“And now,” Crawford finally crowed, sensing his reign as emcee peaking, “our last couple of the night performing the . . . Last Tango in Vegas! The glamorous Olivia Phillips and her partner, new Latin king Matt Devine!”
Oh, wow. Temple’s eyes were glued on the staircase. She wanted someone’s hand to grab. She looked right past Molina and saw that Mariah had scrunched down on her mother’s other side and was staring raptly at the stage. “He’s gonna be okay, he’s gonna be okay,” she was mouthing, as if making up for her unguarded and selfish blurt when she saw Matt streaming blood in the wee hours of this morning.
Kids have to learn to deal with shock; it doesn’t come naturally.
No couple arrived at the top of either stairway in the wings.
The audience stirred, uneasy.
Temple fidgeted in her seat. Was he ill?
Then Matt was there, sliding down the curving banister as he’d first done to escape the masked attacker fifteen hours ago. Talk about capitalizing on real-life experience.
He shot off the end doing a spectacular airborne split over the four risers to the dance floor, landing perfectly in a wide-legged stance, his martial arts training coming into play. He turned and looked back up the stairs as if willing an apparition to appear.
“Oh, wow,” Mariah squealed.
Temple echoed her internally. The makeup and costume crew had made a totally bold move. Matt’s hair was the natural color, but gelled close to his head except for a blindingly blond high-rise top. His black leather pants and shirt were “skinfully” tight. A black leather gauntlet on his wounded left arm stretched up to his shoulder, a brilliantly kinky twist on a practical costume necessity. The recent strains had chiseled features set in the expression of predatory intensity affected by male ballroom dancers.
The effect was startling for a tango: a blond man, totally icy-hot Nazi cyborg fetish awesome.
The look made a certain historical sense, Temple told herself while swallowing hard. Many Nazis had escaped to South America after World War II, and Argentina streets gave birth to the tango and refined it later after World War II.
Mariah didn’t get these nuances, but she got the one that mattered. “He is smokin’. The girls at school will be so freaking jealous!”
Olivia appeared at the top of the stairs in a clingy backless burgundy gown slathered with sequins. Its fluttering “car wash” skirt was slit strategically up to her hips at every opportunity.
Age did not wither, nor custom stale her utter feline sensuality.
This was the couple to beat. The audience rose in a standing ovation to acknowledge that.
That motivated Olivia to move. She glittered like a glamorous serpent as she slithered and slid down the banister, spinning down the four stairs to plaster herself against Matt’s back and wrap a possessive cocked leg around his braced thigh.
O-kay, Temple told herself. She was watching Rico and Lola at the Copa, right? Music and passion were always the fashion. Disengage, Zoe Chloe!
That was kinda hard. The audience was clapping and hooting at every move, and there were lots of them. The tango was a deliberate dance with sharp leg flicks keeping the couple entwined in a sexy procession of moves, scissoring their lower legs in and out.
In this version Olivia was the attempted aggressor. Her sharp, spike-heeled leg flicks flirted between Matt’s wide-planted legs very . . . dangerously. Throbbing, aching violin music dictated each nerve-wracking flirtatious advance and retreat of the dancers’ legs and hips.
Temple couldn’t even imagine rehearsing this dance. The guy would have to wear a suit of armor. At least an athletic protector.
On her left, Rafi was emitting a low, admiring laugh.
On her right, Molina’s eyes were no longer wandering like a bodyguard’s, but transfixed on the stage and Matt.
Olivia was all flashing naked leg, stretching a supernaturally long and straight gam to, uh, Rico’s broad shoulder. He caught her arched ankle and turned her legs like the hands of a clock, until she slid slowly down his side in the splits, an amazing feat for her age. Grandma Gypsy Rose Lee.
Even more amazing, Olivia moved from lying at his feet by drawing herself up through his legs from the back in a torso-clinging move that defied gravity . . . and decency.
The audience frenzy was drowning out the music now. Temple glimpsed Molina quickly distracting Mariah’s eyes from the stage with a whispered comment.
Temple had heard network dance show judges comment once that a routine was so hot and intense that they felt like voyeurs, like it was too private to watch. That was happening now with an ex-priest and a grandma who’d just met a week earlier. Dance was an amazing art form.
Zoe Chloe was blushing and Temple was thinking someone should call the police to shut this show down when the couple executed a series of sharp spins and Olivia sank into the splits again, clutching at . . . Rico’s . . . disdainful hip. Was there such a thing as a disdainful hip? If there could be a contrite right hand, sure.
The applause and screams were overriding everything, even the couple going to the judges’ table. They took bow after bow at center stage.
“Some full recovery,” Rafi growled on Temple’s left.
“Max certainly nailed the competition there, and practically the girl,” Molina muttered on her right.
Max?
Temple stared at Molina, to find her longtime antagonist flushing. “I meant ‘Matt.’ God, Barr. Can’t you manage to get boyfriends without mirror names?”
That’s when the audience gasped.
Molina snapped her head back to the stage and a dazed Temple changed focus a split second later.
While she was ambling toward the judges’ table arm in arm with Matt, Olivia’s shoe had hit a slick spot on the shiny wooden surface. One high heel kicked out from under her.
She was going to land flat on her back, the worst kind of impact. Especially for a sexy senior citizen.
Matt’s knees buckled as he tried to push himself beneath her before she hit, hard.
Molina and Rafi were sprinting onto the dance floor as were a bunch of beige shirts from hotel security, not to mention Dirty Larry slinging his camcorder strap over his shoulder to rush down the aisle to the scene of the accident.
Another dirty trick—sabotage—was all anyone in the know could think. The triumphant couple went from a strut to the judges’ table to being swallowed by a clot of converging security personnel.
The center of the stage looked like a football field with a loose ball.
Temple charged over, late, picturing Matt and his already disabled arm crushed at the bottom of the pile.
Feet lost purchase and skidded, bodies and arms flailed about on a floor as slippery as an ice rink.
Danny was standing, leaning over the judges’ table on the dais that gave him an overview of the melee. “He’s holding something! Striking. Get him!” Danny yelled with the overriding vocal command of a choreographer who could call whole chorus lines to attention.
A mantra of screamed “Die, bastard, die” came from the unseen heart of the struggle.
“Get him. Get him. Get him!” male voices chanted between desperate grunts. “Get who?”
“Man in beige,” Danny bellowed, leaping over the tabletop to help. “He’s got some kind of weapon.”
Midnight Louie, long MIA, suddenly came streaking past Temple’s side vision, making for the tumbled bodies in the pile.
He paused to eye the flailing limbs and feet, lifting a snarling face featuring an amazingly wide and bloodred maw lined with white, sharklike fangs.
Then he leaped onto the struggling pile of flesh, bones, and clothing with what Temple would swear later was a martial arts cry. Or the feline version, anyway.