during Operation Assassination.
Over the past months Eugene had moved into the Cabal with what appeared to be ease. Oh, sure, he was clearly Low Man on the Cabal Totem Pole, but he was accepted as one of them now, which meant he was dead to me.
He also kept trying to repair our friendship, but I wasn’t having any of it. In part because I couldn’t trust that he wasn’t trying to renew the relationship in the hopes of yet again using me as his excuse for when he went off to do the deed with Nathalie. Or even worse, for some new, nefarious Cabal plan.
“Hi, Kitty,” Eugene said. “It’s great to see you.”
“Yes.” Focused on keeping to the single syllables. I couldn’t get into trouble with those, could I?
Lydia nodded. “We need to get together and do a couples’ date sometime.”
My gaze traveled to Nathalie without benefit of my brain’s approval. “Ahh, sure . . .” My only other single syllable options were “No,” or “No way in hell,” neither of which seemed diplomatic in any way.
Jeff disengaged from Abner and Joker Jaws and rescued me. “We’d love to. We’ll need to coordinate schedules.” Jeff flashed his Happy Diplomat Smile. “Of course, it’s not appropriate to do so tonight.”
“Of course not,” Lydia said with a bob of her head. “Whenever it’s convenient for you, Ambassador.”
The Brewers stepped up and we were suddenly outnumbered two to one. Brewer and Armstrong had been having a lot of meetings with Jeff over the past months, and Jeff actually seemed to like Brewer. He certainly wanted me to like Brewer, though I’d resisted all the “couples date” ideas Jeff had forwarded. They did the manly handshake-hug-backslap thing and Jeff’s smile looked genuine.
Jeff had also tried to get me to hang out with Nathalie, but while she was, after Armstrong and Elaine, the least objectionable member of the Cabal to me, I couldn’t get past the adultery thing. I didn’t want to talk about her sleeping with Eugene, I didn’t want pretend I didn’t remember that she was sleeping with Eugene, I didn’t want to hear about why she was sleeping with Eugene, and I saw no way to avoid any of this if she and I went to lunch or tea or whatever. So whenever Nathalie tried to set something up, I had Pierre explain how busy, busy, busy I was.
“You’re a vision, Ambassador Martini,” Brewer said to me after he and my husband had finished being all Washington Gangsta.
“So are you,” Nathalie purred at Jeff.
My mind chose this moment to note that Lydia, like Nathalie, was giving my husband goo-goo eyes. Brewer was giving me an appraising up and down glance. Eugene looked bitterly at Jeff and Brewer, then shot me a Sad Panda look.
My mind chose this moment to query as to whether I thought Lydia was hitting on my husband, suggesting a foursome, or, just for grins and giggles, if perhaps she knew about Eugene’s affair and wanted to go for a Tri-Couple Tournament. My mind also wanted to know if the Brewers might be thinking the same thing. Sometimes I hated my mind.
Before I’d met the Cabal of Evil I’d never entertained thoughts like this. Sadly, so many of them had suggested so many different “fun” ideas during Operation Assassination that I now associated them equally with World Domination Dreams and Triple-X Porn.
While I wondered if brain bleach really existed, Eugene moped at me and Lydia and Nathalie continued to check Jeff out. Brewer continued to do the same with me while talking to Jeff about wine and how Christmas differed in D.C. from California—not as much snow in Brewer’s part of California was the shocking reveal. Jeff shared the equally shocking news that it was the same in our parts of Arizona and New Mexico. Wondered if they had some Bro-Coded Message thing going, or if they were both somehow enjoying this conversation.
Right before I was ready to call the Poofs and ask them to eat everyone, the evening got just that much better. Guy Gadoire and his husband, Vance Beaumont, moved into the salon and shoved Eugene aside.
Gadoire was a lobbyist for the tobacco industry. Vance spent his time lounging around in fashion-forward outfits ripped right out of the pages of GQ. Unlike Reader, he didn’t carry them off perfectly, but he made do. To say they weren’t my favorite couple was, potentially, the understatement of the year.
“My darling Missus Martini,” Gadoire said as he grabbed the hand