For a moment the girl from the Keys seemed utterly nonplussed. She got to her feet slowly and stammered, “You’re not gonna find Freddie for me?”

Shayne said firmly, “Nope.” He rounded the corner of his desk and took her by the arm. “This way out. I have another appointment.”

She jerked away from him angrily, then pushed her body hard against his and said in a voice that throbbed with sexual invitation, “You ain’t never seen me dance, Mister.”

He looked down at her without moving, and wrinkled his nose in disgust at the hot waves of perfumed air that roiled up between them. “Change your brand of perfume before you get so close to a man.”

Childish fury blazed in her lustrous, black eyes, and without the slightest warning her left hand swung up with fingers clawed to rake the side of his face with sharp nails.

He caught her wrist before she reached the target, and swung her away from him violently. “Get out before I turn you over my knee and spank you.”

She stood very still, quivering with wrath and with a dazed, hurt look on her overpainted young face.

Then she spat, “Don’t you ever come near me or I’ll have Ralphie cut you up in little pieces.” She swung away and marched out as disdainfully as she could in her scuffed loafers, and Shayne followed her to the door of his inner office and leaned against the frame as she stamped past Lucy without a glance at her and slammed through the outer door.

“Do a fast burn with Sloe Burn,” chanted Lucy with her gaze fixed on the closed door through which Miss Esther Piney had disappeared. Then she said, “Oh, Michael!” and began laughing helplessly.

He didn’t join in her merriment. He said sternly, “Control yourself and get in here with a deodorizer or something. Next time you close up an oversexed swamp-cat in my office I’m going fishing for a week.”