“Somewhere away from the music, the smoke and other people. A walk on the beach, maybe.”
“You like walking on the beach?”
“I think so. I haven’t had many chances to do it.” Well, there was last night, but he’d rather forget that whole fiasco.
“It’s another way to bring movement into your life. Okay, you’re on.”
They broke apart, and Slade felt a pang of regret for the fact that he no longer held Karma in his arms. Watching the way she moved as they traversed the area between the dance floor and the door was some compensation, however, and putting his arm around her once they were outside on the sidewalk was even more.
They had turned to walk down the street toward the beach when he caught a glimpse of red hair sprouting from a knot on top of a head. The woman under the hair was on her way into the club that they had recently left, and it wasn’t just any woman. It was, he realized with a sinking heart, the woman he’d met last night, the one who had accompanied the men he was with into the alley as they tried to rob him. The woman whose bikini top had ended up in his pocket.
There are certain moments in life that you can see coming from a distance away, and when that happens, the best thing to do is avoid them at all costs. And he didn’t want to meet up with this redhead, whose name, he recalled, was Brenda.
But it was too late. Brenda had already seen him. Not that he was all that inconspicuous, as tall as he was and with the flamboyant Karma O’Connor on his arm.
“You!” Brenda shouted. “Come back here!”
“Looks to me like we’d better get out of here,” he muttered close to Karma’s ear. Fortunately at that moment a bunch of men wearing red fezzes on their heads tumbled out of a charter bus between him and Brenda, who let out a squawk of outrage.
Karma craned her neck. He had no doubt that she could see over the heads of the men in the red hats.
“That woman,” she said. “Is she trying to talk to you?” Brenda hollered something, the words indistinct.
“I think so,” Slade said. “We’d better run for it.”
He hadn’t anticipated the effect these words would have on Karma. Instead of agreeing with him, or better yet putting one foot in front of the other as fast as could be managed, she dug in her heels and said, “Why?”
“Because that woman and her companions tried to rob me last night. Because I decked the two guys, and she went off screaming down an alley.”
Karma narrowed her eyes. “What preceded this? I mean, why would you—”
Yesterday replayed itself in Slade’s memory. Plenty had happened, but there was no way he could explain it to Karma in the few moments remaining before Brenda clawed and climbed her way over the wedge of men who were still good-timing their way out of that bus.
“It was a matter of survival,” he said. “Let’s go!”
Karma was not to be hustled, however, and to his horror, he saw four of the men lifting Brenda up and passing her over their heads until she was gently set down on the other side of their still-moving line.
Brenda let out a little “Yow!” of triumph and bounced toward them. “Slade! Isn’t that your name?” she said, sparing a quick assessment of Karma, who stood mutely at his side.
Slade tried to edge away, but Karma was firmly rooted in place. She was staring at Brenda’s chest, which was a fine example of silicone art at its worst.
“You have my bikini top,” Brenda said without further preamble. “I want it back.”
“I don’t—”
“You do! You grabbed it up off the floor when I was dancing! I saw you!”
“But—”
“Hef gave it to me as a token of his esteem when I was Playmate of the Month!” Brenda was getting decidedly red in the face, almost as red as Slade remembered the disputed bikini top to be.
“Slade, is any of this true?” said Karma through tight lips.
“Some of it,” he admitted.
“Great. I’ve just signed up a pervert at Rent-a-Yenta,” Karma muttered under her breath, but at least his admission did what he hadn’t been able to do. It got Karma moving. She set off down the sidewalk at a pace that could only be described as rapid.
Slade turned to face Brenda, thinking that he might be able to talk her into being reasonable. “Your swimsuit top is at the houseboat. Stop by tomorrow and I’ll give it to you.”
“No,” said Brenda, stubbornness flaring in her eyes. “I want it now.”
“Tomorrow. No problem,” he said, backing away as placatingly as he could.
“Now! We’re going there right away! If you think I’m going to let you keep any article of my clothing for any length of time, you’re nuts. After what you did to my friends—”
“They deserved it,” he told her. “They tried to take my wallet.”
