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."
"Do you model for romance covers anymore?"
"No, too busy." His smile again showcased the Teflon teeth.
"Or . .. there are so many other male cover models competing now."
Fabrizio shook his head until his split ends whipped the sofa back. "No. Covers are start, not end.
Small fries for international multimedia personality. I only come to do walk-through for pageant because G.R.O.W.L was a good start for me. But I do not need this audience. Fabrizio is for whole world now."
"Then you don't feel threatened by all the up-and-comers?"
He shook his golden mane again, his distant watchers shiver-ing with delight. "Fabrizio not threatened by anybody." The lothario's smirk was back. "Except lovely woo-mahn who believes she is afraid of height. This makes Breezy feel very bad, that she does not think he is strong enough to hold her."
"So you're not even threatened by a murderer?"
The last word froze the look on his face, but the intimacy had left it.
"You think a murderer would want to kill Breezy? No. This dead model, this Cheyenne. He was new to this, and he did not have the physique of Fabrizio, no?"
"Still, he apparently had done some modeling abroad. That's usually a sign of a rising career."
"Peanuts, how you say? Little stuff. Fabrizio does all the big stuff, leaves that small fries to the others now. He would be no threat to what I do, what I am. No man is."
"We may assume that you are not a suspect, then, since you had no motive?"
"Suspect? For small woo-mahn you play big games. Why should Fabrizio wish anyone ill? He is rich, famous, happy. Many woo-mahns wish to be picked up by Fabrizio, all over the world!"
The massively muscled arms spread wide again, the better to display his firm, rounded, fully packed pectorals. Funny, Temple thought, that used to be a female secondary sexual characteristic.
Breezy's thigh pressed into hers, hot and hard. It reminded her of an encroaching Christmas ham.
She slapped the notebook shut. "As the second Incredible Hunk winner, you can't compete again anyway, can you?"
"No. But there is no need. Fabrizio has won every heart, because he speaks from the heart." A ham-sized hand pounded the tan-gilded breastbone, in case Temple had overlooked a part of his anatomy. "Sincere, that is the secret of Fabrizio. And we do very well with that."
How odd that he referred to himself in both the third person and the royal "we," when mentioning his business enterprises. Temple supposed that he was a one-man conglomerate of sorts. Pneumatic Man, able to spread himself into million-dollar multimedia areas with a single muscle flex.