Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Her gray-blue eyes stared into his for a long moment. Then she stroked her forefinger across his lips, a tender gesture recalling their recent intimacies. Was it hello, or good-bye?

“Max will always be in trouble with someone,” she said finally. She produced a wry, sad smile. “Maybe me this time, if he’s been playing head games with Molina.” She frowned. “I may be conceited, but I just can’t see him stalking her under any circumstances.”

“She wouldn’t be convinced he was, though, without some grounds.”

“So. You understand what he’s up against.”

“I understand what he’s always been up against.” And that’s why you loved him, Matt thought. Love him.

It’s hard to compete with a martyr. To win Temple, Matt figured, he couldn’t do it over Max’s dead body, over his disgrace and fall. Somehow, he’d have to absolve Max and disprove Molina’s deepest convictions.

Or this ugly suspicion about Max, so wounding to a loyalist like Temple, would always lie between them.

Miracle Worker

“Is it all right if Aldo picks me up here?” Kit asked Temple at about six P.M. the next evening.

Her aunt was shifting her weight from foot to foot in her zebrawood-soled brocaded stiletto sandals like an antsy twelve-year-old.

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Well, you’re used to thinking of the Fontanas as a flock. Seeing just one at a time might be . . . overwhelming and confusing.”

“I’m not the one who has to be very sure about not confusing Fontanas,” Temple pointed out. Pointedly. “Where are you going tonight?”

“The Bellagio.”

“For dinner? That’ll cost Aldo a well-tailored Zegna arm, and probably a leg.”

“I’m worth it,” said Kit, ducking back into Temple’s office and its attached bathroom to finish her makeup.

Temple hoped that she would be that self-confident when she was sixty . . . in thirty years. Right now, the outlook was glum on all fronts.

The idea of Max was bitter in her mind. At best, he was brushing her out of his life. At worst, he was coming on to her, their relentless enemy. Maybe there was some ulterior reason for the good of mankind behind it. Even that idea left a sour taste in her mouth. She wished she’d kissed Matt last night. He’d looked so torn and worried and his mouth was always as clean and bracing as springwater to her.

At work, everyone connected with the White Russian exhibition was being regarded as an apparent thief-in-training. Temple’s guilty knowledge that innocents were suspected when she knew Max was the culprit was twisting her usually wrought-iron stomach into queasy knots. The media was all over the hotel and her and Randy. In fact, to avoid them snooping into their PR plans to accentuate the positive, Randy had ordered Temple to work from her home computer for a while.

Now, she’d barely settled in to craft totally unworkable press releases—how do you defuse a fatal fall and a stolen artifact in 150 words or less?—and Kit was preparing to exit, way too excited about her fling with Aldo to even notice that Temple was running on emotional empty, six quarts shy of hope.

Temple forced her depleted energy up forty revolutions per minute when the doorbell rang.

“Would you get that, hon?” Kit yelled from the bathroom. “I haven’t finished unpacking the bags under my eyes.”

“Hi!” Temple greeted Aldo, checking out his smooth, swarthy Italian hide for forty-something wrinkles. He didn’t look a day over thirty-two, but Mediterranean types aged well. “Kit’ll be right out.”

God! She felt like her own mother. She was the young chick here; Kit was, well, not acting her age.

“How is the family?” Temple inquired as she led tall, dark, and Fontana into the living room. The cappuccino color of his suit matched her sofa exactly, although the material was far better.

“Uh, do you mean the family, or the Family, Miss Temple?”

She felt like she’d never been trapped into making small talk with a single Fontana for so long before.

“I mean your terrific brothers. And I haven’t even been to the Crystal Phoenix in ages to see Nicky and Van.”

“Me, neither,” Aldo said, making ready to sit on her sofa.

“Wait!”

“What?” He slapped a hand to his inside breast pocket. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing . . . worth, ah, a sidearm extraction. It’s just that you’ll get black Midnight Louie hairs all over that pale linen suit.”

“Whoa! You mean I am trespassing on the Top Cat’s territory here?”

“Sort of.”

Temple decided not to mention that Kit had been sleeping there lately . . . when she was home before four in the morning. Temple never thought she’d be the one to uphold the Barr family standards for discreet behavior.

Aldo, perhaps as uneasy as she was, began pacing. Although he wasn’t as tall as Max, he was still way too tall to pace in a room this size.

He stopped by the French doors to eye the petite balcony. “Cute place.”

“Thanks.” Temple felt like a Lilliputian being visited by a rod-packing Gulliver.

“Sorry!” Kit clattered out over the hardwood floors, looking as breathless and perky as a sixteen-year-old. “I’m ready now.”