Cat In A Diamond Dazzle

Chapter 26

Another Opening, Another Shoe

Shades of the late, great Gridiron Show! Temple was once again racing through the theatrical underbelly of the Crystal Phoenix, thinking about skits, costumes and crime. This time she was in cover-model costume, so she had long, heavy lavender brocade skirts to drag along. Good thing she had packed her Guthrie costume.

Off-the-shoulder necklines may be tailor-made to drive historical romance heroes crazy. They are also designed, she found, to drive anyone who wears them--except a broad-shouldered linebacker--

insane. She shrugged as she ran, wanting the material either on or off. It persisted in riding her shoulder rim like a gargoyle clinging to a cathedral ledge.

Her ice-cold fingers jerked up one brocade shoulder . . . what self-respecting romance heroine wouldn't have cold fingers when she was about to rehearse a pose-down with a cover hunk? Heavy on the hunk, no doubt, and light on the rehearsal. She'd heard the author escorts buzzing about a contestant who'd tried to goose any passing female last year.

Though Danny had promised to steer obstreperous sorts away from her, he wasn't God and couldn't control everything. And with Crawford Buchanan's stepdaughter Quincey, a not-so-sweet sixteen, among the cover models, Temple was bound to inherit some of the lusty overflow directed away from Quincey. Temple could hardly plead maidenly qualms at thirty.

She circled her neck to ease a cramp, rebelling against a fall of hot, heavy red hair, also part of the complete covergirl's costume. The hairpiece still felt prone to ebb down her back like an auburn sun sinking slowly in the West, so she jabbed oversize bobby pins into her coiffure as she went, hoping to hit hair, wig or something anchor able, even scalp would do in a pinch....

Of course she had to wear extremely flat-footed satin slippers, so naturally she slipped on the slick concrete and went skating ahead of herself until she caught a costume rack pole, tilting it to perform a fancy circle-stop against the wall.

Temple leaned against the concrete blocks and panted. Running in this heavy, theatrical getup did her composure no good. At least she hadn't damaged the "real" costumes. She eyed a frothy row of still-swaying sequins, pearls and feathers from the Phoenix's nightly revue. The pageant people, of which she was now one, were transients, mere borrowers of this space and these facilities. Interfering with the true show people would be a professional discourtesy.

Righting herself and the rack, her glance was caught by something underneath it that twinkled. She couldn't have stumbled upon another entrance to the underground tunnels, because those were all sealed. What she saw was a shoe, no doubt.

A shoe in fact. It lay toppled. Only the sole was visible, as smooth and untouched as fresh-laid linoleum. But a tiny rim of glitter visible around the toe beckoned like a tinfoil smile, and Temple found herself smiling back. Some people smiled at babies. She smiled at shoes. So sue her!

Oh, what the heck! She could at least see what it looked liked. That was her eternal quest, after all.

She sank into airy layers of her costume's velvet and brocade skirts, then crouched by the rack and bent forward despite the strict disinclination of her corset. She finally managed, with a few grunts, to touch her fingertips to the shoe.

The difficulty made her all the more set on seeing the hidden shoe. That rim of glitz looked mighty like solid silver-white rhinestones. Wouldn't it be wild if this was it? The shoe! Maybe a show-girl (shoegirl?) wore it onstage nightly.

By inching the sole closer with her fingernails, Temple was finally able to pinch her fingers on the toe and work the shoe close enough to pick up.

Except it was... a boot. And what a boot! She stared, stunned, like a Cinderella with an absolute klutz for a fairy godmother.

Oh, it was a fancy boot: inlaid flame-patterns of silver leather, with rhinestones scattered hither and thither like glitzy exclamation points. Though flashy enough to be a women's boot--it was like a size . . .

Bigfoot. And all the rhinestones did glitter, but most were big and clunky. In a word, crude. Sorry, fairy godmother, you aren't klutzy, but your taste in boots sure as shootin' is! Of course showgirls, being almost six feet tall, usually wear fairly large-size shoes. Maybe this was an escapee from a Western routine. Rhinestone Clementine. The old California folk song ran through Temple's mind, with new words. In a basement, in a ho-tel, excavaaaating for a crime, toiled a miner, old-bootfinder and her name was Ne'er-on-time. Light she was and like a fairy, but her boots were number nine. Big old bootsies, for giant tootsies, not the shoes she'd hoped to find.

