Salvage for the Saint Read Free

was barely distinguishable from complete open-mindedness. “But … are you in distress?”
    She wrung her hands helplessly and batted her eyelashes at him nineteen to the dozen.
    “Is that better?”
    They both laughed; and then she said seriously:
    “Simon, I may not be as demonstratively in distress as some of your classic damsels. Technically you might even say I’m not in distress at all. Certainly I don’t think I’m in any kind of personal danger.” Here she looked wistful, almost as if she would have rather enjoyed being in personal danger. “All of which may seem to disqualify me as a true dyed-in-the-wool d in d. And all of which is part of the reason why it’s taken me four days to make up my mind to come and see you.”
    “And the rest of the reason?”
    “The first part of the rest of the reason is that I’m an independent-type girl and I don’t like asking for help. And the rest of the reason is—well, call it natural skepticism.”
    “You mean when it comes to the providential arrival of a rescuing knight on a white charger that looks more like a red powerboat?”
    She gave a thumbs-up sign.
    “You got it in one. Where rescuing knights are concerned, I’m a total unbeliever. Or was. I’d heard and read all about the famous Saint, of course. But frankly I thought you were just too good to be true.”
    She paused, draining non-existent dregs from her glass.
    “But anyhow,” she continued, “I hesitated to bother you at a time when you’re— well—” She spread her hands in a vague gesture that seemed to indicate satisfactorily the island and the circumstances of his being there.
    “On vacation?” he supplied.
    “Something of the sort, I guess. Only I didn’t think you daredevil freelance buccaneer types went in for fixed periods of work and leisure as such.”
    “We don’t,” he agreed. “Or at any rate this one doesn’t. For me the work’s a kind of vacation in itself most of the time, so it doesn’t break my heart when an earmarked vacation turns into work, as it looks like doing now.”
    He was trying gently to coax her to get to the point, but he knew enough about her already to be sure that she would continue to take her time. It came, he suspected, from a kind of careful-stepping delicacy in her character; and that was something he could respect, even if it meant his bedtime was thereby delayed a little further.
    He said nothing for a few moments while he repeated his legerdemain with the glasses; and then he regarded her silently for a few moments more, with a level blue gaze in which there was a shifting light she had seen before, a light that was elusively mocking and quixotic and challenging all at the same time.
    He said: “So you took a good gander at me and decided that the stainless purity of my character spoke for itself—eventually?”
    “I decided,” she answered slowly and deliberately, “that against all probability, everything I’d ever heard and read about you was true—or at least, all the good things— and that there’s no comparative stranger I’d be readier to trust.”
    The Saint blinked.
    “That was quite a speech,” he said. “Thanks. I’m flattered, I really am … Of course, if you got to know me better, disillusion would soon set in. You’d find I have to cut my toenails and wash my socks just like ordinary mortals. On occasions I burp, and I have even been—”
    “Oh, give me every time a man who really knows how to burp!” she purred, clapping her hands in beautifully judged over-enthusiasm.
    And she laughed again with the same rich encompassing warmth as before, a warmth that was peculiarly feminine and flattering in itself. It somehow blended intimacy and reserve and mystery and promise; and it made the Saint study her some more.
    He put her age somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. Those were, from a male point of view, the best years for certain types of women, and in Simon Templar’s connoisseur opinion she was