Free How to Murder the Man of Your Dreams by Dorothy Cannell Page B

was fanning herself with her hand. “Any fears of over-exposure?”
    The month of June appeared on screen. It featured a glistening Karisma stepping out of a swimming pool in a strip of bathing trunks that molded itself to his incomparable proportions.
    “You are not concerned”—Ms. Richards tore her attention from the calendar image and returned to her guest and the viewing audience—“that you are a passing sensation and that one day, perhaps sooner than later, you may be replaced as the king of the romance cover models?”
    The camera closed in, for the kill it seemed to me, on Karisma’s face. His response was the continental shrug and a smile that did not quite reach his eyes.
    Ms. Richards laughed, to indicate that she was teasing. “I understand you have a birthday coming up and, whilst thirty-four isn’t exactly over the hill, isn’t it possiblethat you may be passed over in favour of a younger man—with a new look—for the cover of
A Knight to Remember
, the eagerly awaited sequel to the late Azalea Twilight’s
Crossing the Moat
?”
    “What will be, so it is!” Karisma stilled my beating heart, with that continental throb in his voice and the smile that once more lit up his magnificent eyes. “I am here, I have a good time and lorve women. What more can I say? I do not speak English so good.”
    “You speak it a bloody sight better than most foreigners, my darling.” Mrs. Malloy directed a virulent glance at the door in blatant hope that Gerta had her ear pressed to the keyhole. Shame on her! She did not pale under her rouge when the au pair walked into the room.
    “Frau Haskell!” Gerta had flour all down her front and on the tips of the plait that looked as if she had been using it for a pastry brush. “You are wanted on the telephone.”
    “If it’s my husband, please tell him I will ring him back when”—I shifted my chair closer to the television—“when I have finished rearranging the furniture in here.”
    “No. It is a brigand …”
    “A what?”
    “A brigand, Lester-Smith.”
    “Bother!” My decision to go and speak to my fellow Library League member was made when Karisma vanished from the screen to be replaced by a dancing teabag with spider-leg eyelashes, stumpy legs ending in impossible red shoes, and a smile that went up or down as the puppeteer kettle pulled on the string.
    It wasn’t easy to come down to earth after the transcendent experience of being in the same room with the man of my dreams, but I endeavoured to pay attention to what Gerta was saying when I followed her into the hall and across the flagstones and square of Persian carpet to the telephone.
    “Frau Haskell, it was not my place to make a big stink bomb about what you choose to watch on television.”
    “You were quite right, Gerta, to monitor the children’s viewing.” I reached for the phone on the trestle table, but she got to it first and dusted off the receiver withher apron before presenting it to me—coated like a chicken leg in flour.
    “Then you don’t turn me out into the street?”
    I covered the mouthpiece with my hand. “Of course not.”
    “Then”—her smile filled up all her worry lines so that her face became plump and smooth—“I go back to the kitchen now, Frau Haskell, and tell the children the story about the old clockmaker and the snow elves, while I finish making my special beef stew—just how my wicked husband used to like. It is not easy for me, Frau Haskell, thinking of him in Putney with Mr. Meyers, both of them so laughing and so gay.”
    “Very difficult,” I said.
    “It is a small revenge that never again will Ernst taste my stew made rich and thick with gingersnaps.”
    Feeling my waist thicken as she bustled down the hall, I spoke into the phone. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Brigadier Lester-Smith—”
    “I do hope, Mrs. Haskell, that I’m not catching you at an awkward moment?”
    “Absolutely nothing that won’t keep.” I resolutely banished