“I don’t care,” Brenda said, on the verge, he was sure, of another tirade or maybe hysterics from the look of her. But then fate intervened in the form of a very large woman walking a very large and very hairy dog, which began to sniff around Brenda’s feet in the way that dogs checked out fireplugs.
Uh-oh, thought Slade as the dog lifted its leg and Brenda curdled the air around them with a high-pitched scream. The dog panicked at the sound of Brenda’s ungodly shriek, and it began to run around in circles. The woman yanked on the leash and yelled, “Heel! Heel!” Brenda kept on screaming. And he, Slade, made tracks.
Fortunately there were a lot of strollers out indulging in South Beach ambiance and the brine-scented night air, and fortunately, he spotted Karma’s head about a block away. By the time he’d caught up with her, she had exceeded loping speed and was jogging along quite efficiently.
“Karma,” he said, grabbing her arm. “I can explain.”
“No explanation necessary. I saw you pull that red bra from your pocket this morning when you stopped to inquire about Rent-a-Yenta.”
“It’s not a bra. It’s a bikini top.”
“It serves the same function. Don’t worry, I’ll refund your registration fee.”
“I don’t want a refund,” he said, glancing over his shoulder as Brenda’s screams abruptly stopped. “I want a wife.”
“Fat chance,” Karma said.
He saw that red topknot flopping its way toward them. “I don’t want to talk to this woman. I can explain. Where can we hide?”
“Like they say, you can run but you can’t hide,” Karma said grimly.
“It was all a fluke. I grabbed her bikini top off the floor when she threw it off while she was dancing on the hood of a cut-down ’57 Chevy that was used as a couch in an apartment with some strange people I didn’t know. It’s true, I swear it.”
Karma stopped dead in her tracks in front of a yellow-stuccoed apartment house and stared at him. “That story sounds absolutely too bizarre to be made up,” she said.
“I didn’t make it up. I have no interest in Brenda. Isn’t there somewhere we can go?”
Karma’s eyes moved sideways and took in their pursuer, who was now only half a block away. They were standing in the slim shadow of a palm tree, so there was a chance that Brenda hadn’t actually seen them yet.
“In here,” said Karma, yanking him into the lobby of the yellow-stuccoed place. Slade had the impression of dusty potted ficus trees and tables piled high with dog-eared magazines. A bunch of elderly men sat around tables playing dominoes.
“Hello, Karma dear,” one of them said, his words punctuated by the sound of dominoes slapping on wood. “Your uncle Nate is out.”
“I think he went somewhere with Mrs. Rothstein. He borrowed my Old Spice,” said another. The rest of the men barely looked up.
“I’ll just drop by his apartment,” Karma said, edging toward the elevator and pulling Slade along with her. The men, focused on their game, barely paid attention.
Slade darted an anxious look at the front door. No sign of Brenda, or had she already passed by?
The elevator door opened, and Karma tugged Slade into it. “It�
�s okay. We can cut through my uncle’s apartment to the fire escape. From there we can—”
“I appreciate this,” Slade said. “You don’t know how much.”
Karma stared straight ahead. “Don’t try to weasel your way back into my good graces,” she said. “I can’t place any weirdos with my female clients.”
He looked over at Karma, a slight smile playing across his lips. “I am entirely normal,” he said. “In every way.” Her mouth was unusually full, and her cheeks were flushed. Without knowing why, he bent his head, hesitated and kissed her full on the lips.
He thought she might have gasped beneath his mouth, but he was so intent on lengthening and deepening the kiss that he wasn’t sure. What he was sure about was that her lips were softly pliant, her mouth was warm and willing, and she was one sensuous woman.
The elevator bumped to a stop, and he released her. Without saying a word, she walked out. He followed her, his mouth tingling, his ears ringing. And all from just one kiss.
Looking rattled, Karma led him into her uncle’s apartment and raised a window before turning to face him. “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said.
“It was good for me. Wasn’t it good for you?” He affected an air of studied innocence.
