Renegade Player by Dixie Browning

“It’s just so discriminatingly.”
    “Yeah, about as discriminating as a garbage truck.” He pinched her well-rounded but still-lean bottom, and she swatted his hand away.
    “I was a bean pole! I kept on trying to fill up all those places that other girls filled up when they were about fourteen. By the time I found out that I wasn’t really patterned after an ironing board, it had got to be a habit.”
    Looping the towel around her neck, Kiel drew her closer and began rubbing her hair as they stood on top of the saddle-backed dune bathed in a wash of gold sunlight. “What were you like as a little girl, Willy? Somehow, I can’t picture you as anything except the disgustingly lazy, ridiculously sexy woman with the offbeat sense of fun.”
    The last thing she wanted to do was talk about her childhood. Now that the wounds had healed over, she realized that it had not been all that unpleasant . . . only uneventful. Extremely circumscribed by a parent who, after his first wife died, had neither time nor patience to indulge a child, and so had arranged for her to be brought up in a way that didn’t disturb the sybaritic tenor of his own life-style.
    She snatched back her towel and flicked it at his lightly furred thigh. “Where’s that breakfast you promised me? Your turn to cook today,” she taunted, loping off toward her own apartment to get dressed.
    “Ten minutes,” he warned. “One minute later and the gulls get your share!”
    “Ha! You can put away enough for three people, easily,” she mocked over her shoulder as she swung up her stairway.
    “Yes, but when you’re eating with me, I always cook enough for six!”

    That night she drove the Porsche. They crossed the Currituck Sound Bridge and chose a little-used road on the mainland, and when they ended up near the Virginia border, Kiel suggested they keep on in the direction of Norfolk until they found a good restaurant.
    “Knowing that the quickest way to your heart is through your stomach,” he added with a sardonic smile as she geared down competently to negotiate a narrow, curving bridge.
    “Is that what you’re aiming for?” she dared, picking up speed again on the straightaway.
    “I haven’t quite decided yet. Maybe I’m looking for a bedmate, and then again, maybe I’m looking for a good cook . . . you never can tell.”
    “So when and if you find out, how about letting me in on it,” she quipped, wondering if her sudden shortness of breath were apparent.
    Too hungry to search further, they ate at a third-rate diner on juicy, scrumptious hamburgers loaded with big slabs of sweet onions and a horseradish sauce that was unbelievably good. Willy declined beer and settled for milk, to Kiel’s disgust. On the way back home, he drove and she snuggled down in the comfort-engineered seat and watched admiringly as he made the powerful pistons march to his tune.
    “There’s a bit of harshness in the upper midrange, but she’s a superb animal for all that,” he observed as he slowed down for a stop sign.
    “Hmmmm, is that what makes my spine tingle when you let it out? I like it, whatever it is . . . like a huge pipe organ in a tall-ceilinged church.”
    “You’re really a sensuous creature, aren’t you, Wilhelmina Silverthorne?” he asked playfully, and she slanted a look at his hawkish profile against the lights of Coinjock Bridge.
    “Am I?” she asked. “I suppose so if you mean it in the literal sense.”
    “I wonder just what else you are?” he mused.
    Facetiously, she enumerated on her fingers: “I’m a fairly up-and-coming real-estate saleswoman for one thing and . . . I’m an unbelievably bad violinist for another. Ahhh ... oh, yes, and I play a near unbeatable game of checkers and . . . and I love ghost stories, especially Ambrose Bierce,” she finished with a rush.
    He laughed aloud. “The first I wonder about, the second I cringe from, and the third . . . well, I’ll challenge you to two out of three anytime you