Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

“Nobody’s perfect.” Matt was looking down at her as if he didn’t believe that, as if he believed she was really, really perfect.

“I know I’m not. I’m confused. I’m a . . . worldly woman. I’d have an ex, that isn’t an easy, cut-and-dried thing, Matt. It’d be messy.”

“He wasn’t talking about you, Temple. He was talking about me. And I suddenly realized, in all my twisting and turning to do the one right thing, that I didn’t have to be perfect or do the perfect thing. That thinking like that was a kind of hubris. Selfish. That I only had to love you, as I have since almost the minute I met you, that I only had to want you, as I have since almost the day I met you.”

“What took you so long on the ‘want’ part?”

“So you were faster?”

“Oh, yeah. It was simultaneous, on my part.”

“Really.” He pulled her closer. “From my book, I understand that that’s the best way. Simultaneous.”

“Oh, Matt. There are so many ‘best ways.’ ”

“I want to have them all, with you.”

“Even if I’m not ready for marriage right out of the box?”

“I figured something else out, brilliant solver of other people’s problems that I am. If I do what’s best for you, I can’t hurt myself. I’ve been searching for some overarching spiritual love all my life. And it’s there. In other people. Person. Don’t be guilty, Temple. I’ve wasted way too much of my life on that.”

He pulled her close enough that she could tug his tie loose.

He was undoing her back zipper, short as it was on her halter-top prom dress.

She was back there again, in Jon Bon Jovi prom night country, two American kids in the Heartland. A virgin again. Feeling true love again.

And having it all.

“I’ve always,” Matt said, his voice husky, “pictured us on this sofa.”

He swooped her down like a pirate, stripped her as slowly as a Latin lover, and took her to passionate heights she’d never imagined even in those wildest dreams. She hadn’t hardly to do a thing to aid and abet in unleashing years of self-denial, just be there and be willing to be swept away. The resulting emotional and sensual tsunami took their breaths away. He was the most perfect imperfect lover in the world and she wept with the joy of it.

They lay in Matt’s new bed in the heart of darkness inside the Circle Ritz.

“This is just us, isn’t it?” he asked.

Temple pillowed her head on his shoulder. His bare shoulder.

“Yes.”

“No . . . interference from what I was, you were?”

“No.”

“What we’ve figured out we want, what we need?”

“Yes.”

“Only us. Only tonight?”

“Yes.”

“And tomorrow?”

“Only us, only tomorrow.”

“Are you sure?”

Temple took a deep breath. Midnight Louie was the only sure creature she knew on the planet. People were a lot more handicapped. But she and Matt had come damn close to feline certainty.

“Yes.”

No wonder Scarlett had swooned before being swept up that fateful staircase, Temple thought. No way was tomorrow going to be just another day after a night like this.

Maxed Out

Max had literally hung himself out to dry on a line high above the light-stabbed dance floor far below. He balanced unseen in the dark, a wire walker who understood that he was seriously overextended. In all senses of the word.

To the audiences at Neon Nightmare, he was the Phantom Mage, the masked wall-walking, bungee-jumping illusionist who capered nightly above their sound, synthetic substance, and alcohol-dazed heads.

To the Synth, a group of disgruntled traditional magicians who hated those who revealed their tricks, like the Cloaked Conjuror, and who met in a maze of rooms burrowed into the nightclub’s pyramidlike structure, he was an ex–Strip magician who’d performed as the Mystifying Max.

To them, he was also a raw recruit, assigned to prove his loyalty by ripping off the art show at the New Millennium and bringing down the Cloaked Conjuror and his illusion-destroying show, a show repped by Max’s long-time love, Temple Barr.

And then he was just Max, up to his black turtleneck in a scheme with his mentor and partner in counterterrorism, Garry Randolph, to betray the Synth and uncover the web of international money laundering and mayhem they believed it fostered.

Somewhere in there, he’d hoped he had that relationship with Temple to preserve, for his own self alone, for the dream of having a personal life beyond his brushes with the Irish revolutionary Kathleen O’Connor, who had snagged his teenage heart while engineering his innocent cousin’s political death.

Kitty was dead now, but he was convinced her activities in Las Vegas had been part of a larger plot that extended to several unaccounted-for deaths in the past two years. Whatever had been, and was still going on, was big.

“Oh, what a complicated web we weave,” said Sir Walter Scott, “when first we practice to deceive.”

The Scottish poet had been right enough to remain quoted for the ages. Deception, like magical illusions, took practice. So did stealing rare art objects.