Unknown - 19_Cat_In_A_Red_Hot_Rage

She couldn’t miss his appraisal. “One great thing about being a blond now is I can wear red. Vintage fifties nightie. We femmes fatales knew how to do it then. Come in, wandering voice of the night. I could use a sympathetic ear.”

“Your aunt isn’t here?”

“Apparently she has found a roost elsewhere for the duration of her visit. Can you spell F-o-n-t-a-n-a?”

Matt raised his eyebrows, but was rather glad to hear Templewas home alone again. They settled at the stools by the kitchen eating counter. Temple’s gaze settled on Matt, and it was unsettlingly fond.

“It’s so good to see a sane face.”

“Um, ‘sane’ isn’t the adjective I was looking for.”

“It’s so good to see your handsome, wise, sexy face. Can a girl these days just say, ‘Kiss me’?”

Matt found his niggling doubts vanishing as he complied. He wondered if a guy could just say, “On the couch, the floor, or the patio under the stars?”

“Hmmm.” Temple smiled at him from six inches away, so her eyes were as adorably crossed as a Siamese cat’s. Speaking of which?

“Louie?” Matt asked.

“Kind of you to inquire, but he’s not in. Not on the couch. Not in my bed. Anywhere else of interest?”

“I was thinking the patio overlooking the pool.”

“You know I loved to watch you swim from there. Lustfully. Maybe there,” Temple said.

“Electra would see.”

Temple sighed. “Not nowadays, lover boy. That’s what I needed to tell you.”

“Something about Electra?” Matt was confused. He still expected every other sentence out of her mouth to be about Max, not a good sign in her or him.

“She was discovered leaning solicitously over a dead body at the Crystal Phoenix yesterday.”

“You mentioned that, but come on, Electra a murderer? She was Just trying to help someone, obviously.”

“The victim turned out to be the woman who took her third husband away from her, so the ‘help’ defense is a bit thin.”

Matt bit his lip. “Not good, but I stand by my first diagnosis. Electra wouldn’t kill a fruit fly.”

“I agree. But that’s something to worry about tomorrow, Rhett.” She leaned forward and took his worried bottom lip in her own. “You tell me: on the plantation porch, by the plantation pond, or in the master bedroom?”

Matt’s heart stopped beating for about twenty seconds. She meant it. Here. Now. Them. The bedroom once co-owned by Max.

He reached in his pocket and pulled out the ring. “You’ve been carrying this around?”

“I couldn’t leave it in a cold metal safe when my whole heart’s in it.”

“Mine too.” Temple beamed and put it on her third finger, left hand, but her eyes never left his.

Matt made his choice. It was late. They were both a littleweary. They deserved a pillow-top mattress. Max was gone.

Louie was out.

Matt led Temple into her very own bedroom to make it into a marriage bed.

At five in the morning they awoke. Temple laid her head on Matt’s shoulder and her left hand on his chest while she got something off hers.

“He’s really gone this time,” she whispered, relating all the details about the complete changing of the guard at Max’s former home. “He’d been hinting that this was it, but with Max you never knew.”

“So you can’t ever tell him it’s over?”

“I think he knew. Maybe he had somewhere urgent to be. Maybe he thought cutting the cord was the kindest thing to do. The thing is, I don’t owe him an apology. I did my best to offer him one, but he’s gone again, and I have a brand-new life to live with someone I’ve always loved very much.”

“Always?”

“From the moment we met. I just didn’t dare know it then.”

“Me neither”

“Now we can dare anything.”

“Except for friends and neighbors and close relatives,” he said with a laugh, lifting her hand to kiss the ring on it. “It’s about time they knew. We’ll get through it.”

She didn’t say the thing she’d decided during the night when Matt had made her bed theirs.

Once Electra was cleared of murder charges, Templewanted a civil wedding ceremony in the Lovers’ Knot Wedding Chapel downstairs, with all the soft-sculpture people and their Las Vegas friends present, in front of God, state, Elvis, and everybody.

And then they’d decide in which church in which city, and when, they’d do it all over again, to placate the parental demons. And because she really, really wanted to wear her Austrian crystal Stuart Weitzman Midnight Louie spikes with a wedding gown. On the red carpet to the altar. Catholic, Universalist Unitarian, or whatever their relatives would compromise on.

She wanted to meet Matt’s mother. See her parents endorse their youngest child’s adult choice.

Max had been way too big bad wolf, too alpha, for their cautious Midwestern conservatism. Matt still broadcast good boy gone diffidently successful. He would go down much better, if anybody would.

As her family’s youngest child and sole daughter, she could only hope.

Chapter 23

Diamond Razzle Dazzle

The buses, vans, and taxis from McCarran airport rolled up to the red carpet the Crystal Phoenix had laid from lobby to porte cochere. Today, Wednesday, officially began the Red Hat Sisterhood convention, even though a couple thousand early arrivals had been in occupancy for a day.

Temple, irreverent PR flack that she was, wondered two things: if she and Matt should get married here instead, or if the Red HAT Sisterhood had ever considered the acronym, RHATS.

If six hundred Red Hat ladies had seemed overwhelming, five thousand seemed like a revolution, a mass of well-dressed, cheerful lemmings leaping off a cliff into all things Las Vegas.

Temple watched the onslaught with mixed feelings.

Several months before, the performance artist Domingo had arrived in Las Vegas to swath the Strip’s iconic buildings with a million pink plastic lawn flamingos. The hot pink plumage had indeed been spectacular … until the searing Las Vegassun faded them all to pallid pink.

At first the project had seemed over-the-top for an over-thetop entertainment destination. Then the massed flamingos had attained an odd sort of dignity in numbers. Humble but universal. Colorful, eccentric, unashamed … everything Las Vegas. That was Domingo’s point. Life is art. Art is life.

Today the Red Hat Sisterhood swarmed over the largerthan-life artfulness of Las Vegas, and conquered.

Red and purple outshone the Strip’s neon. They were colors of vigor and assertion, yet available to one and all, if they only had the nerve.

Watching the rivers of crimson and purple flow into the Crystal Phoenix on that royal red welcoming carpet, Templedecided that she had lost her own nerve lately, but she was getting it back.

Matt’s gorgeous diamond-and-ruby vintage ring blared from her left hand. She was engaged! With love, with life, with making sure everything in her purview went well. And that included freeing Electra from suspicion by nailing the person who’d strangled Oleta Lark.

Temple, now proud in pink, Joined the Red Hat Sisterhood river flowing into the Phoenix. In the lobby, the Fontana brothers, suited in tones of cappuccino, cream, ivory, bisque, and generally well-tailored, naturally tan Hunk, were out in full force, all nine of ‘em.

They directed the red-and-purple tide to the checkin lines exclusive to their group. They bowed to kiss plump, beringed hands. Their guiding fingers paused ever so briefly but memorably on curvaceous midlife torsos, merely to direct, of course.

“Whew,” someone whispered in Temple’s ear, under her wide hat brim. “If anybody had told me aging gracefully was this much fun I’d have skipped right over menopause to the good stuff.”