"My darling, you do love me!"
"Of course I do. But if I can't have you all to myself I'll have you dead. Speak!"
"We get married in the morning."
"Some men are so hard to convince," she whispered, slipping the gun into my pocket and herself into my arms. Then she kissed me with such delicious intensity that I almost looked forward to the morrow.
Chapter 2
"WHERE ARE YOU GOING, Slippery Jim?" Angelina asked, leaning out of the window of our room above. I stopped with my hand on the gate.
"Just down for a quick swim, my love," I shouted back and swung the gate open. A .75 roared and the ruins of the gate were blown out of my hand.
"Open your robe," she said, not unkindly, and blew the smoke from the gun barrel at the same time.
I shrugged with resignation and opened the beach robe. My feet were bare. But of course I was fully dressed, with my pant legs rolled up and my shoes stuffed into my jacket pockets. She nodded understandably.
"You can come back upstairs. You're going nowhere."
"Of course I'm not." Hot indignation. "I'm not that sort of chap. I was just afraid you might misunderstand. I just wanted to nip into the shops and…"
"Upstairs."
I went. Hell hath no fury etc. was invented to describe my Angelina. The Special Corps medics had stripped her of her homicidal tendencies, unknotted the tangled skeins of her subconscious and equipped her for a more happy existence than circumstance had previously provided. But when it came to the crunch she was still the old Angelina. I sighed and mounted the stairs with leaden feet.
And I felt even more of an unthinking fiend when I saw that she was crying. "Jim, you don't love me!" A classic gambit since the first woman in the garden, but still unanswerable.
"I do," I protested, and I meant it. "But, it's just… reflex. Or something like that. I love you, but marriage is, well, like going to prison. And in all my crooked years I have never been sent up."