Carole Douglas - Cat in a Red Hot Rage

“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."

“The civil and religious wrongs that created this rebellion over five hundred years ago still persist." The elderly gentleman set his teacup down on its saucer with almost supernatural quiet.

“Yes. But they modify. As do we. As for this former IRA agent you seek . . . I've heard of Kathleen O'Connor. Everyone has. She left very little trail. I take it, from your sparse hints, that you have evidence that she died in the U.S., unnoted. I'm not surprised. She was a legend here. Legends should die somewhere quiet and far away, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in South America. From what I've heard, she was an angry, beautiful woman, an effective agent, and a terrorist who would never give up the fight even when it moderated."

“Yeats and Maude Gonne."

“What?"

“The great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, loved a beautiful Irishwoman, Maude Gonne. But Maude was fiery, totally committed to revolution. She became the Cause. She had no time for beauty or love. Or poetry or Yeats. He mourned her before she was dead, because she was dead to any man in her passion for the motherland."

“Your Kathleen O'Connor could be such a one." Kelly handed over the copy of a disappointingly slim dossier. "Where is she now?"

“In a grave in Las Vegas under a simple headstone with her name and date of death. No one knew her birth date.”

“Why track a dead woman?"

“A dear friend of mine suffered much because of her for many years. It's an obligation."

“And he? Dead too?”

He hesitated. "You might say that I'm on a mortuary mission, Mr. Kelly. I want to dig up this Kathleen O'Connor's history. I know her future and her fate. I want to know her past and the making of her. For my . . . lost friend's sake."" 'You are old, Father William.' "

“Ah, the Irish. Always with the poetry. Lewis Carroll was old and still photographed lovely girl-children like Alice Liddell who'd inspired Alice in Wonderland decades earlier. Was this eccentric bachelor genius, or a repressed pedophile? Today's world allows for many divergent interpretations. I seek my own Alice who went down the rabbit hole: Kathleen O'Connor, before she was IRA, when she was the child of an Ireland that had never been for centuries."