of
my
marriage. And suddenly you’d be surprised at how contented I get.”
    “You should try again.”
    “Uh uh! I rode my little barrel over the falls, thank you. I survived, but not by much of a margin. Floyd, dear man, thank you for the drink and the talk. You can plant me in a cab, please. Tomorrow I’ll be the earnest quester, and nail you down about what you really think about conventions.”
    Halfway through the lower lobby she stopped suddenly and turned, smiling, and said, “If you have time, and if it’s possible to get anywhere near the ocean, ten minutes of sea breeze would blow the cigar smell out of this mop.”
    “I have time and there’s an ocean around here somewhere. I swear I’ve seen one.”
    They walked across the pool area and found an outside stairway that led up to the low flat roof of the furthest rank of cabanas. With most of the hotel lights behind them, they could see the phosphorescence in the waves. They stood side by side, looking over a low wall.
    “One day,” she said, “it ought to reach up with one hell of a big wave and yank all this gunky luxury right back out and drown it.”
    “Nature girl?”
    “By instinct, but not habit.” Suddenly she took her shoes off, put them on the wide railing and stood close to him, smiling up at him. “See? Five five. Not even that, actually. I lie a little. Five four and a little over a half inch.”
    “And you actually weigh seventy-two pounds, and the measurements are really nineteen, nineteen, nineteen.”
    “The
hell
you say, Hubbard.” She came up on tip-toe, put her arms around his neck and sagged her weight on him. “A hunnert ’n five pounds of dreary broad.”
    She kissed him lightly, mockingly, and suddenly he was kissing her with a strength and fury he could not have anticipated. She fitted her slimness to him, strained to him, left her mouth soft for the breaking. The kiss ended and he was holding her close, whispering, “Cory, Cory, Cory, Cory.” Her hands moved on his face and his throat, and she covered all the parts of his face she could reach with a hundred light quick kisses, making an audible, murmurous sound of contentment as she did so, until her mouth came back onto his, into a little more violence than before.
    “You’re not running,” she muttered. “You’re not running like a rabbit.”
    “Cory, Cory. God, you feel so sweet and good.”
    She thrust him away, snatched up her bag and shoes. “I better do the running, my darling. Right now it’s the only thing that makes any kind of sense.”
    She fled more quickly than he would have guessed possible. He called to her, but she did not stop or answer. By the time he reached the bottom of the steps she was more than halfway across the pool area, moving fleetly through a confusion of colored spotlights and floodlights, between the tropical plantings, angling toward the flank of the tall pale hotel.
    He slowed his pace and sat on a chaise near the pool and smoked a cigarette. He wiped her lipstick from his mouth. He looked at the sky,