Her aunt was shifting her weight from foot to foot in her zebrawood-soled brocaded stiletto sandals like an antsy twelve-year-old.
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Well, you’re used to thinking of the Fontanas as a flock. Seeing just one at a time might be . . . overwhelming and confusing.”
“I’m not the one who has to be very sure about not confusing Fontanas,” Temple pointed out. Pointedly. “Where are you going tonight?”
“The Bellagio.”
“For dinner? That’ll cost Aldo a well-tailored Zegna arm, and probably a leg.”
“I’m worth it,” said Kit, ducking back into Temple’s office and its attached bathroom to finish her makeup.
Temple hoped that she would be that self-confident when she was sixty . . . in thirty years. Right now, the outlook was glum on all fronts.
The idea of Max was bitter in her mind. At best, he was brushing her out of his life. At worst, he was coming on to her, their relentless enemy. Maybe there was some ulterior reason for the good of mankind behind it. Even that idea left a sour taste in her mouth. She wished she’d kissed Matt last night. He’d looked so torn and worried and his mouth was always as clean and bracing as springwater to her.
At work, everyone connected with the White Russian exhibition was being regarded as an apparent thief-in-training. Temple’s guilty knowledge that innocents were suspected when she knew Max was the culprit was twisting her usually wrought-iron stomach into queasy knots. The media was all over the hotel and her and Randy. In fact, to avoid them snooping into their PR plans to accentuate the positive, Randy had ordered Temple to work from her home computer for a while.
Now, she’d barely settled in to craft totally unworkable press releases—how do you defuse a fatal fall and a stolen artifact in 150 words or less?—and Kit was preparing to exit, way too excited about her fling with Aldo to even notice that Temple was running on emotional empty, six quarts shy of hope.
Temple forced her depleted energy up forty revolutions per minute when the doorbell rang.
“Would you get that, hon?” Kit yelled from the bathroom. “I haven’t finished unpacking the bags under my eyes.”
“Hi!” Temple greeted Aldo, checking out his smooth, swarthy Italian hide for forty-something wrinkles. He didn’t look a day over thirty-two, but Mediterranean types aged well. “Kit’ll be right out.”
God! She felt like her own mother. She was the young chick here; Kit was, well, not acting her age.
“How is the family?” Temple inquired as she led tall, dark, and Fontana into the living room. The cappuccino color of his suit matched her sofa exactly, although the material was far better.
“Uh, do you mean the family, or the Family, Miss Temple?”
She felt like she’d never been trapped into making small talk with a single Fontana for so long before.
“I mean your terrific brothers. And I haven’t even been to the Crystal Phoenix in ages to see Nicky and Van.”
“Me, neither,” Aldo said, making ready to sit on her sofa.
“Wait!”
“What?” He slapped a hand to his inside breast pocket. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing . . . worth, ah, a sidearm extraction. It’s just that you’ll get black Midnight Louie hairs all over that pale linen suit.”
“Whoa! You mean I am trespassing on the Top Cat’s territory here?”
“Sort of.”
Temple decided not to mention that Kit had been sleeping there lately . . . when she was home before four in the morning. Temple never thought she’d be the one to uphold the Barr family standards for discreet behavior.
Aldo, perhaps as uneasy as she was, began pacing. Although he wasn’t as tall as Max, he was still way too tall to pace in a room this size.
He stopped by the French doors to eye the petite balcony. “Cute place.”
“Thanks.” Temple felt like a Lilliputian being visited by a rod-packing Gulliver.
“Sorry!” Kit clattered out over the hardwood floors, looking as breathless and perky as a sixteen-year-old. “I’m ready now.”
“Bella!” Aldo gathered her into his long-armed escort and steered her to the door.
“We’ll be back—” Kit began. “When will we be back?”
“When the night has had enough of us,” Aldo said dramatically.
Kit shrugged. “Oh, well . . . ”
Temple could have sworn she winked at her before Aldo drew the big coffered door shut on them.
Well, this was a fine how-do-you-do! Kit out on the town, Fontana style. Louie out on the town, prowling style. Matt gunning for Max and not telling her a thing about it until after the fact. Max the usual Invisible Man he’d been for the past few months.
Temple threw herself down on the sofa, unmindful of Louie hairs, put up her feet, and debated calling Matt, calling out for a pizza, calling the Mounties, or the remaining Fontana brothers.
Instead, she did what a future sixty-year-old should do. She fell asleep, feeling rather sorry for herself but too tired to do anything to take her mind off that spineless condition.
When she woke up, the room was dark. Totally dark. Not a lamp lit.
The time on the VCR read 12:00. Midnight! She jolted upright. Wait. She had never reset the VCR time after it went out during one of the few summer electrical storms in Las Vegas. With an annual rainfall of four inches, they were rarer than ace-high flushes. She couldn’t have fixed it anyway, because only Max knew how to do it.
Her eyes felt grainy from sleeping with her contact lenses in, even though they were the soft variety.
The peace and quiet was nice, though, after frenetic, long hours on the hotel’s marble floors. It was too late to relieve Randy, but she’d be there first thing in the morning and start pulling her weight again. Surely nothing terrible had happened in just these few hours.
Then she saw the red light blinking on her answering machine through the open door to her office. Oh, no. Someone had called.
Temple sat up, fast, and tried to stand, but she ran into a solid piece of darkness that caught hold of her arms and held her back. Before she could scream, she recognized the silky texture of Max’s trademark black turtleneck sweater.
“If you won’t scream, I’ll promise not to fall asleep,” he said.
Temple wiggled up high enough in the sofa seat to switch on the floor lamp next to it. Max had been sitting at the sofa’s far end with her feet on his lap, waiting for her to wake up.
“You do look tired enough to fall asleep right now,” she told him, as the light searched the deep lines and sharp angles of his features. “What’s been going on, Max? I swear I can’t take it anymore.”
He just nodded. “I’ve come here on orders.”
“Who orders you around?”
“Apparently, your upstairs neighbor.”
“Matt? You’d never take orders from Matt. What’s going on? He was all rabid to find you, talk to you. Maybe I shouldn’t have passed his message on to you.”
“He was and I found him. We had a heart-to-heart.”
“I heard and I don’t like the sound of that. It’s much too civilized.”
“Just civil. He agreed that I should talk to you.”
“Agreed?”
“He insisted. I agreed.”
“This is crazy. I don’t need Matt as a go-between.”
“Maybe you do. He was warning me.”
“About what?”
“That fingerprint Molina bullied you out of.”
“That was the piece of damning evidence Matt said she had? Then there was a fingerprint on that CD?”
“So Molina told Matt.”
“Why would she tell Matt about that?”
Max shrugged, a gesture so small she hardly detected it. “It appears she finally has the evidence to draw the net closed on me.”
“Oh, God, Max! She just charged in here. I didn’t even think until later that I could have stopped her.”
“I don’t think you could have. She’s been pushing the line on what’s legal lately, not to mention ethical. I do take a certain pride in driving her to such measures. It will be some consolation when I’m led off in chains.”