Читать книгу Life Is A Beach: Life Is A Beach / A Real-Thing Fling - Pamela Browning, Pamela Browning - Страница 12

HIS SECOND CHAKRA was twisted. At least that’s what Goldy told him.

“Excuse me?” Slade said, feeling foolish.

Goldy sniffed. “The second chakra is the center of sensation and feeling. It’s blocked.”

He didn’t see how his second chakra could be blocked, since when he glanced over at Karma, who was fiddling with flowers in a vase on the file cabinet, he felt a definite sensation. He likened it to the way a bull must feel when he saw a cow after a long dry spell. Only cows didn’t have calves like Karma’s. Her legs were shapely and well-defined in those tights she had borrowed from Renee’s closet.

He forced his attention back to Goldy, who had tilted her head and was toying with the strands of beads around her neck.

“And what do I do to unblock my, um, chakra?” he said distractedly.

“Embrace the flow,” Goldy said.

“Embrace the flow,” he repeated. Needing more guidance than he was getting from Goldy, Slade glanced at Karma, who nodded in agreement. Her hair rippled into motion, and he had the sudden inspiration that if he tried to run his fingers through it, she’d let him. Not here, of course. Not now. But sometime.

The phone rang and Goldy answered it. She became involved in a conversation that looked as if it might be prolonged.

“Movement would help,” Karma said to him as she plucked dead leaves off the flowers in the vase. “To unblock your chakra, I mean.”

“Movement? Like walking? Talking? Riding a horse?”

“No, nothing like that. The kind of movement that frees up blocked emotions. You could join a yoga class.”

Slade shook his head to clear it. This didn’t eliminate his growing attraction to Karma, however, and he had to remind himself sternly that she wasn’t his type. This conversation was more than enough proof of that.

“What is yoga?” he asked. He had a vague idea that it was something that Hollywood types did when they came out of drug rehab.

“The word yoga means ‘yoke,”’ Karma said. “It’s a discipline that yokes the individual with the divine through practice that joins our mundane and spiritual lives.”

“Okay, so explain what a chakra is.”

“Chakra means ‘wheel’ or ‘disk.’ A chakra is the sphere of bioenergetic activity coming from major nerves in the spinal column. You have seven chakras stacked in a column of energy from the base of your spine to the top of your head.”

It was worse than he thought, this stuff, plus if there had been chakras wrapped around his spine, he was sure they would have been shaken off by all that rodeo riding he’d done.

Karma kept talking, and she might as well have been speaking a foreign language. “What goes on in the chakras influences our minds and bodies. Maybe Goldy can explain how your second chakra is blocked.”

Goldy rolled her eyes at them and pointed at the phone while mouthing the words, “New tenant.” Slade ran an impatient hand through his hair and wondered distractedly if he could get a takeout somewhere around here for dinner—a nice quiet dinner during which he could enjoy his own company.

“We could go to the delicatessen on the corner. I could explain more about your second chakra,” Karma said, looking him straight in the eye. This statement was a direct answer to his unasked question, and for a moment he thought she might be able to read his mind but immediately discarded the notion. He was letting all this New Age stuff get to him, which was ridiculous.

“You want to?” Karma gazed at him hopefully.

He hadn’t a moment ago, but it struck him that her eyes had green depths that he hadn’t noticed before, and her neck was extremely graceful, putting him in mind of a snowy egret’s. Plus, all else aside, he was hungry.

“I sure do,” he said, and he was rewarded by a megawatt smile.

“I’ll run upstairs and change clothes,” she said.

“Is that necessary? You look fine.”

“Well,” Karma said, glancing down at what she wore, “these clothes aren’t mine.”

She had already gone upstairs and come back down earlier wearing a pair of sandals on her previously bare feet, whose toenails were lacquered sugar-pea green with silver sparkles. He had an idea that if Karma disappeared into the mysterious upper levels of the Blue Moon Apartments, he would have a long wait before she reappeared. She would want to wash her hair, dry it, and slather on makeup. She would agonize over whether to wear the red outfit or the hot-pink outfit and decide after half an hour to wear the blue-and-green print one instead. In the meantime he would have to be polite to Goldy, who sounded like Minnie Mouse on helium. And that was presuming that she got off the phone; if she didn’t, he’d have to rock back on his heels and pretend to admire what appeared to be distressed panels of coat-hanger art on the wall.

