Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

It seemed to have the word Chicago superimposed on it, a perfect billboard for the glitzy musical.

Maybe it was time for them to be leaving Las Vegas.

The weather was almost always hot and hard on her skin type—pasty and prone to freckles. She was getting tired of bathing in sunscreen. And coming from the Midwest, Temple was no stranger to the cold: think of the new outfits that she would need.

She’d tried to reach Matt, but he wasn’t answering, so she went up to her condo, looked for Midnight Louie to be taking an afternoon nap in the air-conditioning, and found him AWOL again as well.

Temple swung her heavy tote bag to the kitchen counter and sighed. Two lovers in town—one ex, one not—and she’d spent the morning catching up on PR matters all over town when she was thinking she was alone, confounded, and not doing well with her first “case.”

She went searching for Louie, through the living room to the tiny triangular patio that made a corner to her unit in the round building. That’s when she spied a lone figure swimming midday laps in the usually deserted pool below.

The building was adults-only, simply because fifties apartment units had been under 1,600 square feet, and the Circle Ritz residents were older adults at that. Electra Lark had converted larger units into condos to keep the building full, but the wedding-chapel business on the side kept her solvent. The business was literally “on the side” of the building, because nowadays a drive-by wedding service was even more popular than the charming chapel inside.

Honestly, Temple thought, people can’t wait for anything in this Internet era.

What she couldn’t wait for was to get out of her lonely, catless condo and down by that pool to observe and interrupt those powerful clockwork laps.

*

Matt suddenly sensed a presence and surfaced, blinking chlorinated water from his eyes.

Swimming was his form of meditation, like martial arts was his form of exercise, although too many things in his life had been hopping in the last few months to get to class.

His first blurred glimpse of the silently watching female figure reminded him that Kathleen O’Connor had confronted him here, face-to-face, that he was the “beneficiary” of the only two true personal appearances she’d ever made in Vegas. Both times she’d cut him with words, and once with a razor.

But it was Temple squinting back at him in the hot sun, her vibrant peachy-red hair a waving, curlicued sunset out of a Alphonse Mucha print of Summer.

He turned in midlap and made the pool edge in one underwater bound.

“No splashing on my new leather sandals,” she warned, stepping back.

That forced him to regard the fretwork of leather and laces both baring and snaring her feet to well above the ankles. Fetish-wear made fashion, and he totally got why.

“I’ll splash more than your shoes,” Matt said, “if you don’t run up and slip into some sunscreen and a suit and come back down here.”

“You know I never use the pool.”

“Why not?”

“Natural red hair. White skin. Freckles. Burning. Melanoma, which sounds like something pretty, but isn’t.”

“The sun’s going over the building and you wear nothing but sixty SPF. You may wear nothing much as a bathing suit, but I wouldn’t know, would I? Something as strappy as your shoes?”

“That would be possible. I can’t remember. It’s been a long time since I’ve been swimming.”

She walked back and forth along the pool’s length while he paced her in the water.

“I miss your Dancing with The Celebs spray tan,” she noted.

“Pretty remarkable stuff. All the network anchors are wearing airbrush these days. I still have some. I could give you an all-over sample. Up in my rooms. After we swim.”

The high heels paused. “I don’t do well in bikinis, except for waxes,” she had to add, to be provocative back.

“Why not?” he asked.

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not a thirty-six C, as you well know.”

“I’m like a nonsnob art lover. I know what I like. I don’t need caliber.”

“Oh, Matt, I’ve had a bummer day. I’ve been hired for a real PI job and I’m totally flunking it. I don’t tan, I don’t swim, and I don’t fill out a bikini. I’m just a short shoe freak with a curiosity bone instead of a funny bone.”

“Come in,” he reassured her. Tempted her. “The water’s like aquamarine silk. I can hold you up, and so can the water. You will feel like a thirty-six C, as you always have to me. You can also explain to me what exactly a thirty-six C is later.”

“You’ve seen Victoria’s Secret ads on TV. You know it’s all about false packaging.”

“Nothing to do with you, then,” he said. “Just join me. I’d really like it.”

She sighed heavily and scampered back into the building.

Matt leaned his chin on his crossed elbows at the pool edge and smiled. All his cares and indecision were floating away. Temple needed a TLC break, and he was free, willing, and able to give it to her.

*

“This is really cool stuff,” Temple called from his bathroom two hours later. “And it really stays on in water?”

“Longer than I wanted it to,” Matt answered from the bed. “Of course, they used tanning spray booths at the dance show.”

She came out dressed and looking slightly toasty all over. “I prefer the personal touch. I’ll never coax you to put sunscreen on me, but a spray-on tan—that felt like a great massage.” She went over to strip back the sheets.

“Amazing!” She wasn’t eyeing him. “There’s hardly any rub-off on the sheets.”

“There is some only because you weren’t patient enough to lie still, like I told you.”

“And why should I be patient with you about that? You’ve been gone a week. You haven’t even asked if I missed you.”

“I was trying really hard right now not to be insecure.”

Temple perched on the edge of the bed while Matt got dressed. The sheets had long ago dried him indirectly.

“Will all these shoe straps rub off the tan when I walk?” she wondered, inspecting her feet.

“I don’t know, Temple. I don’t wear strappy shoes.”

That made her laugh. “You have nothing to be insecure about.”

Then she got serious, addressing something she’d left unsaid for the four days he’d been back.

“I hope you understand that my getting a call from Max as if I was his last lifeline was like you talking to a lost soul on the WCOO call line. All he knew at that point was what Garry Randolph had been able to tell him in their last, short time together. I couldn’t let him go blundering around without anchors of any sort in his past.”

“I know you couldn’t, “Matt said, sitting to pull on his shoes. “I couldn’t have either.”

She got to her knees on the mattress and plastered herself against his bare back. “We’re both fixers, aren’t we? And insecurity makes us human. I shouldn’t have felt so … superior … to Savannah Ashleigh that I thought I could fix her family feuds and banish a bunch of vultures.”

He turned to take her in his arms. “But you did and you can. You just aren’t used to sleuthing without a partner.”

“It’s true. Louie’s been annoying and seems to be up to something on his own these days.”

They didn’t mention that Max had been her invisible partner when he lived in town before.

“What’s really bugging you about Savannah’s case, Temple?”

“Other than that there’s this irresistible distraction back in town and I can hardly find the time to make progress on it?”

“That is me you’re referring to, right?”

“No one else,” she promised, and sealed it with a kiss.

“Maybe I’m too young for the job,” she said when they’d settled into a comfy embrace. “Her aunt Violet is an elderly lady. I don’t know if she’s getting senile or someone is messing up her mind to make her act that way. Expecting anyone to live in that oddball old house until all the resident cats die of natural causes is crazy.