Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

She understood why. “You’re welcome.”

Pinning parts of their salads with the fork tines was a good way to not look at each other and carry on an abbreviated conversation.

“Matt sounds like a solid guy,” he said.

“He is.”

“He must have a hell of a backstory.”

“So did you, it turns out,” she said.

“He knows … what … about me?”

“Pretty much everything.”

Silence. “It’s a bit numbing that my replacement knows more about me than I do.”

“Nobody could replace you, Max,” Temple said wryly.

“Now eat your salad and listen,” she continued. “You were gone the first time for almost an entire year with no word. Matt is the most … genuine guy in the world. Way too nice for his own good, but I’ve brought him around to reality some.” She couldn’t help smiling. “You’re a hard act to follow, but he can do it. I love him. We’re working on getting married in a way that will satisfy two geographically and culturally different families. I loved you, but even you finally made me see we couldn’t live with all the kickback from your secret life. I’m not going to let you flail around alone, not knowing anyone now, here or anywhere, who knows anything about you but enemies.”

His fork had been poised over the salad for a long time, and now he put it down for a hit of the second double whisky. She’d quoted his phone-call words almost exactly, but she could see he couldn’t quite place them.

I don’t know anyone now, here or anywhere, who knows anything about me but enemies. They tell me my name is Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella.…

“So, Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella,” she went on, “since you’ve still got enemies and I’ve still got unanswered questions that effect me and mine, including Matt, and there are still unsolved Synth-related deaths out there and signs that some IRA rogues are aiming their sights on Las Vegas, and since Lieutenant C. R. Molina is still suspicious of you and me and the Circle Ritz palm tree, it’s to my advantage to shake the cobwebs out of your head and get you on the road to your real future life, without me.”

He just stared at her for a few moments. “That sounds like it would be a damn shame.”

“And no flirting, no Irish charm, no inveigling, seducing, or magic tricks.”

He shrugged. “I don’t feel in the mood for any of those things. It’s funny. I felt better, more in control, when I was on my own, almost, running for my life, in Europe, anyway. Ireland got … out of control. Yet here in Vegas, where I loved, lived, and almost died, I seem to feel lost, out of steam.”

And Temple could, and would, use that.

I’ve got a case of amnesia where all I’m remembering is a bit about the IRA, a dead woman named Rebecca or a possibly live one named Kathleen.…

“What’s this about a ‘possibly live … Kathleen’?” she asked.

“Did I say that? On the phone?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe something like that.”

“That. Exactly. You think I’m going to forget any words from a ‘possibly dead’ man?”

“You’d given up on me. What a bummer to have me show up again.”

“I was never really sure you were dead, Max. Maybe years from now, I’d believe it. You don’t die easy.” Temple grinned. “Oh, how I wish I could tell Molina.”

“Not good to tell anyone, but I suppose you can’t keep things like me from the fiancé.”

“No.”

“Where is he?”

“Out of town for a couple more days.”

“I always have this good timing?”

“Yup. Your timing is annoyingly impeccable. Years of being a magician, I guess.”

The appearance of the attentive waiter struck Temple with a fresh little jolt each time tonight. Overhearing must be avoided. She eyed the surrounding diners and met Max’s eyes returning from the same mission.

Their massive steak platters were still sizzling before them, accompanied by huge-handled steak knives.

“Nice of the staff to arm us,” Max said. “I could have used these last week. If the sight of blood disturbs you, I warn you this will be really rare.”

She thought the sight of blood would disturb him, but Max had obviously put the raw details of the shootout in Ulster behind him. Maybe he felt in limbo because he was busy burying the recent past and trying to grasp the present. As for any future, forget it.

Steak required a lot of attention to eat, and that’s what they did. Temple’s side of black truffle–creamed spinach made the vegetable almost like dessert, and Max had both the Potatoes Romanoff and baked. He’d always been steel-spring lean, but now he ate like a starving vampire drank.

“So,” he asked, after the waiter had removed their empty platters, plates, and drink glasses. “Where are you planning to park me, or should I just get a room at the … Goliath, was it? See if anybody there remembers me?”

“Negative,” Temple answered with emphasis. “Remember, you have a house here. Seeing it might jog your memory. No reason you can’t move right in. I planned to take you on a tour of the place after dinner.”

No reason not to move in, she thought—except it might be haunted … by an unidentified stalker who’d shredded Max’s wardrobe and also speared an illegally present Molina, or maybe by Garry Randolph’s real ghost this time. There was nowhere else to park Max for tonight, though.

“Are we having dessert, or what?” she asked, hoping for more pleasant topics.

“How about Baileys Irish Cream and coffee while I tell you about Kitty the Cutter?”

“My favorite after-dinner combo,” Temple said, with a lemon twist in her voice. “Depressants, stimulants, and psychopaths.”

Max laughed for the first time and signaled the waiter. When they were ensconced behind small crystal liqueur glasses and full cups of coffee, he began.

“The long and short of the matter is that Kathleen was always a rabid IRA agent, even after the peace. She raised gun money from wealthy men who sympathized for the cause from Europe to North and South America.”

“Whoring for the homeland? We’d figured that out before you left.”

“Not why. She’d had a … rough upbringing. Ireland was always poverty-stricken with few natural resources and no competitive living wage until the very recent technological revolution. The wrongs against the Irish are long and many and bitter.”

“Then you and your naive cousin were just practice, early in her career?”

“Something like that.” Max downed the dainty liqueur glass of Baileys in one gulp then concentrated on the coffee.

“What’s this ‘dead woman named Rebecca’ have to do with Kathleen?” Temple said.

“I said that in the phone call? Or, more improbably, you remembered that?”

“I tend to remember every damn word from a ghost. It’s my job to know about everything and remix it into something else. Rebecca?”

“A literary reference.”

“Oh. That Rebecca, the literal femme fatale from the Daphne du Maurier novel of the same name. I devoured that book in eighth grade. I wanted to rekill that lying, manipulative, unfaithful Rebecca and marry Maxim de Winter.”

He stared at her. Maybe it was her rerun of childish but uncharacteristic venom or … oh, right. Wrong! Max de Winter. Temple had just confessed that her preadolescent self wanted to marry a tall, dark, mysterious but tormented man named Max.

“That was just an old, outdated book,” Temple explained in unseemly haste, although she considered Rebecca a timeless classic. “A lot of forties mystery novels featured murderous, manipulative women from hell. Probably a ploy to get women back out of the workforce after World War Two.”

He laughed again and shook his head, hiding his weary eyes behind a forked hand. “Your mind jumps around like a knight on a chess board. So one minute you’re a murderous romantic, and the next you’re a feminist?”