Life Is A Beach (Mills & Boon Silhouette): Life Is A Beach / A Real-thing Fling (5 page)

“Next week! What do you mean, next week?”

“I have to process your application. I need to check out references, edit the videotape—”

“You need to find me a wife,” he interrupted.

Her chin shot up. “That’s exactly what I’m planning to do. And if you’ll stop by the office tomorrow, I should have my psychological profile forms back from the printer. You’ll need to fill one out.”

“Psychological profile?”

“I’m a psychologist by training. The profile is something new that I’ve added to Rent-a-Yenta for the betterment of our services.”

“All right, all right. I’ll fill out the form. But what am I supposed to do between now and the time you set up my first date?”

Karma looked at him. She looked at the water and the sunset and the boats out on the bay. She looked back at Slade and said the first thing that popped into her head.

“You
could have your chakras read,” she said.

H
IS 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.