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stage a lot?”
    “Beauty pageants,” Rue said slowly, feeling as though she were relating the details of someone else’s life. “Talent contests. You name it, I was in it. It cost my parents thousands of dollars a year. I’d win something fairly often, enough to make the effort worth it, at least for my father.” She began to sink down in a split. “Press down on my shoulders.” His long, thin fingers gripped her and pressed. He always seemed to know how much pressure to apply, though she knew Sean was far stronger than any human.
    “Did you have brothers or sisters?” he asked, his voice quiet.
    “I have a brother,” she said, her eyes closed as she felt her thighs stretch to their limit. She hadn’t talked about her family in over a year.
    “Is your brother a handsome man?”
    “No,” Rue said sadly. “No, he isn’t. He’s a sweet guy, but he’s not strong.”
    “So you didn’t win every pageant you entered?” Sean teased, changing the subject.
    She opened her eyes and smiled, while rising to her feet very carefully. “I won a few,” she said, remembering the glass-fronted case her mother had bought to hold all the trophies and crowns.
    “But not all?” Sean widened his eyes to show amazement.
    “I came in second sometimes,” she conceded, mocking herself, and shot him a sideways look. “And sometimes I was Miss Congeniality.”
    “You mean the other contestants thought you were the sweetest woman among them?”
    “Fooled them, huh?”
    Sean smiled at her. “You have your moments.” The sweetness of that downturned mouth, when it crooked up in a smile, was incredible.
    “You knock my socks off, Sean,” she said honestly. She was unable to stop herself from smiling back. He looked very strange in his costume: the flowered loincloth, ankle bracelets made of shells and the short black wig. Thompson was the only one who looked remotely natural in the get-up, and he was gloating about it.
    “What does that mean?”
    She shook her head, still smiling, and was a little relieved when Denny knocked on the door to indicate that Jeri, the party planner, had signaled that it was time for their appearance. Karl lined the dancers up and looked them over, making a last-minute adjustment here and there. “Stomach looks good,” he said briefly, and Rue glanced down. “Julie and Megan did a good job,” she admitted. She knew the scar was there, but if she hadn’t been looking for it, she would have thought her own stomach was smooth and unmarred.
    After Karl’s last minute adjustment of the bright costumes and the black wigs, the six barefoot dancers padded down the carpeted hall to the patio door, and out across the marble terrace into the torch-lit backyard of the Jaslow estate. Rick and Phil loped past them on their way inside, burdened with the things they’d used in their act. “Went great,” Rick said. “That backyard’s huge.”
    “It’s probably called the garden, not the backyard,” Thompson muttered.
    Karl said, “Sean, is this the sort of place you grew up in?”
    Sean snorted, and Rue couldn’t tell if he was deriding his former affluence, or indicating what he’d had had been much better.
    Since Rue was shorter than Julie, she was in the middle when the three women stepped out across the marble terrace and onto the grass to begin their routine. Smiling, they posed for the opening bars of the drum music. Julie looked like a different person with the black wig on. Rue had a second to wonder if Julie’s own mother would recognize her before the drums began. The routine began with a lot of hulalike hip twitching, the three women gradually rotating in circles. The intense pelvic motion actually felt good. The hand movements were simple, and they’d practiced and practiced doing them in unison. Rue caught a glimpse of Megan turning too fast and hoped the torchlight was obscuring Megan’s haste. In her sideways glance, Rue caught a glimpse of a face she’d hoped she’d never