“You’re gorgeous just the way you are,” he said, appropriating Karma’s arm and propelling her toward the door. He even waved goodbye to Goldy in a way that he hoped inspired trust and confidence.

“Shall we take the car?” He’d left his Chevy Suburban at a parking meter.

“Oh, let’s walk,” Karma said, and he swung into step beside her.

He realized before they had taken five steps that people noticed Karma. Men stopped and did a double take after they’d passed; some of them gave her a quick once-over as soon as they saw her. It must be because she was so all-fired tall. She’d dominate any group; she’d stand out in a crowd. He walked taller himself because he was walking beside her, and before he knew it, he was taking pride in being with her. He didn’t mind being envied by other men; in fact, he kind of liked it.

“You see, you have to release emotional energy to free the body from its grip,” Karma said, marching along to the beat of a steel-drum band playing reggae on the street corner.

“I don’t think my emotional energy needs to be released,” he ventured.

“That’s what people think. But we all have repressed emotions.”

“Do you?”

“I’m not so different from everyone else,” Karma said seriously, though this was a statement he could have refuted. There was no opportunity, though, because they had reached the delicatessen. He opened the door for her, and she sailed through, hair bouncing, breasts ditto. A guy on the way out gaped at her.

“Would you look at that,” the guy said to his friend. “Would you look at her!”

This was a compliment, but Slade was sure that Karma hadn’t heard it. Or if she had, she was playing it cool.

Once they were seated in the restaurant booth, Slade studied the menu. He was in the mood for a big broiled steak, but there wasn’t anything remotely resembling one on this menu. Instead there were things like a corned beef-with-chicken liver sandwich on pumpernickel, and cheese blintzes, and humongous desserts with names like Double Chocolate Disgrace. On the table were two bowls in a metal holder, one containing small whole pickled green tomatoes, the other containing sauerkraut.

The waiter returned, and Karma ordered a veggie-and-cream cheese sandwich.

“Are you ready to order, sir?” The waiter stood with his pencil poised.

“What do you recommend?” Slade said, throwing himself on the waiter’s mercy.

“We just made a batch of fresh chopped chicken livers. The chicken liver sandwich is very good.”

The idea of eating a whole sandwich made of chicken livers made Slade slightly sick to his stomach, so he glanced wildly at the menu and chose the first thing he saw, corned beef on rye.

When the waiter had left, Karma ladled sauerkraut into one of the small bowls stacked on the table. “Want some?” she asked.

Slade shook his head. “I never liked sauerkraut, and I can’t imagine eating green tomatoes.”

Karma pulled a face. “I can’t imagine not eating them. I’m a vegetarian, so maybe that’s why.”

“You don’t eat any meat?” He’d never known a vegetarian before; he’d always thought such a person must be slightly deranged. Not to scarf down a thick prime rib, drowned in natural gravy? Not to sink your teeth into a big juicy burger with all the trimmings? Never to know the joys of pork tenderloin cooked on a grill, or leg of lamb, or succulent spare ribs?

“Nope, no poultry, no mammals. I eat fish, though. I love fish.”

Fish. He’d been known to eat catfish in the Glades, and he liked a tuna sandwich now and then, but he couldn’t imagine fish as a steady diet.

“I’ve never eaten in this place,” he said, looking around at the clientele, who ranged from jewel-encrusted elderly matrons with shellacked hair to sunburned tourists whose skin looked like raw hamburger.

“My uncle—you met him this morning—and my aunt used to like to bring me and my sisters here when we visited as children. I guess I came by my liking for Kosher food naturally, since my mother was Jewish.”

He welcomed the chance to know more about Karma’s personal life; he couldn’t imagine what could produce a woman like this.

“With a surname like O’Connor, your father was Irish, right?”

