“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 Ito 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.
Chapter 47
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 long-distance 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 Kent 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 m�nage a 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 cliched 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.
And she knocked lightly on the steel door made to look like mere wood.