Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

Neither would Max, which was why she had to find out what was going on with him. Or wasn’t. Maybe it was her. She? Wotthehell, as mehitabel the alley cat had used to say decades ago. Temple was beginning to feel a tad alley-cat tough about her love life, or recent lack thereof.

She dressed in her stretch capris, clogs, and a loose black knit top.

Then thought about it.

And redressed. A good word, redress. That’s what she was looking for. Redress for a case of terminal neglect.

She switched to her high-heeled slip-ons with the corset-laced pewter vamp.

Vamp. Had it come to that? Trying to vamp her ex-live-in?

She added a ’30s-style trumpet skirt and a whisper of trashy Old Money, a newly chic skimpy sweater set with sequin trim.

The Las Vegas night was as warm as green-chili salsa. She paused to take down the Miata’s top, even though it was nearly midnight and convertibles were risky driving for single females.

But she wasn’t a single female! She was a significant other. Time to find out what was so Significant to her Other that he had totally missed noticing that she was up front and center of a news-making mess.

Not to mention totally failing to return her calls.

The warm night wind did its best to soothe the savage breast, only Max could do that so much better … if he’d only bother.

On the way to his house in an older subdivision, Temple reflected that she wasn’t being fair. She considered the fact that she had gotten used to Max as her omniscient protector. Everything he’d done that might have looked like a desertion to the outer world had been for her safety.

First and foremost had been his totally vanishing a year ago: from her life, from his job at the Goliath Hotel. Snap your fingers. And he was gone.

When he’d returned, he’d been forced to finally explain himself to Temple. He wasn’t only a world-class magician, he’d been an international counterterrorism Kent even longer, ever since his first cousin Sean had been blasted to bits by an IRA bomb in a Londonderry pub. If a fortune teller had warned Temple years before that she’d one day be on the real-life fringes of events and personalities from an international espionage novel, she’d never have believed it.

Guilt had always made their relationship into a m�nage a trois, secretly at first, and now openly.

Max felt guilty for loving Temple, and letting her love him, when his past made him a lifelong magnet for danger. Max felt even more guilty about dallying with Kathleen O’Connor twenty years ago while Sean was being blown to kingdom come.

When Kathleen showed up in Vegas a few months ago, she joined Lt. C. R. Molina in discovering that even the returned Max Kinsella was still the Invisible Man. So Kitty the Cutter started harassing Matt in Max’s place.

Which gave Temple a good dose of Max’s displaced guilt. Now it was all moot … Sean, Kitty, Matt, whoever. Maybe.

So why had Max become the Invisible Man again? And why now, when things between them were stabilizing again?

She’d stuck by Max through the cliched thick and thin, the fat and skinny. Now she was tiring of playing faithful female companion.

Maybe she’d become too dependent on his distant but infallible protection service. Maybe that’s what really irritated and scared her. Maybe she’d lost not just a lover but her guardian angel.

Temple parked the Miata several doors down from Max’s house.

Never do anything direct or obvious.

She put up the top and locked the car.

Never leave yourself or anything that belongs to you open and vulnerable.

She approached his door, checking for midnight observers.

Never assume you are unseen.

She went up the walk and faced the door with a huge sigh. Never act impulsively. Emotions are not only stupid but dangerous.

And she knocked lightly on the steel door made to look like mere wood.

Never blow your contact’s cover.

She would count to thirty and then leave. Temple waited. Fifty. Well … another twenty. Maybe she should knock again.

Maybe she shouldn’t have knocked at all.

Seventy.

Going once, going twice, going, going … gone.

What an idiot! She sighed and turned away. The crack in the opening door acted as a period to her sigh.

She turned back.

“Temple!”

Max sounded, and looked, astounded to see her.

It wasn’t that she had not been here before, many times. But never unannounced.

“What’s wrong?” he asked at once.

“That was what I was going to ask you.”

“At midnight?”

“That’s when what’s wrong usually rankles the most.”

He glanced up and down the deserted street. “Better come in.” At least he didn’t sound angry.

She moved into the crowded entryway.

The door closed and was locked. Max took her hand in the dimness and led her into the kitchen.

“What’s happened?” he asked as soon as the low-level fluorescent lighting made it possible for them to see each other.

“That was my question.”

She stared at Max, tall, dark, and leaner than ever. All steel nerves and tendons. His features were intense rather than softly handsome, but she’d never cared for the Rob Lowe type. His longish hair (was he cultivating a ponytail again, after the last one had been shot off?) was damp. It curved around his angular face like rivulets of India ink.

“Working out,” he said in immediate response to her look. “In the middle of the night?”

“I’ve been working on the book, day and night. Just neededsome exercise after all that intense sitting and thinking. Don’t you find yourself in the same boat?”

His smile grew wry, and then quizzical.

“Sometimes. But I don’t see you as an editorial slave.”

“I owe it to Gandolph,” he said. Fiercely. “Garry.”

She understood that Garry Randolph had been far more than Max’s magical mentor since his late teens. Garry had been the only father figure remaining to Max. The murderous events in Ireland had cut him off from his family, forever.

“Then it’s going well? You’re finishing it?”

Max nodded. Grimly. The effort was taxing. “Yes, I’m getting there.”

He tried to grin, but bit his lip instead. She understood, with relief. Max’s recent absence was due to his determination to do his dead mentor justice.

“Max, you don’t have to sweat all this writing stuff alone. That’s my kind of magic. I can edit it for you.”

“It has to be right before you see it.”

“Not really-”

“That’s the way I feel.”

Temple nodded. She was actually relieved to see Max caught up in a web of creative fervor instead of international

politics. If he paid his debt to the past, they could get on with their future, especially now that their greatest threat was dead.

“I was worried not to hear from you, that’s all;’ she said. “I couldn’t raise you on the cell phone.”

“Oh, that. I just locked myself away. Things started cooking … I lost track of time, everything.”

“I do understand. In fact, I’m glad we have the altered state of writing in common now. It’s the pits and the … oh, the-” “The pinnacle?” he suggested.

“Right.” Imagine Max, the man of action, a midnight scholar. Poor guy. “Hey, do you have any food around here? I’m suddenly famished.”

She didn’t mention she hadn’t been able to eat any dinner, for some reason, some worry beginning with the letter M. And M.

Max loved the role of host, but now he glanced around the seriously enormous stainless-steel kitchen as if he’d never seen

it before.

“I’ve really been playing the hermit. I don’t even know what I have in the house.”

“Yeah, and how do you get your foodstuffs anyway? Somehow I can’t picture you cruising an Albertson’s aisle with a shopping list in one hand and a Beretta in the other.”