Unknown - 19_Cat_In_A_Red_Hot_Rage

“Matt, I wanted to celebrate Electra’s exoneration by having her marry us in the Lovers’ Knot.”

“A civil ceremony? You’re sure?”

She could hear his voice weighing what her decision really meant. Was it a stopgap, an easy out, as he had proposed? With divorce always an option. Or was it a first step?

“But now I’ve changed my mind. Let’s not distract anyone from Kit and Aldo. They’ve never been married.”

“Neither have we,” he pointed out.

“Yes, but we’re young. Anyway, the reaction to Kit and Aldo tonight had me rethinking things. We should visit Chicago and Minneapolis and meet the folks, so they don’t feel hurt by a sudden announcement from far away.”

“Whew,” Matt said. “My mom would freak at the idea of a civil ceremony.”

“My mom wouldn’t. I could get married in a Quonset hut beside a swamp by a swami. Unitarians are highly inclusive. She won’t even mind my marrying a Catholic. She will freak atthe idea of my marrying someone she doesn’t know. Or hasn’t met.”

“And my cousin Krys—”

“Yes? Boy or girl?”

“Girl. First year of college.”

“Ah. First crush too, huh?”

“You sure you want to involve families? They’ll try to tell us what to do. And anything we do won’t appeal to someone on one side or the other.”

“Weddings are always like that, from what I’ve seen. That’s why we scout the territory first. To figure out if they’ll make a later ecumenical church wedding too divisive to handle.”

“If we’re making a pilgrimage to the old folks at home, why even come back and get a civil marriage here?”

“To show them we’re serious. Otherwise, they might raise holy hell. Ask us to wait forever. Decide to hamstring us by insisting on a religious ceremony they know the ‘other side’ can’t stomach.”

Matt eyed her with mock suspicion. “You know a lot about tribal behavior in the matter of weddings. I’ve officiated at many, and your low opinion of relations between families at such times is terrifyingly accurate. Like the unlamented but still-not-late Elmore Lark, do you have a few weddings of your own under your belt?”

“Always a bridesmaid, never a bride,” she said lightly. “But I took notes.”

He tightened his arms around her. “I want to have a church wedding, I want you to be a bride, to watch you coming down an aisle toward me looking like an angel, to take you to a hotel room after and seal the ceremony and the sacrament in bed all night.”

He made a honeymoon sound so sexy, so seriously sexy, that Temple felt her knees get watery. He made being married sound like living in officially sanctioned sin. She could hardly wait. This boded well for them not wearing out their passion.

Their kisses grew so warm that Temple couldn’t take the heat. Max had been sexually superb from a skill standpoint, but Matt’s innocent intensity pushed her emotions as well as her body to a climactic peak. Sometimes it scared her, feeling these new depths in herself.

She kissed him lightly and pulled away to speak again. Lightly. “It all sounds so old-fashioned. Will your church expect me to wear off-white?”

His grip tightened. “Hardly. We’ve been winking for years at couples who rent separate apartments a few months before the wedding, as I was reminded recently.”

“But you’d still be living in sin after a Lovers’ Knot ceremony?”

“Semi-sin,” he told her, smiling. He had a hard time discussing sin with her. “Some devout Catholics cleave to all the traditional rules, and some devout ones veer far from them, all in the name of God and the good of humankind. I went to seminary to learn how to be a priest. Maybe I needed to go to bed to learn how to be a husband.”

Temple laughed. “I know a Unitarian minister who would say you were self-justifying.”

“Really, though? Are you sure about these two-tiered wedding plans?”

“Why wouldn’t I be sure?”

Matt was silent for a bit. “You haven’t had a chance to—”

“To say good-bye to Max? I can’t say I won’t always wonder what happened to him, but I don’t need to close one book to start reading another. Life is like that. No neat answers. We just go on. Besides, if Max is out there to be found, Molina will find him. Some way, someday.”

Matt laughed in his turn. “There’s a match made in hell.”

He turned Temple to face him, pulled her close again. “So if we make a couple trips north first, then have a pre-wedding at the Lovers’ Knot at some point, when do we schedule the formal wedding?”

“When my miserable, messed-up hair has all grown out in its natural color again. I am not going to walk down any church aisle with a dye job on my hair instead of my shoes.”

Matt was laughing when he kissed her, and then they were too busy again to laugh.

One of the cats outside wailed like a banshee in the dark. Temple hoped it wasn’t Irish. Or Midnight Louie, registering his opinion of their plans. He was sure to have them, and make them very well known. In his own good time.

Chapter 64

You’ll Take Me Home

Again, Kathleen

The man was portly and in his fading sixties, with still a certain flair to his expression and his voice, but moving deliberately, and perhaps heavily, as though burdened.

He lowered himself onto the leather-upholstered chair before the desk and sighed unconsciously at taking the load of himself off his burdened feet.

All in all, he was the kind of man easily overlooked in a crowd: travel-wrinkled suit, more bags under his eyes than he probably had brought across the Atlantic with him.

He offered his passport over the desk to the younger, nattier man who sat behind it. Draped windows framed a misty day and the smoke-blackened walls of stately buildings from the last two centuries.

A teapot whistled faintly from an office kitchen a decent distance away. The sound was both shrill and alarming, and somehow comforting.

In the British Isles, tea was the soothing social drug of choice. John Kelly took the passport. He was an assistant to the undersecretary to the U.S. Consul-General in Northern Ireland, and the stately buildings outside the windows of Danesfort House were in Belfast.

“You look as if you could use a spot of tea, sir,” he suggested to the visitor.

“I’ve just hopped the Atlantic. A bit confining for a lot of time for a man of my age and heft.”

“You should have decompressed in a hotel room.”

“Despite my condition, I’m eager to get on with this . task.”

“Your phone call said something about wanting to track the trackless. Rather intriguing.”

“I’d hoped it seemed so. I’m after an IRA agent from, oh, fifteen or more years ago.”

“Ah.”

A fiftyish female assistant, with hair as gray as her severe tweed suit, had arrived with a silver tea service. For a few moments liquids poured while utensils and china clinked.

When she left, the two men eyed each other through expression-concealing curtains of steaming tea. They sipped as cautiously as they talked.

Kelly spoke first. “Your name is apparently still potent in State Department circles, although no one would say why.”

“That is how it should be, in an ideal world.”

“Hmmm,” Kelly said. “This world is seldom ideal, but the Irish ‘troubles’ are now a cautiously optimistic mark on the global hot-spot map.”

“Is it true? Have 9/11 and the Mideastern terrorists so upped the ante on mass terrorist destruction that the Irish rebels have lost heart?”

Kelly templed his fingers. “In a post-falling-twin-towers world, yes; mere political-religious Western anarchy pales by comparison to Mideastern political-religious violence. Of course, unrepentant IRA holdouts still wreak some havoc, but the mainstream IRA has no stomach for pub and bus bombings now. I give them credit for that. They’ve seen the true and vicious face of modern terrorism, and they don’t want to be on that Most Wanted list.”