“Matt!”
“I lost my freedom and maybe almost lost my life, Temple. It’s made me think about what everyone else has been saying, one way or another.”
It was great that Matt was having an epiphany or whatever, but did he have to have it on her doorstep? In the hall? Alone? Well, with her?
Like Hamlet, he seemed inclined to soliloquize, which was fine because she was too shocked to say a word anyway.
“Who am I to be so perfect?” he asked.
She nodded. Perfection was a bad idea. Her neck seemed to be rubbing against his hand like a purring cat’s.
“Aren’t I setting myself up to judge others without knowing anything about what they face?”
Well, yeah . . .
“The Catholic Church does have the sacrament of what used to be called confession. Why can’t I err and confess it later, like everybody else? Why can’t I be human?”
Temple found her voice. It was either that or losing her composure completely.
“I don’t know. You’ve got a point. I’m very happy for you. Except that I personally wouldn’t want to be confessed by anybody as part of an ‘err.’ ”
“And I don’t think I could ever honestly regret anything that happened between us.”
Wow.
“Actually,” he said, explaining it to her as if she were a student in the class of Religious Guilt 101, “not doing anything confessable is a sin of hubris, when you think about it. Pride. One of the Seven Deadly Sins.”
“Isn’t . . . ah, lust one of them too?”
“But love isn’t.”
Temple shut her eyes. Do not go there. I can’t handle it.
Matt kept on talking. His voice sounded a lot closer. “I’ve tried, Temple. I’ve tried to see other women. Tried to see them as more suitable, more available than you. You know what?”
She shook her head, like she did in the dark when his radio show was on. He gave great voice.
“I’ve even discovered that each one has her own beauty, her own attraction. I’m honest enough with myself now to feel it, that elemental pull.”
Temple kept her eyes shut. Do not go there.
“But they’re not you. It’s as simple as that. It’s you. That’s all.”
And of course he kissed her, deep and long.
“Will you go away now?” she asked, as soon as she could speak, which was way, way too late.
Silence.
She kept her eyes closed.
“No,” he said.
Oh, my God.
Her blood was pounding so hard her ears were ringing.
When she opened her eyes, he was gone. She was alone.
But of course he hadn’t gone away, really, and she wasn’t alone, really. Her life with Max had just become way more complicated than even a master magician could handle. If he really wanted to.
The thought rankled. Maybe Max no longer wanted to enough. There was no maybe about Matt. He finally wanted to enough.
So what was she doing, standing alone on her doorstep, all revved up with no place to go?
Argghh! Down with men!
She’d probably think about it tomorrow. And no doubt fantasize about it tonight.
Anticlimax
Temple’s bedside clock read eleven-forty.
She could read the red LED figures even without her contact lenses in.
So. Was she going to play the good little saga heroine like Scarlett and wait until tomorrow?
Was she going to just lie here? Was she going to turn on the radio, which was tuned to WCOO like any pathetic Mr. Midnight fan, and soak up the voice that had been practically inside her ear longdistance for two whole hours?
No.
Hell, no!
After tossing and turning for exactly one hour and thirty-eight minutes . . . and driving Midnight Louie away from the bed to a sulking position in the living room, Temple got up.
Great. It wasn’t just human males she apparently was good at driving away. Now it was cats. Well, cat singular in this instance. Louie was a very singular cat and would not like being lumped in with his whole species.
Neither would Max, which was why she had to find out what was going on with him. Or wasn’t. Maybe it was her. She? Wotthehell, as mehitabel the alley cat had used to say decades ago. Temple was beginning to feel a tad alley-cat tough about her love life, or recent lack thereof.
She dressed in her stretch capris, clogs, and a loose black knit top.
Then thought about it.
And redressed. A good word, redress. That’s what she was looking for. Redress for a case of terminal neglect.
She switched to her high-heeled slip-ons with the corset-laced pewter vamp.
Vamp. Had it come to that? Trying to vamp her ex-live-in?
She added a ’30s-style trumpet skirt and a whisper of trashy Old Money, a newly chic skimpy sweater set with sequin trim.
The Las Vegas night was as warm as green-chili salsa. She paused to take down the Miata’s top, even though it was nearly midnight and convertibles were risky driving for single females.
But she wasn’t a single female! She was a significant other. Time to find out what was so Significant to her Other that he had totally missed noticing that she was up front and center of a news-making mess.
Not to mention totally failing to return her calls.
The warm night wind did its best to soothe the savage breast, only Max could do that so much better . . . if he’d only bother.
On the way to his house in an older subdivision, Temple reflected that she wasn’t being fair. She considered the fact that she had gotten used to Max as her omniscient protector. Everything he’d done that might have looked like a desertion to the outer world had been for her safety.
First and foremost had been his totally vanishing a year ago: from her life, from his job at the Goliath Hotel. Snap your fingers. And he was gone.
When he’d returned, he’d been forced to finally explain himself to Temple. He wasn’t only a world-class magician, he’d been an international counterterrorism agent even longer, ever since his first cousin Sean had been blasted to bits by an IRA bomb in a Londonderry pub. If a fortune teller had warned Temple years before that she’d one day be on the real-life fringes of events and personalities from an international espionage novel, she’d never have believed it.