Temple stood up, painfully, the big, bad boot in hand, and puzzled. Here she was, hunting the prize designer pumps and here she had found--instead--a crude rhinestone boot that Trigger wouldn't wear on a bad mane day. Surely this ghastly thing had a mate! She couldn't bear to bend over again, so she tried to sweep the long costumes up from the floor with her slipper-clad foot. All right, she kicked the hems into a froth. No other boot lay revealed under the rack. Yippee cayaaaa! This was a lonesome boot.

So a boot had been forgotten under the costume rack. Discarded, or deliberately ditched? Why?

Temple was expected on-stage right now for some serious hunk-hugging. What to do? She tapped the boot's virgin sole against one palm, undecided. Why was it unworn and abandoned? She would have to contemplate that mystery later.

She bolted back down the empty hallway, back to the two-mirror cubicle she shared with the sullen Quincey. There she dumped the boot in her canvas totebag. She would worry about it later. Right now, she had more pressing matters, like two hundred and twenty pounds of bare, muscled serial hunk to contend with.

Fabrizio stood, wide-stanced, hands on hips (what big hands, what lean hips!), hair tossed back over his shoulders (what luxuriant hair, what broad shoulders!) facing the stage.

That was where his audience was, at the moment. The house seats were empty, but the stage teemed with testosterone and its most spectacular by-products. Thirty-three handsome heroes, restless as a wayward wind, wandered the risers, which squeaked for mercy under their conjoined weight.

Fontana brothers roved in a restless pack, all clad in tight black-denim jeans.

Danny Dove sat cross-legged on the stage floor like a power-mad elf, facing the models--frowning, pointing and projecting his voice to the wings.

"You. Three feet to the left. Not you with the three left feet! Come to think of it, don't move a muscle. We haven't got accident insurance. Just kidding, gang. And you in the tape-measure suspenders.

Down a riser, big boy, your head will be hitting the boom mike. Yes, Mr. Fontana the Fifth or whoever, edge that boyishly lean bod over just. . . a . . . tad."

Temple felt small and vulnerable as she huddled with the other two pose-down girls in the stage-left wings. She would have liked to stay there. Her two sister models were dallying with their costumes, jerking them down from the top and up from the bottom, exactly the opposite approach Temple was inclined to take.

Quincey was gowned as an Old West saloon girl. Whether she had a heart of gold was unclear, but her deck-of-cards bustier featured the jacks of hearts and diamonds front and provocatively centered.

Her knee-length red-satin skirt was edged in black marabou feathers, which she was hiking up to high heaven on one hip and fastening there with a safety pin.

"Don't you have any underwear on?" Temple asked, following the diamondback-rattlesnake pattern of Quincey's fishnet pantyhose all the way to ground zero.

"Of course not." Quincey's tone was pure teenage disdain. "You never know what will show during one of these things, Danny said. Would you want someone out there in the audience seeing your groady old underwear?"

"Well, it might be better than the alternative." Temple tugged at her receding dress shoulders again.

"Darn. This outfit will not stay put!"

"Your boobs are supposed to hold it up," Quincey explained, rolling heavily made-up eyes.

Oh, that's the problem." Temple regarded the gown's gaping neckline. "I don't have any."

"Sure you do. Just lean way forward into the dress, then stand up again."

Quincey demonstrated with limber enthusiasm, thus revealing the tiny tattoo of a bulldog smoking a cigar that had hitherto hidden coyly behind the jack of hearts. Her mild exercise had increased her bra size by at least a letter of the alphabet. Bras were the only subject where getting Cs was better than Bs or As.

Temple, impressed despite herself, bent over, nearly cutting off the circulation in her torso, and rose again. Quincey was right, the bodice felt tighter and--oh, my--much more of her had come out to look around.

"What keeps us from falling out of these getups during the action onstage?" she wondered next.

"Nothing," said the girl on her other side, a brunette named Lacey with authentically long, burnished hair. These were mere girls so slight and young that there was no point in calling them women and looking ridiculous. "This is exactly like a real cover shoot, you know: the more provocative the better."

Oh, my ripping bodice! Temple thought. I didn't sign on to be provocative, just to snoop.

"Luckily," Lacey added, "most of these guys are pretty good, and have their own, like, routines. We'll just get together and decide whether we go horizontal or vertical, like where we wrap our legs and arms and all that stuff. You know, consult before trying it."

Did she say, "consult before dying!"

"So you've done this before?" Temple said aloud.

