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 neededsome 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 deli-licious. 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 body. 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.