“Um-m-m.” The girl stretched her bare arms and arched her body upward with sinuous grace of a kitten.
A full-faced view of the girl erased any small doubt he might have had about her identity. The girl in the deck chair was Barbara Little, alias Margo Macon.
Grinning broadly, Shayne lifted his cognac glass in a toast and said, “So this is it. The bold, bad French Quarter where beautiful girls loll around unclothed to raise the blood pressure of unwary tourists.”
She nodded, her wide blue eyes frankly interrogating him. “Le Vieux Carre.” A perfectly slurred accent caressed the words. “Do I? And are you?”
“What?”
She smiled lazily, drawing her upper lip away from the fine edges of her teeth and looking entirely unsophisticated. “Do I raise your blood pressure, and are you an unwary tourist?”
Shayne pondered the question, then said, “At the risk of offending you — no.”
Her delighted laughter bubbled up. She turned on her side, rested her chin on her hand and studied his features with unabashed approval. She said, “I like you,” simply and candidly.
“Why?”
“Because — not one man in ten thousand would have stayed on his side of the rail with me lying here — like this. Not one in a hundred thousand here in the Quarter. But you haven’t even tried to get in a lecherous crack,” she ended, a little frown puckering her forehead.