Guilt had always made their relationship into a ménage à trois, secretly at first, and now openly.
Max felt guilty for loving Temple, and letting her love him, when his past made him a lifelong magnet for danger. Max felt even more guilty about dallying with Kathleen O’Connor twenty years ago while Sean was being blown to kingdom come.
When Kathleen showed up in Vegas a few months ago, she joined Lt. C. R. Molina in discovering that even the returned Max Kinsella was still the Invisible Man. So Kitty the Cutter started harassing Matt in Max’s place.
Which gave Temple a good dose of Max’s displaced guilt.
Now it was all moot . . . Sean, Kitty, Matt, whoever. Maybe.
So why had Max become the Invisible Man again? And why now, when things between them were stabilizing again?
She’d stuck by Max through the clichéd thick and thin, the fat and skinny. Now she was tiring of playing faithful female companion.
Maybe she’d become too dependent on his distant but infallible protection service. Maybe that’s what really irritated and scared her. Maybe she’d lost not just a lover but her guardian angel.
Temple parked the Miata several doors down from Max’s house.
Never do anything direct or obvious.
She put up the top and locked the car.
Never leave yourself or anything that belongs to you open and vulnerable.
She approached his door, checking for midnight observers.
Never assume you are unseen.
She went up the walk and faced the door with a huge sigh.
Never act impulsively. Emotions are not only stupid but dangerous.
&n
bsp; And she knocked lightly on the steel door made to look like mere wood.
Never blow your contact’s cover.
She would count to thirty and then leave. Temple waited. Fifty. Well . . . another twenty. Maybe she should knock again. Maybe she shouldn’t have knocked at all.
Seventy.
Going once, going twice, going, going . . . gone.
What an idiot! She sighed and turned away. The crack in the opening door acted as a period to her sigh.
She turned back.
“Temple!”
Max sounded, and looked, astounded to see her.
It wasn’t that she had not been here before, many times. But never unannounced.
“What’s wrong?” he asked at once.
“That was what I was going to ask you.”
“At midnight?”
“That’s when what’s wrong usually rankles the most.”
He glanced up and down the deserted street. “Better come in.”
At least he didn’t sound angry.
She moved into the crowded entryway.
The door closed and was locked. Max took her hand in the dimness and led her into the kitchen.
“What’s happened?” he asked as soon as the low-level fluorescent lighting made it possible for them to see each other.
“That was my question.”
She stared at Max, tall, dark, and leaner than ever. All steel nerves and tendons. His features were intense rather than softly handsome, but she’d never cared for the Rob Lowe type. His longish hair (was he cultivating a ponytail again, after the last one had been shot off?) was damp. It curved around his angular face like rivulets of India ink.
“Working out,” he said in immediate response to her look.
“In the middle of the night?”
“I’ve been working on the book, day and night. Just needed some exercise after all that intense sitting and thinking. Don’t you find yourself in the same boat?”
His smile grew wry, and then quizzical.
“Sometimes. But I don’t see you as an editorial slave.”
“I owe it to Gandolph,” he said. Fiercely. “Garry.”
She understood that Garry Randolph had been far more than Max’s magical mentor since his late teens. Garry had been the only father figure remaining to Max. The murderous events in Ireland had cut him off from his family, forever.
“Then it’s going well? You’re finishing it?”
Max nodded. Grimly. The effort was taxing. “Yes, I’m getting there.”
He tried to grin, but bit his lip instead. She understood, with relief. Max’s recent absence was due to his determination to do his dead mentor justice.
“Max, you don’t have to sweat all this writing stuff alone. That’s my kind of magic. I can edit it for you.”
“It has to be right before you see it.”
“Not really—”
“That’s the way I feel.”
Temple nodded. She was actually relieved to see Max caught up in a web of creative fervor instead of international politics. If he paid his debt to the past, they could get on with their future, especially now that their greatest threat was dead.
“I was worried not to hear from you, that’s all,” she said. “I couldn’t raise you on the cell phone.”
“Oh, that. I just locked myself away. Things started cooking . . . I lost track of time, everything.”
“I do understand. In fact, I’m glad we have the altered state of writing in common now. It’s the pits and the . . . oh, the—”
“The pinnacle?” he suggested.
“Right.” Imagine Max, the man of action, a midnight scholar. Poor guy. “Hey, do you have any food around here? I’m suddenly famished.”
She didn’t mention she hadn’t been able to eat any dinner, for some reason, some worry beginning with the letter M. And M.
Max loved the role of host, but now he glanced around the seriously enormous stainless-steel kitchen as if he’d never seen it before.
“I’ve really been playing the hermit. I don’t even know what I have in the house.”
“Yeah, and how do you get your foodstuffs anyway? Somehow I can’t picture you cruising an Albertson’s aisle with a shopping list in one hand and a Beretta in the other.”
“I don’t carry firearms. Well, almost never. And the groceries are delivered.”
“Of course. Since you’re so zoned out on writing fever, and I do understand, let me whip something up for you.”
