Performance anxiety. And she wasn't helping by barging into his pre-appearance retreat.
She hotfooted over to collect Louie. By then Santa had found a traditional twinkle for his eye and had raised a forefinger to his lips.
Temple nodded, happy to comply with the holiday deception she had almost messed up. Santa glanced down to her shoes, frowned, and then winked.
Temple tucked Louie under her arm, despite velvet-raking possibilities. Cost of doing business.
"No claws!" She hissed the command to him under her breath. She shrugged apologetically at Santa Claus and hefted Louie higher. "You know the kind of claws I mean," she told the man in red.
Then she rushed out without a backward look.
Down the hall thirty feet she stopped beside an identical door, also ajar. This door leaked light and noise like a festive sieve. Entering, Temple found herself the last guest to arrive. Everyone from the conference room was installed here now, along with triple their number in children and significant others.
Even Yvette's pink and Solange's chartreuse carriers had made the relocation, sitting side by side and looking like anemic holiday decorations. All the cats were free to roam, except Maurice, who was on a leash.
Temple didn't know what would happen if she let the felines mix it up, but Louie weighed a ton. Though he had not flailed since they had left the other conference room, he had steadily slipped down her side. He now hung at hip level. One notch lower, and he'd be on the floor again.
She let him drop, realizing that the cats had wonderful chaperones anyway: kids of all sizes and ages, eager to surround them with curiosity and affection. The kitties, perhaps, would not welcome pats from sticky hands attached to high-pitched voices and sudden, jerky movements.
Temple was in the same beautiful pea-green boat with her one pussycat as every other woman in this room was with her one-plus offspring: she had a charge to watch every minute so that no one did it damage, and it did damage to no one. All Temple really longed for was a long; hot soak in a bathtub somewhere quiet.
"Though that went well."
A Colby cousin, a blond guy her age that Temple would have thought handsome if she had never seen Matt Devine, had edged over with a cup of ruddy wine punch. Since his other hand held a glass of harder stuff, Temple took the wine.
"Thanks. I actually needed this. Did the audition session really go well?"
"Absolutely. Vote's not in, and The Client hasn't spoken, but, ah, you certainly have my vote. That's off the record."
"Of course. And thanks for the support."
"I'm behind your alley cat one hundred percent too. Not that they haven't done well with Maurice, but your Louie combines streetwise charm with a certain elegance."
"I think so too. And the lucky lady cat?"
His flaxen head shook. "Pity about the petite silver. Bad break. Still, no client wants a tabloid appearance, not even for a cat. Besides, that sister of hers is a standout filly. Never even heard of the breed, but she films like a brandy Alexander goes down. Don't you think?"
"I do. Perhaps Yvette could have a cameo role."
His pale head shook. "In this business, you're either top cat, or no cat."
"So Maurice's career is--?"
"You've heard of the dodo?"
"As in . . . dead as a doornail?"
He nodded. "I must mingle. No one should suspect a preference."
With that he ambled away ... to the side of Savannah Ashleigh.
No doubt, Temple thought, too weary to temper her newly acquired Las Vegas cynicism, he would tell Savannah that she had an edge in his opinion. But he didn't carry her any libations. Perhaps he preferred her hands free.
The wine punch was too strong for Temple's burgeoning headache, but nothing from the bar interested her, and the kids were all drinking something dark green, which would probably be super-sweet and sticky.
Midnight Louie, she noticed, wasted not a second in sprinting away from the kiddie corner, where Solange and Yvette were cornered back to back, ears flattening as dozens of sticky fingers patted them right on that prize-winning doming.
Savannah Ashleigh was doing nothing to protect the Persian siblings, having changed into something less comfortable but more befitting the season--a white leather jumpsuit festooned with star-shaped silver studs. No doubt the super large star rather lewdly studding her right breast was supposed to represent the one that had led the Wise Men to the manger.
Temple trailed Louie, nervous about the havoc his alley-cat habits might wreak among such delicacies as a Christmas tree decorated with Venetian glass ornaments with a mini-mountain of exquisitely wrapped presents beneath it. This was Louie's first Christmas indoors, as far as Temple knew, and she had no idea how civilized he would be.
Much to her surprise, he avoided this tempting pile of twinkling lights, fragile decorations and beribboned, bright papers begging to be pounced on, torn, crushed and then pursued.
"Worried about your pal?" Kendall asked.
Temple's statuesque guide looked truly elegant in burgundy velvet, much more the yuppie boss's daughter that she was.
"Just watching. He seems fascinated by the chimney. Maybe it's those eight tiny reindeer atop the roof. They look kind of mousy from here."
"Don't let our art director hear you! That's his creation."
Kendall smiled fondly, and Temple realized that she must have attended these parties as a child herself.
"Daddy adores these hokey events. Sophisticated New York adman, and yet he insists on playing Santa Claus every year. I shouldn't give the surprise away, but pretty soon Santa will come sliding down the chimney--there's a little hatch into the kitchen next door--and it's ho-ho-ho time and presents for all. Then Santa goes back up the chimney and the party's over for another year."
Kendall sighed. "We've all told Daddy it's not necessary any more, and rather undignified, at his age and weight, to keep donning cotton batting and less padding every year to go wriggling up and down that chimney. He could just appear at the door like every other homemade Santa in town.
"But it's a tradition, and Daddy just loves family traditions. They all do, Colbys, Janoses, Renaldis." Kendall's nostalgic look soured.
She ripped her martini, a big enough sip that the floating olive barged into those perfectly aligned Scarsdale teeth. "That's probably why so many of us intermarry; as kids we see each other early and often. Not always a good idea. That's my ex over there. Carlo. He prefers Carl."
Her nod singled out an attractive, dark-haired man in round, horn-rimmed glasses, a Renaldi who was neither olive nor Lombardy poplar tree. "Even after a divorce, there's no getting away from one another."
"Did you have children?"
"Not us. Not married long enough. But we would have, I suppose, if Carl could have torn himself away from his sports cars long enough."
Louie had paused before the faux fireplace, sizing up the wall-board chimney. Temple kept an eye on him, but her mind was meandering elsewhere.
"You know, Kendall, what you say reminds me of the Rothschild family."
"The Rothschild family? You know them?"
"Not the current generation, or their ancestors. But that's how they became the premiere banking family of Europe, despite being Jewish at a time when most Jews were confined to ghettos. The Rothschilds had lots of sons and daughters, and those had lots more sons and daughters. So the first cousins married each other when they grew up to keep the business in the family. Outsider sons-in-law were drafted into banking too."
"We're not that bad!" Kendall looked alarmed. "The Colbys, Janoses and Renaldis are hardly related. It's quite a tribute to Daddy, setting up shop, so to speak, with army buddies from a very different side of the social street way back in the sixties."