"You're actually going to enter this contest?"
"Absolutely. I've read enough romances to have the drill down pat. Say, could you bring along that cute little laptop of yours?"
"Oho, so that's why I need to escape my emotional Waterloo at the Circle Ritz for a few days! You need my megabytes."
"It's still a nice getaway. Now, where's that costume?"
"Oh, I don't know, somewhere in the lower depths of my closet in a big polyethelene dry-cleaner bag."
Temple sighed, grunted and then dove into a space where none but dust bunnies had gone since she had moved into the Circle Ritz almost a year earlier.
"Yeoww!" she complained, jumping back. "Something stuck me."
"You don't suppose it could be a scorpion?" Electra, the ever-consciencious landlady, shoved several of Temple's best outfits aside for a clearer view.
But the culprit did not possess a stinger in its tail, although a tail was standard-issue for its kind.
Midnight Louie lay curled up on a floor-trailing plastic bag. He greeted his unmasking with a lion-size yawn, and an additional, contented flex of his claws.
"So that's where he goes when I can't find him anywhere," Temple said.
"He's just having a Midsummer Night's nap in a peaceful place. Cats like that sort of retreat."
"How do you know?" Temple asked. "I thought you were allergic to cats?"
"That doesn't mean I don't know their habits. In fact, that may be why I'm so allergic to them. Don't worry about the costume. If Louie's wrinkled it, I can take it upstairs and use my industrial steamer on it."
"Industrial steamer! I'm impressed."
"No, but your gown will be," Electra said. "I intend to get you packed and over to the Phoenix within six hours."
"What about Louie?" Temple wondered as Electra dove into the closet to yank the heaped plastic out from under him.
"He can go as Puss in Boots, but he'll have to get his own wardrobe mistress."
Within five hours Temple, Electra and more garment bags than two unescorted ladies should carry were camped out in the Crystal Phoenix's bustling lobby behind a long, broad line of similar souls.
Midnight Louie had been left lounging on the clothing-strewn wreck that was Temple's bedspread at the moment.
"Shouldn't we have told someone we were coming here?" Temple wondered queasily.
"Why?" Electra sounded indignant. "That is the advantage of being single; no one is owed an explanation. If they want to know so bad, they'll find out, believe me. Besides, who did you plan to notify? The maintenance man, or gentlemen boarders named Max and Matt?"
"I didn't have anyone specifically in mind," Temple began in a wishy-washy manner she much despised.
"Besides, they'd just laugh at us."
"Why?" Temple didn't ask who "they" were.
"Obviously, you haven't been a romance reader, or you'd know. To the nonromance-reading public, we're silly, love-starved women with so little going on in our lives we have to read these laughable tales of sex and seduction."
Temple hoped she didn't look as appalled as she felt. "I was thinking of this as just another convention. It didn't occur to me I'd be taken for a romance junkie merely by being here."
"What's wrong with that?" Electra demanded.
Before Temple could explain that she belonged to enough disadvantaged categories--women, short women, unlucky redheaded women, deserted women, assaulted women--without getting dragooned into yet another one oi which she was utterly innocent. . . someone bumped into her from behind.
The offense was repeated, with feeling.
"Hey!" Temple spun around, ready to lambaste.
The offender's identity struck her dumb.
"Well, well," he said, practically purring. "Had no idea you were this hard up, T.B. I can point you to a dozen places in Las Vegas where you can put a little romance in your life, besides this hen party." He glanced at the long line of women waiting to register for their rooms. "What a bunch of losers."
"So that's what you're doing here, Buchanan."
"Hey! As you often say so eloquently. Sleaze is my beat." He leaned closer than was necessary or particularly healthy, batting his thick black eyelashes up and down the better to look Temple up and down. "You don't want to ogle these beefcake cover models, T.B. Half of 'em are queer and the other half are iffy. If I'd have known you were at loose ends and had a yen for romance, we might have got something going. No wonder you're so snappish to me. You just need a good--"
"Jerk!" Electra growled like a watchdog at Temple's side. "Who is this little man, Temple?"
"Not the Duchess of Windsor's darling, I'll tell you that. Meet Crawford Buchanan, author of the Broadside column for the Las Vegas Scoop."
"Oh, yes, I've seen it," Electra allowed. "Usually with used cat litter on it."
"I'm not covering this for the Scoop" Buchanan disdainfully adjusted the hang of his ivory linen jacket. "I'm the local liaison for Hot Heads, the national TV news mag, you know. I'll be providing a blow-by-blow account on all five days of the GROWLers' time to howl. If you're nice to me"--he leaned almost close enough to polish Temple's teeth with his own--"I'll make sure you get an on-camera interview. I'll even identify you as a local flack. Be good for business."
"I'm here on business," she announced airily, stepping back and right onto Electra's toe. "For the Phoenix." She hoped that was vague enough. "The only air time I need is room to breathe about six miles from you!"
"Women." Crawford smiled smarmily at Electra, as if--being silver-haired--she wasn't quite one anymore. "You can always tell they like you when they're testy."
"Sorry," Temple said, leaping off of Electra's toe the moment Crawford Buchanan had removed himself.
"Why?" Electra looked puzzled.
Mortified, Temple turned to see who her spike heel had nailed to the floor, and more important, who was so stoic as to mumble no word of protest.
Oh my. There he was. David in the flesh, only seven feet high instead of eighteen. Temple looked up, and up. Max was tall, but effacingly narrow. This guy was built more like an inverted skyscraper. Unlike one of those needle-nosed buildings, he widened as he went up to Schwarzenegger proportions. Unlike David and Arnold, he draped his upper development in a modest curtain of bicep-brushing hair--pseudo sun-streaked, honestly straight and artfully untamed.
Temple had the oddest sensation of being within stomping distance of a massive palomino horse. All right. Palomino stallion. Okay, revise that. Palomino stud.
I'm sorry," she said, "for stepping on you."
"You step on Fabrizio?" His tanned face crinkled (adorably, Temple assumed) with amusement. "No.
Fabrizio must avoid stepping on lovely lady." With that he grinned (tenderly) and picked her up (manfully) in one fell swoop.
Some women in line turned to stare, then coo. Some blushed. Fabrizio crushed Temple to his manly chest, bared thanks to an unlaced not-so-manly poet's shirt. His skin was tanned, super-naturally hairless and his pectorals swelled to such unbelievable dimensions that Temple marveled that he was allowed out in public without a Wonderbra.
Electronic flashes exploded along the registration line, but a hotter, more dazzling light went nova on the sidelines. Temple knew that blinding brilliance from days of old, though at that time she had been the tormenter hiding behind it.
"Looks like America's favorite male cover model, Fabrizio, has found a maiden fair already." Crawford Buchanan's oozing baritone rose from beyond the nebula of wattage. "How does it feel, miss, to be where every woman in America wants to be? How does it feel to be in the great Fabrizio's arms?"
The great Fabrizio was nuzzling her neck and swinging his gilded locks into her nose, which itched.
"Like ... like, my friend Flicka," Temple said brightly. To the Great Fabrizio, she was less creative. "I have a terrible fear of heights," she murmured fretfully. "I may be sick to my stomach any second. Put me down."