Douglas, Nelson: Midnight Louie 05-Cat in a Diamond Dazzle

"Temple." He leaned forward to put his hands on her arms. "We've got lots to talk about. We can't possibly catch up on five months all at once."

"Not just months, Max, years! After you left, when Lieutenant Molina came around asking questions, I realized that I knew hardly anything about your past."

"That works both ways," he pointed out. "We did get carried away with ourselves."

"Me? You're saying I have a past worth exploring? Hah!"

"The past five months certainly sound eventful." He was smiling.

"Why is Lieutenant Molina so anxious to find you? And what about those men who--?"

Max's hands slid down her forearms until they enclosed her fingers. His touch was as warm as always.

If "cold hands, warm heart" was a truism, did "warm hands, cold heart" apply?

"Temple, that assault on you never should have happened. That's why I left, why I never contacted you, no matter how much I wanted to. My disappearing act was supposed to draw them away from you."

"Then you know who they are; you know why they want you."

"No." He considered. "I suspected that someone like them might be after me, that's true enough. I can even guess why, but I can't tell you. If you know anything, you're in danger."

"I'm in danger ignorant, too. I might as well know why."

Max shook his head, releasing her hands. "I can't say. It's not only my decision--and certainly not my inclination--to keep you in the dark, believe that. And I can't stay here right now to sort all this out."

"All what? Me? The condominium? The hotel casino murders? Who Jack the Ripper really was? Don't tell me you're confessing to all or any of the above?"

His features both softened and sharpened. All of his attention focused on her. "Exasperation is the last resort of the uncertain, Temple."

While she contemplated that, he reached out and drew her onto the sofa, into the lean-back corner with him, so she was tucked between the crook of his arm and his shoulder like a jigsaw puzzle piece slipping into its well-worn dovetail.

Tension evaporated.

"You're all that I care about," he said simply, "but unfortunately not all that I have to be concerned about."

Max sighed, which wasn't like the Max she knew, but then she had apparently never known the real Max (maybe the complete Max would be a better way to put it).

"I suppose I was naive," he said, almost to himself, and that didn't sound like the old Max either. "I had no business getting involved with you."

"Now's a great time to figure that out."

"With anyone, really. But you changed my mind--fast."

"I thought you changed me, and my life."

His arms tightened around her and he rested his head on top of hers. Their position gave Temple that same seductive, cozy feeling you get bundled up with someone you love on a toboggan, poised atop an exhilarating hill, on the brink of a thrilling but familiar ride. Toboggan rides, she reminded herself, hadn't done much for Mattie Silver and Ethan Frome.

"We may have made a fast merge on the highway of love, but it wasn't a whim," he said wryly. "And it wasn't undertaken lightly, by either of us. Remember how we exchanged our 'papers,' how we rigorously practiced safe sex for six months? We did everything right."

"I remember rigorous, and it certainly didn't feel like practice, or that safe, even if it was," she said, remembering also the sweet anticipation of sex in the slow lane. "We were so cute and quaint, kind of like in the Dark Ages, when engaged couples waited until they were married. It actually was a lot more exciting that way."

"We were responsible," he said. "We took care that we didn't hurt each other. Temple, I've been faithful. I haven't thrown that away."

"I've been celibate, too." A bittersweet thought clothed in ambivalence shrouded the naked truth.

Did her attraction to Matt in his absence add up to infidelity? Why did honesty so often unravel at the edges?

His embrace tightened. "Then there's nothing to stop us starting where we left off."

"Not exactly. There's nobody to stop us . . . except us. I tried not to listen to other people's doubts, but you were gone, and, after a while, I didn't have glib answers anymore."

"Maybe you shouldn't discuss me in absentia."

"Aha, so that's where you were all this time: off on a foreign junket in Absentia."

After a shocked moment, Max laughed, the free-wheeling spree of delight that always made her smile. She was smiling now.

He pulled her on top of him. "God, I've missed that."

"What?" Still smiling, and backsliding into that half-audible, almost-coy lover's Q&A session.

"My paprika girl." His big hand tousled her hair. "Always surprising, and full of spunk."

"Thank you," Temple said, as expected.

"I hate spunk," he answered with feeling, on cue.

And they laughed again.

Because they were back, in Max's Loring Park resident hotel, a quaint rambling old place painted ersatz-Victorian yellow, filled with actors and other artsy itinerants. They were on the lumpy living room sofa, while the small television set droned reruns of Mary Tyler Moore's old seventies sitcom, and she was playing Mary and he was Mr. Grant for an acerbic moment, and they were beginning to get very well acquainted indeed.

Temple couldn't say whether Max kissed her, or she kissed him, and that had been the way it had always been, too. And she couldn't say when it started or when it stopped, but they were still doing it when Midnight Louie rose and walked pointedly over their lower legs, all twenty-some pounds of him stalking indignantly off now that things had gotten mushy.

The cat's withdrawal brought her to her senses, or away from them. She pushed herself up and away, but slowly.

"What is it? What's really come between us?" Max asked.

"Time. Truth. It can't be the same, Max. It just can't. I'm not the same."

"Is it Devine? He's damn good-looking, and damnably nice. I can see--"

"No, you can't see. Not a thing." She put a hand on his shoulder, assuring, consoling. "Matt's not the threat you think."

"Why not? Is he married?"

"No, but he's not free."

"Then he's divorcing. ..."

"Not in the way you think."

"What way?"

"I can't say."

But she wanted to, wanted to explain why their association could look so romantic and be so platonic thus far, despite some fairly adolescent tangos in the dark. But she couldn't expose Matt like that. Max watched her with that patented judicious, astute Max look. They were so different, and so much the same.

"Divided loyalties." The ruefulness in Max's voice reflected his own acquaintance with such struggles of the conscience. "You can't betray a confidence. Your silence means you're committed elsewhere to some degree, Temple."

"So does yours."

They regarded each other sadly. Telling the truth, yet saying nothing.

Temple moved back to her side of the sofa; actually Louie's, but even he had walked out on this painful impasse. From the kitchen she heard the astounding sound of Free-to-be-Feline pellets being crunched. Either nothing else was set out to eat, or he was making an unprecedented statement.

"It's not Matt," she said finally, not expecting Max to believe her. "It's the mystery. We all have a right to our own mysteries, but yours are too deep. I have to wonder now if I've been misled. Taken.

Used."

Three little words, and she could see him conceal an internal wince at each one. He lashed out in turn, but not at her.

"Then it's that damnable police lieutenant Molina, planting poisonous seeds, but doing what?

Arresting me? No, not even if I walked up and held my wrists out for the cuffs. Because I'm not... guilty of anything arrest able. You're going to let some pathologically suspicious detective come between us?"