“Mmm-hmm. He and my mother married in college. Both families predicted the marriage’s immediate failure, but my parents had four daughters, including me, and lived happily for years. Until my mother took up cake decorating, that is, and they split up. She changed her name to Saguaro, like the cactus, and moved to Arizona.”

“They divorced because she became a cake decorator?”

“Kind of.” Karma seemed reluctant to elaborate.

“I’ve heard of many reasons to divorce, but that one takes the cake.” He grinned at her, pleased with his play on words.

The corners of her mouth twitched as if she were suppressing a smile. “Dad didn’t approve of Mom’s new occupation. You see, she worked for a bakery that specialized in cakes that look like body parts.” She looked embarrassed and seemed as if she expected him to be shocked, but he was still operating in the dark.

“You don’t mean—”

“I do mean,” she said. “The body parts weren’t arms and legs, if you get my drift.”

He did. He tried to picture in his mind a cake that looked like a pair of breasts or—well! He cleared his throat.

“So, uh, what does your father do?” he asked, sensing that they had reached a conversational cul-de-sac.

“My father found a new life after Mom left. He works on a cruise ship, plying wealthy widows with booze and blarney while pretending to enjoy teaching them the tango.”

Slade chuckled. “We should all be so lucky.”

Their food arrived, and they dug in. Once the corned beef sandwich had taken the edge off his hunger—and it was a delicious sandwich—Slade managed with some difficulty to overcome his aversion to the subject of his chakra.

“Suppose you tell me more about my second chakra. Like, where it is, for example.”

“Your second chakra is located in your abdomen.”

“Why would it have problems?”

Karma inhaled a deep breath, and looking as if she doubted the wisdom of explaining, she plunged ahead anyway. “Well, you know how these days we store information on disks—with computers, I mean? I told you that chakra means ‘disk.’ So it stores information, too. If a chakra is blocked, it needs reprogramming.”

“Reprogramming,” he repeated, thinking that this was worse than he thought.

“The issues of the second chakra are change, movement, pleasure, emotion. If the chakra is blocked, it can be difficult to form attachments, difficult to experience the right emotion. I can match you up with the perfect person,” she said, “and if you can’t change, or get no pleasure out of the relationship, or can’t emote—”

“Emote?” Slade said, wary about this new direction she was taking. All he wanted was a wife. He didn’t expect to have to change, and he wasn’t sure where movement fit into this whole thing, and he wanted to feel pleasure, but wouldn’t that come naturally when he found the right person?

“You want to run that by me again?” he said.

“Emotion is a building block,” Karma explained before she took the last bite of her sandwich.

“I see,” he said, turning this over in his mind.

“Are you sure you don’t want one of these tomatoes?” Karma said, shoving the dish across the table at him.

“No, thanks. And just between you and me, I think this whole chakra stuff is a bunch of nonsense.”

Karma stopped conveying a tomato from the dish to her plate and let it drop with a weary thump back into its dish. “Great,” she said. “Fine. See if I try to help you any more.”

“You’re supposed to find me a wife,” he said, losing patience.

Karma started to slide out of the booth. “Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you understand that this is what our conversation is all about? Don’t you think the fact that you haven’t managed to turn up a likely candidate so far might have something to do with some kind of—of mind block?”

“I don’t see the connection,” Slade said honestly and a little desperately as he slapped a large bill on the table and followed Karma as she charged out of the restaurant.

“You wouldn’t, since your chakra has for all intents and purposes shut down,” Karma said. Her long legs ate up the sidewalk as she barged her way through bunches of blondes and a gaggle of tourists all gawking and talking excitedly.

Slade caught up with her. “You told me that I’m supposed to express emotion. Wouldn’t you say I’m expressing emotion by telling you how I feel about all this chakra-babble?”

She slanted a look toward him. “What do you think emotion is?” she shot back.

He had to think about this for a moment, but the answer seemed clear enough. “Well, I’d say that emotions are instinctual reactions,” he said.

She seemed taken aback, surprised at his response. “Okay. At least you know one when you see one,” she conceded. “That’s a start. To take it a bit further, our feelings are our unconscious reaction to situations or events. We organize our feelings through emotion. We can choose the way we react to emotions, but the feelings themselves are quite separate.”

