Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

“I’ve never been a true-blue eye-color person. Just sort of blah gray-blue.”

“Silver-blue. That’s the way they look in here.”

And maybe they did. Danny wasn’t beyond establishing a flattering color scheme that would paint Temple right into it.

She was wavering. This was a room where whatever a woman wore would slip down or ride up. Where a man didn’t fade into the woodwork but seemed like a Great White Hunter taking a break from the noonday sun.

Max could do this room justice in a New York minute.

Matt would take a while to get into the groove. But he would. And getting him there would be all the fun.

“Temple. We haven’t talked.”

She didn’t talk then.

“Since,” he added.

Since.

He’d made a proposal then. Literal. Marry him. On the maybe plan. Civil ceremony. Civil opportunity to undo it all. Not a bad scheme for an ex-priest hooked on a fallen-away Unitarian with a pretty serious ex-Catholic boyfriend.

She had a proposal too.

She reached up, cupped his face in her hands and pulled it down into a kiss that did justice to the room, to Danny’s romantic hopes, to her burdened heart, to Matt’s expanding psycho-sexual ambitions. She was the experienced one. She shouldn’t take advantage of his situation, his dead-serious feelings for her. He’d be so easy to seduce that he . . . was seducing her.

This felt like heaven. The sweet, seriously escalating way he kissed her, his hands clinging to her like she was his personal life raft. The hell with it! She just wanted to sleep with him. Full speed ahead. Damn the torpedoes. She felt him respond heatedly to her mouth, her hands. Want met need met love met sexual steam heat. Ah . . . the Perfect Storm.

She broke away. She did. Put a shushing finger on his lips.

Somebody had to run for safe harbor before the storm broke and drowned them all.

Afternoon Delight

Now that Temple’s personal life was in a sensual shambles, the art and magic extravaganza at the New Millennium was starting to pull together.

She may have enjoyed a brief encounter, an intimate interlude that had ended in a draw: she and Matt had both drawn back, shaky, from a brink that was still awaiting them with a sweet, edgy certainty. Hesitation only intensified the Danse Romantique.

But crass reality didn’t slow down life crises for a second.

The media, like a Roman coliseum audience having had a dead body thrown to it, had buzzed around like flies. Then they’d accepted the notion of a petty thief caught in his own inept web and moved on to other, more gruesome crimes. Hanging was so bloodless.

And Art Deckle’s rap sheet was too penny ante to present a serious threat to such a major event. He was a fruit fly caught on adhesive paper meant for a far larger pest.

Temple felt rather bad about that. She considered that if she really wanted to really feel bad, she’d make sure she and Max rendezvoused soon so they could seriously examine the state of their union.

But she didn’t feel quite up to that yet after her brief but warm encounter with Matt yesterday afternoon.

So, she lingered at home for a change, brooding over her four P.M. energy-boost coffee and yogurt smoothie while Kit padded back and forth from the living room to her office bathroom with an ex-actor’s heavy-lidded dislike of mornings.

“You must have been up really late,” Temple said as her bath-robed aunt sleep-walked past for the sixth time. “I’m sorry this New Millennium project has put the kibosh on our running around town and having fun.”

“Don’t be.” Kit paused beside Temple at the kitchen counter stool and yawned. “I have been running around and having kinky fun anyway.”

“But Vegas isn’t a place to see all by your lonesome.”

“Who said I was lonesome?”

“I thought we’d do all these girly things, like the hotel world-class shopping malls.”

“That will be fun.” Kit hopped up on the adjacent stool and poured coffee into a clean mug.

“There’s Splenda in the dish.”

“No thanks.”

“Cream or milk in the fridge.”

“No thanks. I want this cup as hot as hell, as black as sin, and as strong as the devil.” “Goodness, Auntie!”

“. . . has nothing to do with it, as Mae West remarked. I didn’t come in until four A.M., but you were slumbering like the babe you so clearly are in my memory. Glad I didn’t upset your dreams.”

“Four A.M., Aunt? What were you doing?”

“None of your business, Niece.”

“Have you picked up some gambling jones while I wasn’t watching? Mom would never forgive me.”

“Why should she? She never forgave me.”

“Forgave you for what?”

Kit’s pale blue eyes, now half open, eyed Temple over the mug’s thick rim.

“Let me count the ways. For being her younger sister. For majoring in something as impractical as theater, for leaving Minnesota when I was twenty-two, for never marrying, for actually getting acting jobs in New York, for never having kids, for becoming a writer on top of everything when I got too old to play thirty-somethings.”

“Kit. I thought you and mom were . . . okay with each other.”

“There were just two of us, Temple. Two sisters only a couple years apart in age. That’s an awful lot of sibling rivalry for one family. Didn’t you ever wonder why you were her fifth child?”

“That did seem like a lot of kids for Protestants in Minnesota, but my oldest brothers were already in high school when I came along and seemed more like . . . cousins or young uncles. Come to think of it, somebody did once suggest to me that my family was so large because my parents wanted a girl.”

“That may have been part of it, but who wouldn’t have wanted you?” Kit smiled fondly as she stroked Temple’s blond hair. “You were adorable. I was almost ready to escape back to New York with baby you. Yeah, I think Karen really, really wanted a girl. Because she was the older sister and she always thought they hadn’t raised me right. But then you turned out to love all the things I had. Theater. Writing. Fascinating guys who aren’t about to settle down to nine-to-five jobs and backyard barbecues. With lutefisk yet. Life isn’t fair.”

“Oh.” Temple had never seen her family like that, through the opposite end of a telescope, far and wee, as a whole unit of time and distance and many different personalities. She was that little red dot, there, on the fringes of the four boisterous older brothers and her harried parents. Like a little red wagon left out in the rain.

She was supposed to be Kit, only doing the right Minnesota thing: staying in the home state, marrying and having kids, driving a minivan, and not worrying about dead men hanging from bungee cords. Or what her magician boyfriend was really up to, or whether she should marry an ex-priest at a Las Vegas wedding chapel, maybe even with Elvis officiating. . . .

“Oh,” Temple said. “So that’s it. That’s the vague something I always felt. I was a disappointment.”

“Not to me, kiddo.” Kit chimed mug brims with her. “Just don’t go all Carpool Mom on me now. I was out until four. So? I don’t ask what your ex-live-in does when he comes creeping in at three A.M., do I?”

Temple felt her face flushing, not a good complement to ice-cool blond hair.

“Listen,” Kit said, “I am very carefully not prying into your love life, although your landlady has told me ‘The Tale of the Bed’ one floor up in lavish detail.”

“Things are a little . . . unsettled lately,” Temple confessed.

“No kidding.”

“So . . . what about your love life?”

Kit lifted her cup in a toast. “Viva Fontana!”