Renegade Player by Dixie Browning Page B

only meant— Well, you have thrown more than a few men for a loop. There’s the Willits kid, for one. Hardly legal size, of course, and so you throw him back, but surely there’ve been a few who qualified as keepers. What about my predecessor RENEGADE PLAYER at CCE? Someone mentioned that you’d seen a good deal of him.”
    “Randy?” she exclaimed, startled. “I’d hardly call him a keeper.”
    “Why not? He was certainly in the keepable income bracket.”
    “There you go again, insinuating that all I could possibly be interested in is a man’s pocketbook! I don’t think I like this conversation very much, Kiel,” Willy asserted, wrenching herself away from Kiel’s arms. She sat huddled over defensively, fighting a demeaning urge to cry.
    “Sorry. You must know I’m interested in you, Willy. Maybe I just wanted to make sure I didn’t make the same mistake my predecessor made.”
    “Well, if it’s of any interest to you, you did. He—he tried to take me to bed, tried a little too energetically, and—and I hit him and, well, he got angry and called me some not very flattering names and stormed out. Unfortunately, he had been drinking rather heavily before that and he ended up making an even bigger fool of himself by driving into a ditch.”
    Kiel was silent for so long Willy thought he might not have heard her. He was probably wondering what anyone could say to such a sordid little melodrama, short of laughing at it.
    “I understood you were seeing him pretty steadily,” he said after a while in a voice that sounded almost impersonally disinterested. “Why didn’t you want to carry the affair to its logical conclusion? Purely as a matter of interest.”
    Provoked, she retorted, “Because I didn’t love him, not that it’s any business of yours!”
    “Then why see so much of him in the first place?” he asked with infuriating logic.
    She turned to him impatiently. “Good Lord, Kiel, what am I supposed to do, join a convent until a marriage is arranged for me? I like a little social life. I enjoy male companionship—no more, no less than any other red-blooded American girl. Is there something wrong with that? For all I knew, Randy Collier could have been the right man for me. How could I find out without getting to know him better? As it happened, we weren’t all that compatible, and when he tried to promote something I didn’t want, we broke up. Now, are you satisfied?”
    He stood up abruptly and crossed the narrow open space to lean against a stay, gazing out in the direction of the channel marker. They had anchored out in the sound beyond the breakwater because all the spaces along the docks were filled, and now, across the still water came the sound of laughter and a burst of music that was quickly moderated. Willy stared helplessly at the tall, shadowy figure, his legs braced unconsciously against the almost imperceptible motion of the deck, and when he was momentarily revealed by a flash of sheet lightning out over the sound, she could see the rigid set of his shoulders.
    She started to speak, clearing her throat and trying again for a light tone. “Turnabout’s supposed to be fair play. What about the life and times of Kiel Faulkner?”
    After a moment’s hesitation, when she thought he hadn’t heard her, she turned around to gaze out over the opposite side of the Tern , but then he answered her, sounding preoccupied. “It’d bore you, I’m afraid. Maybe we’d better turn in now. I’ll do the dishes if RENEGADE PLAYER you’d like to get through in the head, and then you can have a bit of privacy. Sorry there’s not much separation between boudoir and galley.”
    A surge of disappointment swept over her. “Fine,” she said brightly. “It’s been a long day, anyway.”
    Kiel crossed the intervening space with two strides and caught at her arms, pulling her up to shake her slightly; and distraught at the way he seemed to push her from one emotional extreme to another, she