Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Topaz Tango

Temple cuddled closer, needing a romantic interlude after the anxiety and hurly-burly all around them.

“You’re gonna laugh,” he warned. “I knew I had to take charge and sling Wandawoman around like a seventeen-pound matador’s cape, all the while feigning passion. So . . . I imagined I was dancing with Kitty the Cutter.”

“What brilliant Method acting, Matt! No wonder you were so relentless, so powerful, so passionate. You were dancing with the Dev il. The classic attraction-rejection dance with evil incarnate. Kathleen O’Connor was a perfect embodiment of that.”

“When I let out my anger at Kathleen O’Connor for cutting me, in a way I became her. I felt the pent-up rage that makes a person so destructive. And, thinking about her attack, I realized for the first time, maybe because I’m different from then, because of, you know, us.”

Temple nodded. “Us” was a first and only sexual commitment for Matt, and it had been hard-won.

“This may sound sick.”

“The truth often can.”

“I sensed for the first time, thinking back as I had to, something sexual about her rage and her attack. I don’t think of women as sexual predators, but I believe she was.”

Temple nodded again, solemnly. “You were fresh out of the priesthood when you encountered her, so you didn’t get her underlying motives. I think you’re right. You remember the story of Max and his cousin Sean visiting Ireland as a high school graduation present?

“Yeah. Sad story. Could make a modern opera out of it. I get Max’s guilt. I’ve always understood that about him, even when he was being his most caustic. It must have been hard on you.”

“Only when he was in those Irish melancholy moods, and that was seldom. Max helped nail the bombers. He got revenge, for what it was worth, and went on to prevent a lot of awful acts of terrorism from happening. Sean’s loss was there, but it was old news. But I don’t think you understand just how innocent they were, those boys.”

“Catholic high schoolers? Back then? Sure. Trust me.”

“And eager. This was their first time unsupervised, in a foreign country during perilous times, and yet it all looked so cheery and all pub songs and ale and no one carding them. Kathleen O’Conner was older, in her early twenties. She was a woman, and the game the boys played competing for her was semiserious. They were virgins and here was a free woman who seemed to want to change that, and they’d be scot-free, never likely to see her again. No risk, all gain.

Max won, he thought. He didn’t have to be embarrassed about being a seventeen-year-old virgin ever again and his cousin Sean wouldn’t hold it against him that he’d gotten there first. That apparently literal roll in the hay saved Max’s life but cost him his peace of mind.”

“I know he came to believe that Kathleen was allied with the IRA and knew the pub would be bombed. What a sad, sick woman,” Matt said.

“He also came to believe that Kathleen knew Max would meet his cousin at that pub, afterwards. To brag a little, and celebrate. He believed that she picked him, and so picked him to live, so that his first act of love turned an act of trifling boyish betrayal into a mortal personal loss. That’s why I call her ‘Kitty the Cutter.’ She existed to mess up other people’s lives with whatever it took on her part, sex or violence.”

“You’re describing a psychopath.”

Temple nodded. “She tainted the lives of the only men I’ve ever loved.”

Matt was silent, accepting the simple truth of Temple’s love for both of them.

Then he sighed. “My God, I never thought I’d be glad someone was dead. Or that someone deserved to die, or to be stopped, anyway. Max was there? He was sure?”

“She was still chasing him, chasing his car on that demon’s motorcycle of hers. After all these years, she was furious that he was alive and happy and free of her. It was a single-vehicle accident. She gunned that motorcycle off the road into a fiery crash. He stayed around long enough to search for a pulse in her broken neck. There was none.”

They kept silent, their close embrace and mutual mood completely turned from triumph to a sober clinging.

Matt pulled Temple away to see her face finally, looking roguish, deliberately lightening the mood.

“Tragic story. Like I said. I got off lucky,” he commented.

“You mean the wound she gave you was only physical?” she asked.

“I mean I got away from that homicidal man-eater still a virgin.”

Temple laughed through the unacknowledged sheen of sorrow in her eyes.

She let herself be swept back into the arms of the sexiest pasodoble dude on the planet. Well, in Las Vegas, anyway.

Paso de Deux

In the Hummerbar, all heads turned as she entered, as if a prima ballerina had just spun onto the stage.

Disheveled, distracted, Revienne remained a femme fatale.

Max, meanwhile, calculated all the amazing coincidences that could have led so quickly and incredibly to their reunion. And if he could get her into bed tonight. He’s the knight-errant, after all, the guy left behind who soldiered on and caught up with the girl. He’s had a lot of pain, no gain, and he so needs a lay.

Does it always come down to this? Naked need? Probably.

In a vague sense, he understood what he needed more: Garry Randolph is the man who knows who Max is and why he ended up here in this condition, and what he really needs. But Garry is a figment now. Revienne is real, and she needs a martini.

“ Mein Gott, Michael! Those . . . monsters. They grabbed me off the street in Alteberg, held me overnight in a filthy, dark warehouse. Why? What have I done?”

Her gray eyes narrowed over her Gray Goose vodka gimlet. Nice combo. “What have you done?”

Not enough with you, lady.

That was the trouble with lust. It was utterly unreliable. Secret agents like himself must deal daily with the unreliable, yet must crave the reliable. That was a delusion. God, his left knee ached. The left knee of God. God must have had them, because so many of His devotees kneeled . . . .

Max didn’t believe in luck, in kneeling, in Gods who demanded both, or in good women who turned up fortuitously in bad places. Maybe he didn’t need to get laid that bad.

“Was that the village’s name, Alteberg?” he asked.

“Yes.” She gazed at him over the glittering rolled rim of her martini glass. “I’d gone out for breakfast. You were comatose.”

“Not like in the clinic.” He had dropped the Irish accent. Sounded like himself, whoever that self was.

“No, just from food and wine and . . . overstimulation.”

Her massage .

“You were dead to the world.”

All too much so.

She shrugged. She had wide shoulders for a woman. He didn’t find that unattractive. She must work out hard on her upper body strength. Why?

“That’s when you were kidnapped,” he prodded. “Do you know who? Why?

“No more than you do.” She waited.

He waited.

She ran the tip of her tongue over the cocktail glass rim.

The muscle in his right calf jerked. Overstimulated. The more seductive she was, the less his mind wanted her.

This was a game of cat and mouse. The roles hadn’t been assigned yet. He’d thought he’d needed to find her, to make sure she was safe. He’d thought he’d needed to find her, to prove he could. And he thought he’d needed to find her to seek shelter, to find out for sure if she wasn’t to be trusted.

Now it was all too easy. You’d think a man with a short-term memory loss and two bum legs would want it easy. But he didn’t. Hell, he was Irish. He knew that much. Some people thrive on adversity, and he was one.