She stopped the swing in mid-air, twisted at the waist, bent over and shot out her left foot. That loafer caught me right in the stomach. Then she quickly followed with another karate blow that I had to hustle to break. It came at me from the side in a long arc. Maybe she wanted to chop my head off at the neck. I was still recovering from the loafer in the stomach when I saw the blow coming.
I stepped inside it and got my arms around her and hung on. We turned around twice, then went down in the soft grass at the side of the path. I had her around the waist and was holding her tight. My cheek was pressed against hers. She immediately gave up the super-female-agent attack and reverted to what she knew best: the ordinary female habit of kicking, slapping, and scratching.
“Let me go, you creep!” she said.
I held onto her until she calmed down. When she was limp in my arms I moved my cheek far enough from hers to see her face clearly.
“Want to talk about it?” I asked.
“Damn you!” she answered.
I held onto her. “If you admit your little attack wasn’t successful, I’ll let you go.”
“Drop dead!”
“All right then. We stay just like this. Actually it isn’t too bad for me. You’re easy to hold and you smell good too.”
She pushed out her lower lip. “Damn,” she said. “I thought I was going to be the one to get the drop on the famous Nick Carter.”
I raised my eyebrows, bushy as they were. “And just how did you know I was Nick Carter?”
The pouting lip went back in. The tongue flicked out just enough to moisten the lips. A teasing look came into the green eyes. The voice dropped low when she spoke.
“Take me to your place and I’ll tell you,” said the young lady.
“Can you walk? Or would you like me to carry you?”
“What if I said my ankle hurt?”
I scooped her up in my arms and carried her back down the path. She was lighter than she looked. That is not to say she looked heavy, but she looked more filled out than she actually was. At first I had thought it might have been because she had foam-rubber help filling out those curves, but our little wrestling match proved to me she neither needed nor had such assistance.
“You look older than I thought,” she said. She had her head on my shoulder and was staring at my face.
“I’m wearing a disguise.”
“I know that, silly. But I mean besides that.”
I reached the door and told her to hug my neck while I let us in. When we were inside she dropped her feet to the floor, wrapped her arms around my neck and moved her lips along my jaw line until she found my lips. Her tongue darted in and out while she kept grinding her tiny body against me. When she stopped, there was barely enough room for a feather to get between us.
“Your ankle doesn’t hurt at all, does it?” I asked.
“Make love to me, Nick,” she answered. “Please.”
“Your problem is you’re too shy and backward. You have to learn to assert yourself. Be bold.”
“Make love to me. Undress me and take me to bed.”
“Thank you, but no,” I said. “Even if I have no particular feeling for the ladies I go to bed with, at least I prefer to know who they are. And I really prefer to like them.”
“Don’t you like me?” The lower lip was stuck out again.
“You attack me. You call me a creep. You tell me to drop dead. You say I’m older than you thought. And then you stand there and ask me if I like you. Yes, I like you. But I don’t even know you.”
“My name is Tanya. Now make love to me.”
With that she pressed her body closer and kissed me again. Since we had suddenly become old friends, I decided I might as well carry her off to bed.
When she was on her back with her long eyelashes blinking up at me, looking almost too innocent, she said, “Nick?”
I was unbuttoning her blouse. “Yes, Tanya.”
“You’ve made love to a lot of women, haven’t you?”
The blouse was open. She was wearing a white bra, all lacy with a tiny pink ribbon in the center where the two cups joined. “There have been one or two, yes.”
“How many?”
I frowned. “I never gave it much thought. I don’t keep score.”
“I’ll bet you can’t even remember the faces or names of most of them.”
“That’s right. Would you like to leave?”
She made a little groaning sound. “No. What are you doing to me?”
I was doing things to her all right. The bra was off and so was the blouse. My lips had found the lovely, plum-colored nipples. She was wearing stockings which I removed carefully, taking the loafers with them. And then the skirt. That was simple.
Her hands were moving over my chest. She kept digging her heels into the bed while little groans came from her.
“Please!” she whimpered. “Nick, darling, I don’t think I can wait much longer.”
She was wearing cute, powder-blue, lacy bikini panties. I got my thumbs under the waistband. I already began to feel the burning in my loins.
My thumb was under the waistband and I began to pull the panties down. The edge had already started past the soft, velvet thatch between her legs when I saw something else.
It was metal. As I pulled the panties down farther I saw that it was round like a gun barrel. It had been lying flat against her skin and when I pulled the panties past it, the thing sprung out aiming straight at me.
And then it went off like a loud cap pistol. Instinctively I jumped to my feet and looked down at myself. There was no bullet hole anywhere.
Tanya began to laugh. “If you could have seen your face,” she said. Then she sat up in the bed and reached for the phone. She dialed a number, then waited.
I put my hands on my hips and watched her. Any fire I had felt in my loins was out now.
Tanya shook her head at me. “I’m a new agent with AXE,” she said. “It’s lucky my gun was loaded with blanks or you would have been quite dead.”
She turned her attention to the phone. “Yes? This is Tanya. The panty gun has been tested and it works perfectly.”
I pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
Tanya hung up then immediately dialed again. She waited with her breasts outthrust, tapping her teeth with her fingernail. She wasn’t looking at me now. Then she said, “Yes, sir. I have made contact with Mr. Carter.”
Two
The cigarette was half smoked when Tanya hung up. She reached for her bra and put it around her, fastening it in the back.
“I’ll be working with you on this assignment, Nick,” she said as she made some last-minute adjustments to fill the bra cups.
“Oh?” I said. I felt like I had been used. It wasn’t a feeling I had often. And it wasn’t a feeling I particularly cared for.
I said, “I think we have some unfinished business here.”
She blinked at me while she pulled on the blouse and started buttoning it. “Really?”
“What we had started before your little cannon went bang at me.”
“Oh.” She climbed off the bed and started pulling on her stockings. “You’re handsome and all that, Nick. But after all, I am only nineteen. And you’re... well over thirty as I understand, right? You’re really much too old for me. Never trust anyone over thirty and all that. I really prefer younger men.” She smiled a quick smile. “No hard feelings?”
I mashed out the cigarette. “No hard feelings, Tanya. But Hawk had better have one hell of a good reason for teaming me up with anyone as young and inexperienced as you.”
She stiffened and stared at me with fire in her eyes. “I think what just happened shows I’m not too inexperienced.”
I thought for a while — she was right.
I gave her a smile. “O.K., but start having a little respect for your elders.”