Karma had slowed her pace was now walking almost sedately at his side.

“My emotional response to all this is that you and me should go in one of these bars and discuss this over a drink or two.” Karma looked at him with rank skepticism. “So I can learn more about this,” he amended.

Ahead of them, a group of people spilled out onto the sidewalk from a neon-lit doorway. “How about here?” he said.

He thought he might be becoming more sensitive to others’ emotions when he recognized a whole raft of them flitting across Karma’s mobile features. Confusion, distrust, sheer terror—not to mention a brief blip of yearning over-laid with what he thought might be desire. But desire for what? For a beer? For his company? For more, even, than that?

“We can stop for a drink,” she said. “I don’t want to be out late, that’s all.”

He took her elbow, and she tensed as if she might shake his hand loose although she did not. They made their way into the club, where hot salsa music accompanied scantily clad bodies gyrating on a minuscule dance floor. Karma slid into a booth, and he slid in beside her.

“How do you know so much about all this chakra stuff, anyway?” he asked her after they’d ordered drinks.

She smiled at the waiter as he slid her glass of white wine toward her. “I guess you could say I was born into the territory. My parents met on a commune in the late sixties. My sisters and I were raised on soybeans, sprouts, tofu and a lot of other things that you’ve probably never heard of. Chakras, yoga, the freedom to be you and me, and so on. Commune life ended when we all had to go to school and they moved us to Connecticut where my father got a job in an aircraft factory.”

“That sounds normal enough,” he allowed.

“Oh, but there’s more. Life in suburbia was modified by my parents’ history. Jewish woman married to an Irish Catholic and spending their marriage’s first years grubbing around in an organic garden equals not just your ordinary family.”

“Are your sisters like you? Do they have unusual names like yours?”

“My oldest sister is named Azure, the youngest one is Isis, and the middle one is Mary Beth.”

“Karma, Azure, Isis, and Mary Beth?” he said, smothering a chuckle at the incongruity of it.

Karma picked up on his amusement. “Go ahead. Laugh if you want to. We’re used to it.”

“Where did the Mary Beth come from?”

“Mary Beth was named after the midwife who rode five miles on a snowmobile to deliver her. Consequently, Mary Beth has always considered herself lucky that she was born in the middle of the worst winter storm to hit upstate New York in twenty-three years.”

“Are their occupations as interesting as yours?”

“Isis is married to a dentist and they’re raising his three sons by his first wife, all model students and soccer enthusiasts. Azure is a management consultant based in Boston. Mary Beth is a rabbi. I love to ride by her synagogue and see ‘Mary Beth O’Connor, Assistant Rabbi’ on the sign outside. I imagine that the unexpected juxtaposition of our Irish surname to the title of assistant rabbi merits a few second glances from passersby.” Karma grinned.

Slade laughed. He couldn’t help but be charmed by this woman with her tumultuous hair, offbeat personality, and unusual background. It occurred to him that he hadn’t met an interesting woman in ages. Years. It was why he had come to Miami Beach. It was why he had signed up with a dating service.

“What about you?” she asked.

“I’d say we’ve pretty much covered that during the interview.”

“Not about your childhood. Or your family,” she pointed out.

Slade took a sip of his beer before answering. “Grew up in Okeechobee City, went to college, worked the rodeo circuit for a while and eventually came back to run the family ranch. My dad is ready to retire from ranching. He and Ma can’t wait until I come home with my fiancée so they can do some traveling.”

“This fiancée you hope to find,” Karma said carefully. “Do your parents have right of refusal? I mean, what if they don’t like her?”

“They’ll like anybody who decides to put up with me. They’re so eager for a daughter-in-law that they’d accept the bride of Frankenstein if she’d marry me.”

“I hope I can do better for you than that,” Karma said seriously.

He was about to say, I hope you can, too. However, he looked at Karma, really looked at her in that moment, and something in her expression made him bite back the words. He thought she looked regretful, even a trifle upset.

