BWAH!

I still regret not staying the night, though. He had his uses.

connie, since I have spent the past quarter century hiding from people in order to avoid being a problem from their past - which is also why I will never write the novel about the first 25 years, even fictionalised - that last line just made me so. damned. happy.

"Just one more time and we're done, love."

"Okay."

"I know I've said that before, but this time, I mean it. One more time, and you're off the hook. Forever."

"Sure."

"Did you bring it?"

I know he thinks the smile is for him. It is, just not in any way that he'll appreciate. He never imagines the smile could be for me too. The smile deepens.

"Yes."

"C'mon. Let's go."

His eyes follow eagerly as I lean for the bag at my side. He doesn't watch my right hand, which reaches for the heavy gun on my lap.

"Sure."

It would even make me lose weight, the chance to appear at a Senate hearing as a character witness for him. "Why, yes, Senator, I was Mr. X's lover in college. I can definitely testify to his, ahem, moral character."

Heh.

ita, that's a compelling read, but I can't place what's about to happen. Is she an assassin? For some reason, I'm reading it as a sort of "La Femma Nikita" deal.

She's going to kill him to make sure it's the last time.

Last time of what is less important.

It has a nice illicit feel to it. I think what made me go all "La Femme Nikita" on it was his line about "you're off the hook".

Aha! Still batting a thousand in the review department. From the Denver Post:

"The Famous Flower of Serving Men," by Deborah Grabien (St. Martin's Minotaur, 213 pages, $22.95)

When British director-producer Penny Wintercroft-Hawkes is bequeathed a London theater by a French aunt she scarcely knew, as well as the funds to renovate it, she is elated, as it will give her acting company a permanent base and a chance to branch out a bit. Of course, there turns out to be a catch: The theater is inhabited by a vengeful ghost from medieval times determined to right some ancient wrongs. Penny and her boyfriend, folksinger Ringan Laine, realize they have to lay this desperate spirit to rest before they can get on with their lives, and they set out to learn exactly who their ghost is and what her sad history might have been.

The history that Penny turns up goes back to the Peasants' Rebellion of 1381, an event that predated the Victorian-era theater by centuries. But the building stands on the former site of a prison in which inmates were burned alive during the fire set by the peasants, and not only the theater but the whole neighborhood is still haunted by that terrible event. The story is nicely creepy, with the darkness balanced by its cheery portrait of bright, talented young urbanites.

I know what I need to write now I think...it's hard for me to actually do it. Because what if my research isn't any good and it can't happen that way, and only a moron would believe it? What if this? What if that? What if my characters are like when kids play with action figures?