She headed for the huge Zero King refrigerator-freezer that the house’s previous owner before the late Gandolph—Orson Welles, no less—had installed.
“I can’t speak for the supplies,” Max said hastily.
But the huge refrigerator was more fully packed than she’d ever seen it. Fresh berries, including expensive raspberries and blackberries. A whole shelf of exotic mustards. French bread. Lots of greens with unpronounceable names. She’d never seen such a well-stocked larder.
“Hey, even I can cook up something from all this,” Temple announced. “Something delilicious. Just sit down on the stool and I’ll cut and paste for once.”
He obeyed her, which was a first.
Temple pulled out rye bread so dark and meaty it was almost black, cheese, lettuce, an onion, olives, and a package of shaved roast beef lean enough to be anorexic.
“You look like you haven’t eaten in three days,” she said.
“I’ve been eating and drinking the book project night and day for I don’t know how long.”
“Then it must be going well.”
“Progress is being made,” he said guardedly. “You look pretty deli- licious yourself.”
Now, that was the Max she knew and loved.
“If you’ve been cave-manned away, you probably don’t know that I’m up to my old tricks.”
“Counseling Matt Devine?”
“No!” Temple almost sliced off part of her thumb with a wedge of cheese. “Haven’t you seen the papers? About Amelia Wong, the feng shui maven, hitting town for the Maylords furniture opening? I’m handling all that. Well, the Las Vegas end, anyway. Wong has a whole platoon of personal assistants and PR people and bodyguards.”
“The only papers I’ve seen are Garry’s rough draft. Bodyguards? Feng shui is dangerous? I thought it was some gentle domestic art, not a martial one.”
“It is. Speaking of gentle domestic arts, I not only can slice a mean sandwich, but I’ve been reading up on feng shui, and your entryway could use a whole lot better chi.”
“I could use a whole lot better chi.” Max began sampling from the bowl of washed berries she had plunked down on the black granite countertop in front of him, on which he had once plunked her down. Yum. “But you’ll do for now.”
She glanced up and found the heat back in his blue eyes. He had looked so uncharacteristically stressed when she’d arrived. Max had always led a superstrenuous life, but he had always managed to conceal the cost. Maybe he was opening up to her on a whole new level now, letting her see him sweat. Temple frowned. Max never sweated.
What was going on?
“So tell me the news I missed,” he said, visibly relaxing.
“Let’s see. I was in a group shooting spree, as shootee, not shooter. I found two dead bodies and have managed not to be bothered by Molina on a single one.”
“Shooting spree? You found? Two dead bodies?”
She basked in the comforting aura of Max’s astonishment and concern, not sure which was the more comforting. Max’s readiness to ride to her rescue or a certain pride that she hadn’t needed him on this one? Yet.
“Well, the first time I was part of a crowd that didn’t exactly find the body. We had it personally unveiled to us by Amelia Wong during her orange-blessing ceremony.”
Now that she had engaged Max’s interest and brought him out of the strange, distant mood she’d found him in, quirky explanations of tragedy suddenly couldn’t cut it.
“Oh, Max. It wasn’t just a dead bo
dy. It was . . . Simon. Simon Foster. Dead. In the Murano. At Maylords.”
None of those cold, hard facts meant anything other than Martian to him, but her emotional undertone did.
He was beside her, wrapping her in the damp velour of his workout sweats, to which she added her own long-delayed dampness.
He didn’t say or ask any more, just held her.
“And I’m not even cutting any onions yet,” she finally said. Thickly. Much later.
“I don’t like onions anyway. Skip them. And maybe you better put the knife down. It’s sticking into my ribs.”
“Oh!”
Max removed the long sharp knife from her fingers and took over slicing the bread.
“There’s an open bottle of wine in the chill compartment,” he said. “Very red, very dry, and very expensive. French, of course. You pour the wine, and I’ll cut the cheese.”
She laughed, shakily, at the allusion to her reckless knife wielding, and did as he suggested.
French wine always made her lips pucker, but sipping it felt virtuous. Maybe it was like communion wine. Too austere to be a sin, not at all silky and sensual, like a white zinfandel or a merlot.
Max lifted her up onto the kitchen stool, reminding her of another man and another lift. Not good.
Then he smiled and linked arms and glasses with her and they drank that hokey old-movie way, together. Good.
“Tell me about it,” he said.
“Simon Foster is Danny Dove’s significant other. Was.” She sipped again, on her own. “I’d just met him at the Maylords opening.”
“Maylords is your account?”
“Right. Amelia Wong et al. is their guest guru for the opening week’s events.”
“And the Murano?”
“A door prize for the opening. It was orange.”
Max winced. Like Louie, he personified the sophistication of black, pure black.
Temple felt obliged to defend her client’s color scheme. “The whole week’s theme was . . . is orange. It’s the hot new merchandising color this year.”
“Louie must love that.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Black cat. Orange. Halloween.”
“I guess.” Temple felt misery descend on her like parachute silk, soft but engulfing and blinding, doing nothing to cushion the impact of landing on her own inadequate feet.
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