“Now about the way I move,” he said after they had watched the dancers for several minutes. “Why don’t you let me show you that I know how?”

She regarded him with a puzzled expression. “Excuse me?”

“Let’s dance. In the interest of freeing up my chakra, of course.”

“Don’t make fun of it,” Karma said sharply. “If you don’t believe in the theory, fine. Lots of people do, that’s all.”

“I guess I need to know more about it before I make up my mind. But for now, what about dancing?”

Karma bit her lip. “Well,” she said. “I was thinking it was time for me to go home.”

“You won’t turn into a pumpkin, Cinderella. Humor me.”

“Any reason why I should? You’re my client. I’m not supposed to—”

“But that’s exactly the point. I am your client.”

“I should be finding the perfect date for you. I shouldn’t be out having a good time and forgetting that this is a business relationship.” She seemed troubled.

“Are you having a good time, Karma?” he asked softly, letting the words sink in. Because I am, too. I’d have a better time if you’d dance with me.”

After a moment’s hesitation during which Karma seemed to weigh the pros and cons, the pros must have won out. She got up and Slade followed her onto the crowded dance floor. No sooner did they get there than the song that was playing stopped and segued into a smooth ballad.

He took her in his arms, liking the solid feel of her, liking the way she melted into him. She was lighter on her feet than he would have expected, and he led her to the center of the floor where lights from a revolving glass ball overhead played across her features.

“So, Karma, tell me—do I move all right?” he asked after they’d been at it for a few minutes. He was teasing her to see what she’d say.

He expected a saucy retort, maybe a challenge. But she surprised him. “Oh, yes,” she murmured.

“So do you. But in case I don’t express myself enough to bring my most repressed feelings out into the open, what should I do?”

“Our previous discussions make me suspect that this is an insincere question.”

“Insincere is as insincere does,” he said.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that I asked for advice, and if I take it, you’ll know that I’m far more interested than I’ve let on.”

“This is a verbal sparring contest.”

He tightened his arm around her waist. “At the moment, it’s more physical than verbal as far as I’m concerned.”

“Yikes,” was Karma’s inelegant remark. “Double yikes.”

“So?”

“Well, if you really want to do something about movement and gain a little inner peace as well, you could try yoga, like I mentioned before.”

“And where would I learn this yoga?”

“We hold yoga classes on the roof at the Blue Moon on Tuesday nights. Eight o’clock sharp.” She spoke with a breathy little hitch in her voice that he found unbelievably sexy.

He pulled her even closer, felt her breasts pushing against his chest. “And you will be there, I suppose.”

“I suppose. I mean, definitely. Unless I have something else to do.”

What would this woman do in her spare time? he wondered. Make tofu-cilantro goodies such as the ones she’d lost at the bottom of the bay along with her bicycle? Hang out with Goldy in the lobby of the Blue Moon? Go on a date?

It occurred to him that Karma O’Connor might have a boyfriend. Or worse. She might be engaged. If she ran a dating service, she could have her pick of clients.

“You’re not taken or anything, are you?” he demanded out of the clear blue, surprising himself as well as her.

“Taken?” She moved away and blinked at him. He noticed that her eyelashes were curly and long.

“As in going steady. Or engaged. Or something,” he said, stammering around and feeling stupid.

“No.” She moved closer now, tightening her arm across his shoulders. This gave Slade an exultant feeling that he would have been hard put to describe. He knew she wasn’t his type. But he also knew that he might have a chance to get lucky for tonight. Or maybe the next few nights, if he played this right.

Not that it was only sex he was interested in. He wanted to know what made Karma O’Connor tick. He wanted to know why she thought the way she did, why she danced with her eyes closed. He wanted to know why she was running a place called Rent-a-Yenta and what she’d done before that. He wanted to know—

“You could come tomorrow night.”

He had to think for a few seconds to put this statement in its proper context. “To yoga class, you mean.”

“Yes, it would be good for you.”

“If I promise to be there, will you leave here with me now?” he said, sounding more urgent than he intended.

“And where would we go?” she asked. In another woman, this might have sounded coy, but he didn’t think Karma was capable of coyness.

“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.”