"Naw, I talked to a girl who did it last year. She's running the bookstore this time."

"Why isn't she modeling again?"

"Oh, she did this reeeally hot, super-steamy number with the guy who won last year, you know, an'

her folks saw it on tabloid TV, an' Skintight magazine called an' wanted her to do a, you know, really sexy photo layout and her, like, Stone-Age folks got totally bent out of shape and almost didn't let her come at all this year." Lacey's snapped gum, transmitting a tooth-decaying aroma of fruit-flavor, put a period to her endless sentence.

On Temple's other side, Quincey bent to pull a red satin garter up her thigh and snapped it into place.

Temple thought that she would do something different and simply snap. Like a twig. An overaged twig in a tempest not of her own making. But their attention was again drawn to the unknown horrors to come onstage.

"Now," Fabrizio announced during a lull. "I volunteer for sample pose-down, in case any of you guys are feeling shy."

None of the guys onstage looked the least bit shy, Temple noticed, with the possible exception of Jake Gotshall. And even he was looking, frankly, pretty hot to trot.

Nor were any of the assembled hunks swooning with enthusiasm at Breezy's self-sacrificing suggestion. Danny's head had turned to fix the Dallyin' Italian with the basilisk eye of a director sensing a mutineer.

No one directs a macho man, though, but his own ego. "Who will be Breezy's little woo-mahn for a run-through, eh?" he asked.

"Oh, this is too awesome!" Quincey murmured. "Just like one of those historical romance scenes where the women are captured and rounded up to be sold as love slaves and the handsome pirate captain picks one out. Me, me, me!"

"Wrong period, kid," Lacey said. "You need John Wayne or somebody else dead. Leave the live ones to me."

She undulated in front of Temple and Quincey to strike a pose in a harem costume apparently made from Salome's original seven veils after the moths had gotten through with it. A hand that jingle-jangled with seventeen or so thin brass bangles waved to and fro. "I'll do it, Fabrizio!"

But that would have been too easy. Too easy for Breezy, Temple muttered in her mind.

She knew what was coming. He knew from experience that she was easy to pick up. She was a marked woo-mahn. Quincey was right. Temple was beginning to feel like the much-put-upon heroine of a historical romance.

Time froze. Temple's mind beat birdlike against the confining cage bars of reality, seeking refuge in memories of a moment so like this one: a scene from one, or ten, of the historical romances she had speed-read in the past few days. She stood there, on that sandy, forgotten shore, in her disheveled finery.

"Who will be Breezy's little woo-mahn? I will run through anyone who says me nay, eh?" he demanded. Rasped. G.R.O.W.L.ed.

Captain Breezy Beelzebub "Blast" Slaughters intense eyes, bluer than all the seven seas churned together into one seething, intemperate tidal wave, raked over the captured prey, frightened booty of the good ship Windswept.

Then they paused on the frozen form of dismayed Tempest Storm, proud, Titan-haired daughter of planter Gust Storm and his lovely but frail aristocratic wife Gale, and sister of the darling baby boy Squall

. . . who would do exactly that, were he to understand his sisters vile predicament.

Stunned, Tempest heard Captain Blast's seven-league boots stomping over the stage sand toward her.

Her fate lay in this hard but handsome mans hands, and his intentions lay in the hot, burning flames of his ice-blue eyes.

She desperately tried to . . .look tempestuously disdainful, yet knowing that she must endure all that the pirate captain might do to her before a leering crew of thirty-three tall, broad men cut from the same bold, rapacious sailcloth . . .

... RUN!

But first. . .

she desperately decided to . . .

de-bend her dress bodice.

Like all gravity-defying acts, this one looked easier to do than to undo. Drat, her pose-down debut would be a sight to remember. Where was the sweet retreat of fiction when she needed it?

"Hah!" Captain Breezy stopped, took a wide stance that emphasized thighs the size of Easter Island hams, and pointed imperiously to Temple, whose only relation to any kind of Storm was as a licensed driver. Life had returned to Real Time, no matter how bizarre.

" La Rossa." He smiled. Showed his teeth. Leered. Licked his lips. Ate her grandmother. "We are already experts at the pose, no?"

Before Temple could shake her head, or shrug her gown back on her shoulders, Fabrizio strode over and caught Temple's itty-bitty hand in his great big paw.

He led--dragged--her to center stage, not her idea of undercover work.

