Until You

"I just told you," he said through his teeth, "I'm not interested in an autograph."

Miranda looked at him. "No?"

"No."

"What are you doing here, then? For that matter, how did you get in? No one's permitted backstage, Mr—Mr—"

"O'Neil," he growled. "O-apostrophe-N-E-I-L. Is that too difficult for you to remember?"

Nita laughed out loud. Miranda looked at her and smiled. Then she turned her back on Conor O'Neil.

"So," she said to Nita, "what do you think? Should we go to that party after the showing or... hey! Hey, what do you think you're doing?"

Conor's hand had closed tightly on her shoulder. He swung her towards him, fighting to control his temper.

"Maybe that act works with clowns like the guy who was painting your face," he said. His voice was soft and cold and as hard as the press of his hand. "Maybe it works with all the other monkeys who swing around after you."

"Let go of me!"

Conor's fingers bit into her flesh. "But I promise you, Miss Beckman, it sure as hell isn't going to work with me."

He took his hand from her shoulder and watched her face. It was hard to read, under all that gook, but she was shaken, he could tell. Well, hell, he was shaken, too. Losing control was never a good idea but who could blame him? Even from across the room, he'd known when she'd become aware of him and known, too, how readily she'd dismissed him as a man beneath her notice.

It was one thing to be treated rudely but to be treated as if he were something messy Miranda Beckman had found on the bottom of her shoe was something else again.

She was beautiful, yes, and beyond his wildest imaginings. She was also everything he'd been told she was, and more. Aloof, spoiled, self-centered, and with one hell of an attitude.

No wonder nobody had a decent word to say about her.

The fat little man with the paunch had painted her face so she looked like a cross between Morticia Addams and the bri

de of Frankenstein. Close-up, he could see that her mouth was outlined in black and filled in with a red that reminded him of blood. Her green eyes had been so heavily circled with something that looked like ink that he could hardly see their true color. Her hair had been pinned back, probably so she could wear one of the ugly black wigs he'd seen piled on the cart that had almost run him down.

And yet, for all of that, her natural beauty managed to show through—on the outside, anyway.

A memory flashed into his head. One Christmas when he'd been little, maybe a year or two before his mother died, she'd taken him to Fifth Avenue to see the sights. Though they lived in the city, this part of it was as foreign to him as China would have been.

The animated displays in the Lord and Taylor windows had enchanted him, and he'd grown wide-eyed at the Santas on every street-corner, but what had sent his heart soaring had been the beautiful Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center.

When the cold had gotten to be too much, his mother had dragged him away only by promising she'd take him to Macy's, where he could pick out a special decoration for their own tree but when they got into the store, Conor had taken one look at the white trees hung with gold and silver balls that decorated the place and announced, with perfect childish logic that he didn't want a decoration from a tree, he wanted one of the trees themselves.

He'd pleaded. He'd argued. He'd almost wept, though his father had already taught him that little boys never cried. But his mother kept saying he couldn't have one and finally, he'd sat down cross-legged on the floor beneath the biggest white tree and refused to move.

Angry, embarrassed, his mother had swept him up into her arms to carry him off. Desperate, Conor had reached out and grabbed the white Christmas tree...

And discovered the truth.

The tree, beautiful beyond his wildest dreams, wasn't real. It was gilt and tinsel, straight through to its phony core.

He remembered his disappointment. "You should have told me," he kept saying to his mother, and his mother had given up her scolding, held him close and said if she had, he'd never have believed her.

Twenty-eight years later, he was older but not smarter. People had told him what to expect of Miranda Beckman, but he knew that he hadn't really believed them.

Now he did.

Whatever he'd thought he'd seen in the painting of her, and in the snapshot, had been put there by his imagination. Her smile wasn't mysterious, it was vain. Her eyes weren't sad, they were empty. She was as one-dimensional as her portrait.

Conor felt a rush of relief. It was over. Now he could admit to himself that thinking about Miranda Beckman had been some kind of weird obsession. It had not been pleasant, walking around and knowing he was almost out of control, and hating himself for it. Well, that was finished. If she was the one who'd sent the note to Eva, she'd have to be dealt with. If she wasn't, he'd walk away and forget her.