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

"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."