“It was unnecessary and uncalled for. And—”
“—and very nice,” he murmured, gazing deep into her eyes, which dazzled him with their complexity of feeling.
She bit her lip and appeared to collect herself. “Let’s go,” she said, and she stepped out onto the metal fire-escape stairs.
“Now what?”
“We go that way,” she said, pointing toward the next roof.
It was easy, clambering across the roof, and the next one, and the next. Throughout their curious journey, with the city of Miami Beach spread out before them, with the scent of the sea in his nostrils, all he could think was that he wanted to kiss Karma again. And soon.
“This is the Blue Moon,” she said when they had reached a roof where lawn chairs were set along the edge of the building facing the ocean. The chairs on the sun deck were occupied by couples doing—well, who knew what? Slade had an idea, but he doubted the advisability of asking Karma if she would like to indulge. He was pretty sure she’d say no.
Karma marched across the roof and opened a door leading to a narrow hallway inside. “I suppose you want to be invited into my apartment for a drink or something,” she said, squarely facing him under the glare of an unshaded bulb dangling from the ceiling.
“Yes,” he said because he had never wanted anything so much in his life. “Yes, I reckon I would like that just fine.”
Karma sighed and massaged the back of her neck. “I’ll have to think this over,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said.
“You might want to come in to the office and look at some of my female clients’ videos,” she said.
“I thought you fired me,” he said. “As a client, I mean.”
“I did. But now I think you’re okay.”
“Because I kissed you?” he said, opting for the bold approach.
“No, because I believe that you didn’t have any psycho reasons for having that bra—”
“Swimsuit top.”
“—swimsuit top in your pocket. I saw your expression when you pulled it out this morning. You looked surprised. That’s enough for me.”
At the moment, screening videos of her other Rent-a-Yenta clients didn’t appeal to him at all. “How about lunch tomorrow? Or dinner?”
“Or yoga? Remember, I said we’d have a class here tomorrow night.”
She must be testing him. He didn’t want to go to a yoga class. He hated anything New Age. But he did want to see Karma again, and desperately.
“I’ll be there,” he said.
She favored him with a decisive nod. “Good. Now I’d better walk you out of the building. Goldy doesn’t take kindly to unescorted men rambling around in here.”
They walked down four flights of stairs and found Goldy in the lobby, sitting behind her desk watching TV.
She looked up briefly, showing absolutely no surprise that the two of them had descended from on high rather than walking in the front door.
“Your aunt Sophie is here,” she said.
Karma’s eyebrows flew up. “My aunt Sophie is dead.”
“Well, she’s here anyway.” Goldy gestured in the direction of a cardboard bucket of the same ilk as the ones that fast-food fried chicken came in.
“What in the world are you talking about, Goldy?”
“Your aunt Sophie. They delivered her ashes. That’s them right there.”
4
THE NEXT DAY WHEN KARMA met her uncle Nate at the neighborhood ice-cream parlor, she informed him about the fried chicken barrel now reposing on top of her refrigerator.
“Okay,” he said, “so I should have ordered an urn. But what difference does it make? Sophie wanted her ashes scattered in the ocean. She loved the ocean.”
Karma took time out from licking her raspberry frozen yogurt on a stick. “And you’re going to scatter them, right?”
Nate looked uncomfortable. “No, not me. You, Karma.”
Karma stopped stock-still in the middle of Ocean Boulevard. “Why me?”
“I pretend like she’s buried. I go to the cemetery every day to see her grave, God rest her.” He pulled her out of the path of a speeding dune buggy. “You should watch where you’re going, Karma. I don’t want to be going to any more funerals for a while.”
They resumed their stroll. “With me out of the way, you could give Rent-a-Yenta to Paulette,” Karma said while thinking that scattering Aunt Sophie’s ashes was something Nate should do.
“I don’t want you out of the way, Karma. Your cousin Paulette was second choice. Anyway, she already has a job counting money for a big Wall Street firm.”
