Until You

"Brunch sounds good," Conor had answered, kissing her, "but I'll be damned if I can think of anything we can do with the rest of the day."

The sound of her husky laugh was still echoing in his ears as the buzzer to the Winthrop mansion sounded. Conor grasped the heavy brass doorknob and turned it. The door swung open and he stepped inside a small anteroom.

"Good morning, sir."

The accent was English, the attire was formal. The butler, Conor thought, without question, and though the man's greeting was polite, the look on his face suggested it was certainly not a good morning if he was going to have to admit someone like this into the Winthrop presence.

Conor gave an inward sigh. He was used to it by now but it still amazed him to find that the toadies of the rich and powerful were often twice as smarmy as their masters.

"Mr. Winthrop will see you in a moment."

"Good," Conor said, at the same time moving forward into the foyer so that Jeeves or whoever the hell he was had no choice but to step aside. He shrugged off his Burberry and tossed it at the man. "Don't bother hanging my coat away," he said pleasantly. "I won't be staying long."

Jeeves inclined his head and draped the Burberry across the back of a chair with a tapestry seat and arms and legs that ended in claws. Conor half expected the chair to growl and chew the trenchcoat into pieces.

"As you wish, sir. If you'll wait here, please?"

The butler vanished noiselessly through a doorway that led into the bowels of the house. Conor undid the button on his Harris tweed jacket, tucked his hands into his pants pockets, and balanced forward and backward on the balls of his feet while he admired his surroundings.

The foyer was handsome. The walls were paneled in the sort of rich, old wood that bore the deep luster that comes of decades of patient care. He glanced down at the carpet beneath his feet. It was old, too. Persian, maybe, or Turkish.

He took his hand from his pocket, shot back his cuff and looked at his watch. Five minutes gone already. What in hell was taking Winthrop so long?

Impatiently, he paced the perimeter of the room. No doubt about it, it was certainly nice to be rich. Very, very nice. That had to be a Van Gogh on the wall. His dark brows lifted. And, unless he missed his bet, that was a Jasper Johns hanging right next to it...

Jesus.

Everything seemed to go still as his gaze fell on a painting that hung slightly apart from the others.

You didn't have to wear a paint-spattered smock to know that it wasn't the work of anybody whose name had ever rocked the art world. This was no Old Master, dark and glorious with age, and it wasn't an impressionist gem. It wasn't even something new, trendy, and outrageously clever. The painting's only claim to fame was its subject. And she made everything else that hung on these walls fade to insignificance.

Conor moved forward, his eyes never leaving the portrait. It was of a young woman standing in a garden, her face and body angled towards the viewer. She was wearing a demure, old-fashioned dress, white lace, maybe, with a high collar and long, full sleeves, and holding a wide-brimmed straw hat in her hand. Her hair, a waterfall of midnight silk, was drawn back from her high-cheekboned face and then left to spill, unhampered, over her shoulders. Her eyes were a shade of dark green that Conor knew couldn't be real but had to be the invention of the painter. Her mouth looked soft and inviting. It was color of a budding rose and bore the faintest suggestion of a smile.

The girl in the painting was beautiful, with the guileless innocence of youth.

Or was she? The longer he looked, the more he saw something else. The girl seemed to have both the purity of a Madonna and the sensuality of a Jezebel.

With heart-stopping swiftness, Conor felt his body harden with need.

"Hell," he muttered, under his breath.

The last time he'd reacted that way to a picture, he'd been a randy adolescent drooling over a copy of Playboy. What kind of nonsense was this? If you factored in the night he'd just spent in Mary Alice's bed, what was happening to him was damned near impossible.

But it was happening, just the same.

"Mr. O'Neil?"

Who was she? He stepped closer to the painting. That smile—was it really a smile, or was it something else, an allusion to a sadness so deeply hidden it might never be revealed?

"Mr. O'Neil?"

And those eyes. That color. Surely, no artist would devise such a shade of green—

"Excuse me, Mr. O'Neil."

Conor blinked and swung around. A white-haired man with an aristocratic bearing was standing just behind him, hand outstretched.

"So sorry to have kept you waiting," the man said. "I'm Hoyt Winthrop."