Apparently, it wasn't Danny Dove's idea of how to run a rehearsal either.

Danny jumped up and spun Temple out of Fabrizio's ham-handed grip before either of them could blink.

Now Danny pointed imperiously. "You. To the risers with the rest of the chorus line." He turned to the assembled hunks.

"If you must have a demonstration of the finer points of a pose-down, I will give it. Now, you must remember that although you are dealing with a person who may weigh as little as half your own poundage, she is liable to feel heavier than you think, especially if you try too-heroic maneuvers without a careful rehearsal. For instance, no Taming-of-the-Shrew sack of potatoes over the shoulder shtick . . .

unless you've rehearsed it."

Danny demonstrated by bending and rising with Temple draped over one shoulder, his arm around her knees the only thing that kept her from tumbling to the hard stage floor.

Temple tried to gasp, but the corset ruled out all emergency breathing techniques. Danny had spun so she faced the empty house, and a good thing, too; gravity was pulling her bodice to depths that Quincey and company could not dare dream of. She crossed her arms over her gaping decolletage (and crossed her fingers on her shoulders) while eavesdropping on Danny's crisp lecture on her rear ... er, at her rear.

"In this position, the woman's weight is mostly over my shoulder, but gravity makes even the lightest one like lead. Let go of her legs, and you drop her. Lean back too far, and you drop her. My advice is: don't try it. If she ends up on her ass, you end up looking like one. Not very romantic."

Temple felt her world shake as Danny bent and she once again touched terra firma, feet-first.

Not for long.

"I know, gentlemen, that during pose-downs you are fond of executing a maneuver known as a 'dip.'

" Danny's scathingly precise enunciation made the act of a dip sound like . . . well, the act of a dip.

"Bear in mind that the female torso bends, but it does not break."

Danny turned and bent again. Temple suddenly was staring at the hems of curtains suspended in the flies. She felt she was lying head down on the grounded half of a teeter-totter. Speaking of totter, she felt that she was going to slide headfirst and backwards off the edge of the known world . . . which-did-too-have-one!

"Not to worry." Danny's reassuring tone soothed as he maintained their difficult position and continued his lecture.

"This looks easier than it is. Notice that my supporting arm is lengthwise as much as possible beneath the lady's spine. Notice, too, that I leaned back a bit as I bent her and myself over, so her feet are not churning to keep braced on the floor. You do not wish to make your lady fair look like a hyperactive gerbil. If you must dip, and I do not recommend that you try this in your own home, practice slowly and safely. Get it right. Otherwise, you will have her flailing in your arms ... or falling to the floor. Then the only dip you have to take is your farewell curtsy as you are hooted offstage as an unromantic boor."

Danny pulled Temple upright as if she weighed six pounds and dropped custody of her hand. "Any questions?"

Temple had one. She knew she had been heaved around like a side of beef, but she had never really felt out of control, despite her fears. And Danny probably weighed a hundred and forty pounds with his hair wet.

A slow, ponderous wave of clapping bestirred the becalmed hunks, who understood the weight problem, if nothing else. Danny took Temple's hand and stepped away. She recovered fast enough to take a shallow (due to the dress) bow, and smile like a trouper.

"My hero," she whispered wryly as Danny bowed and kissed her hand.

"Better than being a hero sandwich," he muttered, rolling his eyes at the risers, where Breezy pouted like the world's largest five-year-old.

Danny's angelic grin as he regarded Fabrizio sobered to a director's sternness. Temple ambled offstage, trying not to feel dizzy.

"Spotlight-hog," Lacey greeted her. "Too bad you got stuck with the wimpy director."

"I'll tell him you said that," Temple answered sweetly. "I know he'll make sure that you get all the dorkiest guys as pose-down partners."

"Right on, Batgirl!" Quincey grinned at Temple.

Together they watched Lacey slink away to wave at the guys on the risers.

"You did okay," the sixteen-year-old told Temple in a hurried, hoarse whisper. "But don't be such a nerd about the damn neckline."

It was, Temple realized sadly, excellent advice.

Since the worst, for now, was over, she realized her subconscious had been playing tricks during her mental sojourn in Historical Romance Heaven. The least of them was the unlikely handle of Tempest Storm: it had come to mind so quickly because it was the stage name of an infamous stripper.

Did this fact offer an omen for Temple's fate during the real, live dress rehearsal and actual performance still to come?

Temple decided to distract herself from forthcoming indignities with another shoe hunt.