Lucky Paulette, Karma thought glumly. She probably had a boyfriend, too. But not someone as handsome and charming as Slade Braddock, she’d wager. Not that Slade was her boyfriend, but he had kissed her. He was a good kisser, too.
“Anyway, Karma, I like to go to the cemetery and look at Sophie’s grave. I sit there for a while and I talk to her.”
“Aunt Sophie doesn’t have a grave. She’s in that fried chicken barrel.”
“Barrel? Don’t call it a barrel. It’s a fried chicken bucket. Sophie wouldn’t need a barrel. She was as slim on the day she died as she was on the day I married her. And anyway, I picked out a grave that looks like it could be Sophie’s. Sometimes I drive Mrs. Rothstein to the cemetery, too, so she can visit her husband’s grave nearby. There’s a pretty bottle-brush tree, and we like to sit under it on a nice wrought-iron bench. Let me have my fantasy that Sophie is there, bubbeleh. Don’t spoil it for me.”
“But Uncle Nate—”
“Your aunt Sophie was my life. I miss her.” Nate wiped a tear from his eye.
Karma slid an arm around his shoulders. “She’d want you to make a new life, Uncle Nate.”
He sighed. “I know, I know. That’s true.” He cheered up slightly. “So when can you scatter the ashes?”
Karma finished the rest of her frozen yogurt and tossed the stick in a trash can painted with a purple palm tree. “I don’t know. I’ll have to figure out a way. I think I’ll need a boat, since you can’t really toss ashes from shore without the prevailing winds throwing them back at you.”
“You let me know what you’re going to do.”
“I will, Uncle Nate. Thanks for the frozen yogurt.” She bent and kissed him on his wrinkled cheek.
“You’ve got your yogurt class tonight, don’t you?”
“Yoga. I practice yoga. I eat yogurt.” Her uncle had never been able to tell the difference between yoga and yogurt, which had been endearing at first, but now it was beginning to wear on her.
“Okay, yoga. Didn’t I hear that the big cowboy was coming to class?”
“Where did you hear that
?” Karma uttered in surprise.
“Goldy mentioned it. Is it true?”
“I invited him. Not sure if he’ll be there tonight,” she hedged.
Nate’s eyes twinkled. “He will be. I saw the way he looked at you the other morning.”
“From your mouth to God’s ears,” Karma said, but Nate only laughed.
“That’s my line,” he said, and it was true. Her uncle was always saying that.
After she and Nate parted company at the corner, Karma walked slowly back to her office, wondering where would be the best place to hire a boat. She was still mulling this over as she climbed the stairs. The door swung open before she inserted her key.
“Hi, Karma.” Jennifer, the same Jennifer who was eager to find a date who was husband material, had parked her sexy self in front of the TV in the alcove where clients were welcome to browse through videos of possible matches. “Aunt Goldy sent me over to take delivery of the couch and chairs for you, and I figured it’s a chance to check out new prospects. I’ve just met one, in fact.”
“Oh?”
“He said his name was Slade Braddock. He was looking for a psychological profile form and took one off your desk. I hope that’s okay.”
Karma’s spirits fell. She wished she hadn’t missed him. “I guess it’s all right. Um, Jennifer, why aren’t you at work?”
“I switched to the night shift.”
“They have night shifts for ear piercers?”
“Uh-huh. That’s when all the teenagers come in, and we’re having a special—two for the price of one.”
“Two ears? You charge per ear?”
Jennifer rolled her eyes. “No, silly. Two people for the price of one. You should come get your ears pierced while the sale’s on. Your belly button too. I’m not supposed to do belly buttons, but I’d make an exception for you.”
Ouch! But, “I’ll think about it,” Karma said. To her dismay, the very video cassette that Jennifer now cradled in her eager little hands was labeled Slade Braddock, Client 1811.
“This guy was soooo cool. I think I’ll pop this cassette in the VCR and see what he has to say.”
“I haven’t edited it yet.”
Life Is A Beach (Mills & Boon Silhouette): Life Is A Beach / A Real-thing Fling Page 6