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

"Oh? I detect zat zee dainty Midnight Louise cannot be more than a year or so old. I am nevair wrong about zee age of anoz-zair female."

Is it possible that the Divine Yvette has developed a French accent since Midnight Louise accused her of being French? Talk about a suggestible sensibility!

"I am sorry, dear lady, that my miscreant daughter was so rude to you."

"I am sorree, Louie, that you have such a rude offspring. And now I must nap. My beauty sleep was interrupted."

"You will not hold my relatives against me?" I inquire more anxiously than I would like.

The Divine Yvette sighs as she rests her soft gray triangle of a face on her silken paws. "I cannot say. I have always known that we exist on two different planes--"

"You are not leaving already?"

"But I try very hard not to be a--how you say? A snob. Perhaps your daughter could benefit from obedience school."

"That is for dogs!" I reply, horrified.

The Divine Yvette shrugs and shows the pearly tips of her two exquisite fangs. "If the shoe fits, the foot should wear it. Au revoir, mon ami. "

I withdraw, not knowing what to blame Midnight Louise for more: betraying my past lovelife to my current amour, or giving the Divine Yvette the idea that she is French.

Chapter 18

Every Large Breezy ...

Temple and Kit returned to the Crystal Phoenix to find the lobby packed with registering G.R.O.W.L.ers.

"Oh, no!"

"What?" Kit asked, scanning the mob.

"Fabrizio again. Does he stake out the registration line, or what?"

"Of course he wants to catch them coming in. This is his business, Temple, and these women are his fans."

"At least we registered early and can sneak past."

"But we're not going to." Kit corralled Temple's arm as she tried to eel away. "Here's an ideal opportunity to practice your new undercover persona."

"What new undercover persona?"

"Remember? I told you at lunch. Trot out your old reporting skills and become officially nosy. This crowd expects the media to be out in force, and it's dying to get noticed."

"Dying is the operative word around here lately."

Temple frowned as Kit pulled her toward Fabrizio's knot of women. "I really don't want another close encounter with Fabrizio. He's so bold, so blond ... so bigger than life. I feel like I'm going to be stomped by Trigger when I'm around him."

"Ah! But you are Media now. Breezy will be a pushover, and you'll do the pushing. Mention a major show, and he'll trot over quietly for a lump of sugar, I promise. Now, here's the notepad and pen from my registration packet. Remember, he's probably got the inside scoop on all the pageant personalities. He might even be the killer. Go, girl!"

Kit pushed Temple into the charmed circle surrounding the cover model. It made an odd sight: the squat cluster of women swarming the towering blond-maned man like a ring of enchanted mushrooms. He was it. The pinnacle of power, the Viking god with oiled muscles, sun-streaked blond hair and a twenty-four-karat Personality with a capital Pow.

Temple felt like an ambivalent bobby-soxer on the edge of the Elvis phenomenon, but ole Breezy zeroed right in on her, probably because she was, as usual, the most liftable female present.

"La Rossa!" He greeted her like an old fling.

His tanned face beamed, his Mediterranean-blue eyes twinkled, his impossibly white teeth flashed. This guy was a one-man weather report: clear and sunny and shining only for you, lucky woman you. Just you and another two-and-a-half million females on the planet. His . . . oh! ... huge, grasping hands were stretching for her.

Temple let out a big breath, as Matt had instructed her to do when confronted with a superior force, barked, "Stop!" in English, then "Basta!" in Italian, and held her palm up like a school-crossing guard.

David could not have gotten Goliath to so much as blink with this tactic, but Temple's routine halted the oncoming action figure in mid-stride. Maybe the Italian word for "enough" had done it. A cloud of uncertainty shadowed Fabrizio's relentlessly upbeat features.

"You do not like to be picked up by Fabrizio? But why?" His hands spread wider, both to question... and to prepare to pounce.

The encircling women grew quiet, like jackals waiting for the lordly lion to finish off the prey before they tore the leavings apart.

Temple swallowed, but her voice was firm when she answered. "Because I can't take notes when I'm off the ground, and notes are very important to a field producer for Hot Heads ."

The fans' faces transformed from suspicion to rapture. Breezy was no less blissful. Hot Heads was the moment's most torrid tabloid TV entertainment show. The Heads was short for headlines, but the contraction was apt: famous faces and talking heads telling all made the show so hypnotizing to viewers.

"Why did you not say so earlier, dear signorina? I would never want to interfere with your working. And what do you wish?"

"Ah, just a few minutes of your time while I take preliminary notes for our on-camera personalities."

"You have them, these minutes. You have all of me." His arms spread wide, his open shirt gaping to strain across rippling chest muscles. Temple found the effect rather creepy. She could see her mythical tabloid headline now: "Fabrizio possessed by sentient muscles from Mars!"

Temple backed away from the oncoming Fabrizio and his train of silent, intent, gap-mouthed watchers, then led him to one of Van von Rhine's cream Italian leather seating pieces that dotted the lobby. Van had designed the Crystal Phoenix with such personal pains that every piece seemed a favorite of the hostess.

Temple perched on the cushy seat's edge, her heels planted on the lobby's navy and gold carpeting. Experience had taught her that sinking into down-stuffed furniture could entrap her.

Fabrizio leaned expansively into a shirred leather corner, like a very rich milk chocolate in a luxurious box, spreading his arms over the backrest and his legs until one askew knee almost nudged Temple's. And she taking so pathetically little space on her best days!

She laid her notebook on her crunched-together knees--she felt like a novice in a Spanish cloister, but Breezy was such a territory-hogging guy that she had no other choice, unless she wished to be annexed.

The fans had withdrawn to a decent distance, just barely, and hovered, hoping to overhear any scintilla of stray sound.

Fabrizio smiled at her, steadily, knowingly, intimately. "Why you not like picking up, eh? Every woman"--he pronounced it "woo-mahn"--"likes man to take charge, to carry her away from the everyday. This is what Fabrizio do. Why you not like?" His piercing gaze, honed under hot studio spotlights hundreds of times at $3,000 a pop, she had read, focused on Temple like a lascivious Latin laser beam.

The three-grand ogle did not impress her. They all had that smug invasive look, the professional ladykillers, implying that the woman was some uptight ignoramus resisting the Sultan of Sex. And just underneath the romantic schmaltz lay an implicit threat of superior masculine knowledge, if not force, of knowing what was best for her. Temple was too polite to tell Fabrizio that the whole manner repelled her because it was so perfectly professional.

"I have a phobia of heights," she said shortly.

"Oh, yes." He nodded. A neurotic weakness was perhaps understandable, and not unexpected.

"So you say before. I will not let you fall. You would no longer be afraid with Fabrizio."

"I'm, ah, afraid I would be. Now, about the show--"

His body and features clicked into another mode: rapt attention.

"Everyone, of course, knows your story, Fabrizio."

"Ah, yes. How Fabrizio is simple Italiano boy. Always I want to be model, travel, always I build body and want to go to America. Like Arnold. But then I model for romance covers, and the woo-mahn is ecstatic. I now am multi-media personality. I have workout book and tapes, calendars, romantic advice line, cologne for men."