Douglas, Nelson - Midnight Louie 05-Cat in a Diamond Dazzle

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Temple surrendered and lifted a foot into the aisle.

"Fabulous," he pronounced. "Yellow is your color. Is the ankle stronger than sheet metal again?"

"It's the other ankle and, yes, at least as firm as tinfoil. How are you, Danny?"

"In my element, ducks." Danny Dove cast a theatrically languishing glance over his shoulder at the stage thronging with wandering, bare-muscled, bawling hunks in search of stardom, not Stella.

Danny wore vintage Gene Kelly today: tight black T-shirt, jeans and sockless loafers. Gene would have worn the socks--dorky white sweat-socks--but that had been forty years ago, before the birth of Contemporary Cool.

"Are you coordinating the pageant?" Temple asked hopefully.

" 'Coordinate' is more word than most of these guys can manage. Some have modeling and acting experience, if you count blue movies, but theatrically, the majority are barbarians. Three days to turn these sows' ears into silk tuxedos. Still, I do love a big, juicy challenge."

Danny stiffened his shoulders and marched up the aisle toward the milling contestants.

Temple glared at Kit before she could say anything. "He is not an eligible man."

"Not to us, perhaps. But everybody is eligible to somebody. Who is he?"

"Local choreographer. I would have introduced you, but his heart was in the Highlands." Temple jerked her head toward the stage, where a tow-headed giant wearing a red tartan kilt and little else was striding over the boards, broadsword in hand. "Danny Dove is a pretty big name in this town."

"Danny Dove? No kidding?" Kit leaned forward in her seat to watch the wiry director instantly whip milling hunks into something resembling a chorus line.

"You've heard of him?"

"He made his name on the Manhattan bathhouse circuit back when Bette Midler was making hers in the same venue. So he ended up in Vegas. I'd bet he makes bucks."

"You'd win."

Electra frowned. "Then why is he doing this little show?"

"Kid in a chocolate factory." Temple nodded at the stage. "Men in tights. Ambiance."

Electra was not assuaged. "Is it . . . safe for these young men--?"

Kit laughed. "Golly, Electra, guys who look like that have learned to encourage or fend off either sex since high school. They're the ones who take advantage of--they take advantage of their looks and other people's longing. Beautiful people learn the drill early, and if they choose to make a career of it, they're usually the least vulnerable of anyone in the dating game."

"I'm old-fashioned," Electra confessed. "I married all of my husbands."

"All?" Kit was shocked.

Electra nodded demurely. "Let's watch the rehearsal, girls. Isn't that what we're here for?"

They sank back into their seats in unison, but Electra's question lingered in Temple's eternal inner monologue.

What were they themselves here for? Kit was the professional. A writer, imagine that. Her aunt the romance novelist. To Kit this pageant was a mere promotional circus, and the men on stage were the attractive animal acts that lured the public to buy her popcorn.

Electra was the ardent amateur, a reader yearning to break into print. She saw these rather overwhelming men as symbols of lost youth and late-life renewal.

Temple was an escapee from reality. Along for the ride, evading the angst at home, dodging her personal responsibilities. Fleeing to an environment she barely understood, and wasn't sure she liked or even approved of.

Women frankly ogling men as a role reversal had a certain kinky appeal, but was as silly and immature as men ogling women. And, at the moment, Temple wasn't in the mood for either option. Had Hamlet showed up instead of Danny Dove, and barked "Get thee to a nunnery," she might have gone, gratefully.

Kit, actress-author extraordinaire, gestured to the proscenium. "This is set up more like a fashion runway."

Temple nodded as she examined the temporary tongue of stage covered in garish red cloth with cellophane blades like trampled grass, sticking out at the audience in tacky audacity.

Onstage, Danny's hands were slapping out amazingly loud claps.

"Attention, Romper Roommates. You all have your order of appearance, God bless us, everyone.

Walk it on down, one by one, and show me the shtick you came in with. Then I'll give you something that works. Go!"

They came down the runway, as obedient as lambs who would be lions. Shoulder blade-long manes streamed (though some men were post-Delilah Samsons, conventionally shorn); sculpted muscles flexed in four-four time in shoulders, thighs and washboard stomachs (though some were less muscle-bound than others); all flashed bleached-to-bone-white teeth (though any audience was absent except for Temple and associates, and a mixed-sex cadre of stage crew and costume volunteers).

"Oooh!" Electra exclaimed as one candidate performed several handstands down the runway The next produced a wavy dagger with a jeweled hilt, then held it pointing floorward between his legs as he executed a slow split, letting the metal blade suggestively lift skyward as his riven thighs neared full contact with the stage.

"Whew!" Kit fanned herself with one hand. "A night at the Laddie's Lair."

A roguish sort with short curly hair sashayed downstage, a workman's leather tool belt clattering around his hips like a gun belt. At the runway's very tip he took a wide stance, then drew a metal measuring tape from its center-hung housing in the twelve o'clock low position.

"Danny Dove is right," Temple muttered. "Everybody has a gimmick."

"Just like the strippers in 'Gypsy,' " Kit agreed, rising. "I've got to visit the ladies' room. Let no hunk do anything he shouldn't do before I get back." She bustled up the aisle.

Onstage, Danny Dove had collapsed into a cross-legged position at stage right, rubbing his corrugated forehead with his hands. His dancer's eloquent body conveyed what words did not: the contestants' preplanned shticks were as corny as anticipated.

"What a disappointment." Electra spoke loudly enough to carry to the stage apron, just as Mr.

Tape Measure's nine extended inches snapped back into its holster. "I mean... I expected more, more savoir faire."

"More dash and less trash," Temple said. "I hope Cheyenne doesn't embarrass himself, though I shudder to imagine what the Fontana Boys will come up with."

Electra nodded bleakly. "Kit isn't missing anything."

"Maybe we can sneak out discreetly," Temple suggested, rising.

"Imagine, a front-row preview parade of Incredible Hunks and we're bored. Let's catch Kit coming out of the ladies' room."

A lull in the lineup of male pulchritude created a perfect escape hatch. Temple and Electra were tip-toeing rather ostentatiously up the plush-carpeted aisle when rustles and whispers erupted behind them.

Yell bloody murder and no one will look. Whisper a little and they'll stand transfixed. The two turned to the stage just as a bare leg thrust out from behind the side curtain.

It was well-formed, and hairy enough to be masculine, but also decidedly equine.

Temple raised an auburn eyebrow.

Another leg--or, rather, foreleg--followed.

Edging nervously onstage was a horse of mottled gray color daubed with white, an Appaloosa famed for the pale scatter of melting "snow" spots on its hindquarters.

But no one in the audience could see its hindquarters yet, and who would even worry about it, given the tawny, sinewy, naked male figure of an Indian--Native American, in politically correct terms--on its back?

"Well!" Electra stopped so sharply Temple caromed off her suddenly solid form. "Wait. I once considered using an Indian hero in my romance entry. Wish I'd seen this guy sooner. This is more like it."

"It's theater, all right," Temple agreed, watching horse and rider amble downstage. "Will that makeshift ramp hold a near-ton of horseflesh and hunk?"

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