Leslie Charteris - The Saint in the Sun - Nassau: The Fast Women
"Her name is Teresa Montesino, if you insist on a label on every tombstone."
Simon allowed his somewhat obstructed gaze to transfer itself to the exotic pulse-perturber on whom Godfrey Quillen was exerting his highest-octane charm. This was not an unbearably painful shift. The brunette had all the more obvious attractions that Mrs Quillen superficially lacked. She had the intense dark eyes and sensual lips that automatically inspire exploratory ideas, and the corporeal structure which it is always fun to explore. A hopeless cynic might have prognosticated that at some middle-aged future she could be just plain fat, but this was an unhappy conclusion that a less cautious soul did not have to envisage prematurely. At a similar age to Cynthia's, still safely under thirty, she offered the overwhelming sort of competition that any wife might reasonably have qualms about.
"You can't shoot him for having good eyesight," said the Saint soothingly.
...
"Are you so unhappy to be stuck with me?" asked Teresa.
She had enough Mediterranean accent to give her voice a fascinating different intonation, but not enough to attract too much attention or to become quickly tiresome.
"By no means," said the Saint, and gave her another thorough inspection at this more convenient range. "I mean, am I stuck? If so, I have a sensational idea. Let's throw a dinner party of our own--for disreputably unmarried couples. And just to be sure we don't insult anybody, let's not invite anyone else."
That was the beginning of an evening which he would remember for a long time. Not that he was likely to forget the important details of any adventure, but an evening with Teresa Montesino was quite an experience in its own right.
For all the tourist traffic that flows through it, Nassau is a very small town on a very very small island, so that it has no secret dispensaries of ambrosial food and/or dionysian entertainment known only to a fortunate elite.
...
"If there is an accident, you will be quite right to suspect me--but that is the most you will be able to do."
The Saint devoted himself to maintaining a sangfroid which would have been rated commendable by the sternest British standards.
...
So for a while he danced with her, as casually as it could be done with anyone of her build and cooperative zeal. Another unfriendly woman might have commented that she was not very subtle about the way she made it difficult for her partner to be unaware for a moment of her architectural assets; but to a victim with hormones it was not a completely unendurable ordeal.
"You must get tired of answering this, but why didn't those Roman talent scouts think they could get more dividends from you in a movie than a motor-car?"
"I have had those offers. And perhaps I would be as good as some others who have taken them." She was just brash enough to pull back her shoulders a trifle and take a slightly deeper breath, which on her was a seismic combination. Yet the Saint was far more devastated by the absolute certainty that he detected a downright twinkle in her gaze.
...
"I'll wave to you, Juliet."
She turned closer to him, one arm partly on the back of the seat and partly on his shoulder, her eyes big and darkly luminous in the distant light from the entrance.
..for the moment he could only fall back on the faintly flippant equanimity developed from some past experience of such challenges.
"All right, darling, what's in it for me? After I've freed Godfrey from his encumbrance, but he's inherited her money, and you've married him--"
We could console ourselves," she said, "until he had an accident."
There must be extravagances for which plain silence is ineffectual and a guffaw is inadequate. Simon decided that they were close enough to that pinnacle. He said lightly: "This, I must think over."
"Come upstairs and think."
"The management wouldn't like that. And in the morning you might be sorry too."
She leaned on him even more overwhelmingly, bringing her full relaxed lips within an inch of his mouth. He waited, well aware of the softness that pressed against him. Then she drew back sharply, and slapped his face.
"Thank you, dear," said the Saint reaching across her to open the other door. "And happy dreams."
She got out of the car. And as she did so, there was one inevitably perfect moment in which she offered a transient target that the most careful posing could never have improved. With the palm of his hand, he gave it an accolade that added an unpremeditated zip to her disembarcation and left her in stinging stupefaction for long enough for him to shut the car door again and get it moving out of range of retribution.
Almost as soon as he turned the next corner he had cooled off. He had a violent aversion to being slapped, and the smack with which he had reciprocated had been uninhibitedly meant to hurt, but he realized that she had some material for self-justification. Any woman who candidly offers all her physical potential to a man, and has as much to offer as Teresa Montesino, and is rejected with even goodnatured urbanity, can be expected to respond rather primitively.
Simon Templar had no virtuous feelings about the rejection. He was quite animal enough to be keenly aware of what she had in stock for the male animal, and he no longer had any lower-case saintly scruples about taking advantage of a grown woman whose natural impulses came more readily to the surface in the glow of certain liquid refreshments. He hadn't for one moment seriously contemplated make love to Teresa for any reward that Cynthia Quillen might have offered, but neither did that mean that he was resolved to fight to the death against letting her drag him into bed. He hadn't expected her to make any such effort, but when it happened he had found himself chilled by an unprecedented caution.
"I must be getting old," he told himself wryly. And he wondered how old you had to get before two totally differently attractive women each asked your advice about murdering the other, during the same evening. He thought that life might get really dull when there was no proposition you could afford to turn down and be satisfied with your own estimate of what you had passed up. He could see Teresa's last stunned expression as starkly frozen as a flash photo in his mind's eye, and was still laughing when he fell asleep.
