Until You

"The guys who wear those sexy berets?"

He looked at her and chuckled. "Amazing, how all you broads think alike."

"Conor O'Neil, you're impossible."

"But sexy. Remember that."

"I could never forget it," she said softly.

Their gazes met and held. Conor smiled and reached for her hand.

"So," he said, "here we sit, just a pair of overgrown delinquents."

"Well, not anymore. We've both got completely respectable jobs." Miranda straightened in her seat, tossed her head and gave him the kind of smoldering look she'd given Manuel's camera. "I," she said in tones of deepest drama, "am a famous model. And you are an internationally recognized private investigator."

A muscle knotted in Conor's jaw. "Yeah," he said, after the slightest hesitation, "that's me

, all right."

"Were you an investigator when you met your wife?"

"Ex-wife," he said, his fingers lacing through hers. "No, I was in college when—"

"College?" She thought back to the evening in the park and the frayed Columbia sweatshirt he'd been wearing, and she began to smile. "Don't tell me. Boy enlists in army rather than follow orders and go to law school, boy survives army and grows up in the process, boy gets his discharge, enrolls in law school—"

Conor laughed. "Some rebellion, huh?"

"Absolutely. You got the degree because you wanted it, not because your father wanted it. But how come you aren't practicing law?"

Because Harry Thurston, that smooth-talking bastard, got hold of me and convinced me I'd be doing the honorable thing for God and country if I went to work for the Committee instead.

"My ex used to ask me the same thing." He shrugged his shoulders, let go of Miranda's hand, picked up the remaining half of his sandwich and then put it down and pushed the plate aside. "I don't know. Law seemed too tame after Special Forces."

"Is that why you got divorced? Because your ex wanted you to be a lawyer instead of a detective?"

Conor looked at Miranda. He could almost see the lies he'd told her stacked up between them, pulsing with the glow of their duplicity.

"I'm sorry," she said quickly, "I don't know what's gotten into me. It's none of my business. I never ask anybody so many ques—"

"It's very much your business," he said, clasping her hand again as he leaned towards her. "I want everything about me to be your business. It's just that—that..." Anger knotted in his gut. "Dammit to hell, why couldn't we have met like anybody else? Over a bowl of pretzels, at a party, or on a plane."

Miranda's face went white. Her hand shot out, as if she were warding something off, and her glass of iced tea toppled over.

"Oh God," she said, "I knew it! It's him!"

"Who?" Conor was already on his feet, swinging around and scanning the street.

"Moratelli."

The name thrummed through Conor's blood. He took a step forward, all his senses fixed on the street that stretched before him, but he saw nothing, no one that could be the man who had terrorized Miranda.

"Where?"

"He's gone, but he was there a second ago, I swear it, just beside that lamppost. I thought I saw him before, when you were getting our lunch."

"Dammit," Conor growled, spinning towards her, "why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I was sure I'd imagined it. Because I didn't want to bring back all the awful stuff that happened in Paris. God, what does he want?"