Until You (A Romantic Suspense Novel - Author's Cut Edition)

by Sandra Marton

  "Will—you—get—off—me?" she said and when he didn't move, Miranda twisted beneath him and tried to roll him off.

  In a heartbeat, she knew it hadn't been a very good idea.

  So did he.

  If only she hadn't moved.

  One minute, adrenaline had been pumping through Conor's system at about a gallon a minute while he'd tried to figure out how to deal with the crazy woman pinned beneath him—and the next minute, his body was doing it again.

  At least, this time it made sense. He wasn't reacting to a portrait or a photograph or to a woman going out of her way to give him a peep-show. He was reacting to the real thing. Male anatomy and female anatomy. Yin and yang. Hard muscles against soft, sweet-smelling woman...

  A woman who was terrified of him.

  Dammit to hell, he thought furiously, and he rolled off her and shot to his feet.

  "Get up," he snarled.

  She stood, her face stony and her eyes cold. But she was trembling and that only made him angrier. He thought of the ads he'd seen her in, of that sexy pout she offered the camera; he thought of the way she'd greeted the Frenchman with the too-pretty face this morning, damn near climbing the guy's leg like a bitch in heat.

  So she'd felt his erection. So what? It would hardly be the first time.

  Who was she kidding, standing there in a dress that molded itself to her breasts and ended damned near at her crotch? No way was he going to apologize for an act of biology she specialized in causing.

  "Well, Beckman?"

  "Well, what?"

  "Are you going to tell me why you tried to kill me?"

  Her eyes narrowed until they were slits.

  "Get out of my apartment, O'Neil."

  "I take it that's a no."

  "Did you hear me?" Her voice shook; but the hand she pointed towards the door was rock-steady. "Get out!"

  "Okay, don't tell me. I'm not even sure I want to know. It's been a long day. I'm tired, I'm hungry, and I'm as eager to see the last of you as you are to see the last of me. If it makes you feel better..." He went to the door, opened it a few inches, then turned and looked at her. "How's that? We'll leave the door ajar, I'll ask you a couple of questions, and then I'll leave."

  "I'm not answering any questions. I told you that this morning."

  Conor sighed. He dug into his pocket, came up with an ID card that bore his photograph and flashed it at her.

  "This is an official visit, Miss Beckman."

  As he'd hoped it would, that caught her attention. "Official?"

  "Yes."

  Some of the color was returning to her face and with it, that look of haughty disdain.

  "I should have known," she said. "What are you, O'Neil? Some government flunky come to chat about my childhood?"

  Conor looked at her. "Why would I want to do that?"

  "Oh, come on. I'm not stupid. You said you wanted to talk about my mother and Hoyt. And Hoyt's up for—what? A U.N. post?"

  "An ambassadorship."

  "Whatever," she said, shrugging her shoulders. "It's time to open the closets and sweep out all the dirt."

  Conor smiled pleasantly. "Is there dirt to sweep out?"

  Miranda's eyes flashed. "Only me," she said, her voice steady and cold.

  "Well, then, you won't mind answering my questions."

  "That's where you're wrong." She strode past him, shouldered the door fully open, and stood beside it with her arms folded. "Eva should have warned you. I'm not into accommodating authority figures. So you can take your government badge and your notepad and shove them—"

  "I'm not with the government," Conor said with a smooth smile.

  "No?"

  "No."

  Miranda's eyes narrowed. "You just said—"

  "I said I was here on official business, and I am." He didn't even think about what lie he'd tell her. It was one of the things about his profession, he thought with bitter satisfaction; lying came as easy as breathing. "I'm working for your mother."

  She laughed. "Right. And I'm a candidate for mayor."

  "I'm a private investigator."

  "A what?"

  "An investigator. A private detective."

  "You're joking."

  "I never joke about my profession," Conor said with such sincerity that he gave himself a round of mental applause. "Can we sit down and discuss this?"

  "We are discussing it. Why would Eva need a private eye?"

  "Someone sent your mother a note."

  "How fascinating."

  "It was a strange note, and unsigned."

  "So? What's it have to do with me?"

  "That's what I'm here to find out."

  Nothing showed on Miranda's face. If she'd sent the note, she was hiding it well.

  "Look, O'Neil, I'm sure this is leading somewhere but it's getting very late—"

  "The note may have been a threat."

  "A threat?" she said, her eyebrows lifting.

  For a woman who'd written the note, she looked absolutely blank.

  "Maybe. It was cryptic."

  "And?"

  Here it came, The Big Lie. He didn't think she'd be able to keep that stony look on her face after this. If she'd written that note, he'd know it.

  "The note mentioned your elopement," Conor said, and waited. But her reaction wasn't anything he'd expected. She didn't look caught off guard, she simply looked baffled.

  "That's ancient history. Why would anybody send Eva a note about that?"

  If she was putting him on, she was doing a damned fine job of it. Conor decided to switch tactics.

  "That's what bothered her. She's worried. About you, I mean."

  Miranda's eyes narrowed. "Try another line, O'Neil. Eva hasn't worried about me since I was twelve."

  "Still," he said, "she's concerned."

  "Why?"

  "Well, if the note is some sort of threat, it could very well be directed at you."

  "That's ridiculous. Why would anybody want to threaten..."

  She went still so suddenly that the silence seemed to have a physical presence. Then she made a little sound of distress and sank down on a chair.

  "Shut the door," she whispered.

  He did, and then he looked at her. "What is it?"

  She stared at him. The color was creeping back into her cheeks but when she got to her feet, she seemed wobbly.

  "Here's the chance of a lifetime, O'Neil," she said. "How'd you like to take a tour of my bedroom?"

  She didn't wait for him to answer, she simply set off down the hall. Conor stared after her. Then he took a deep breath and started walking.

  Chapter 6

  The coffee in Conor's cup was murky black. He looked down at it, scowled, then lifted it to his lips and took a long swallow.

  The stuff tasted like something that ought to be poured down the drain but when you needed a jolt of caffeine as badly as he did, you took what you could get, and you took it straight, without sugar or cream.

  He sighed, put the cup down and scrubbed his hands over his face. What he really needed was to fall into bed, clothes and all, and sleep for ten hours straight.

  How long was it since his plane had touched down on French soil? A day? A week? A month? He didn't know anymore, and he wasn't sure he was functional enough to figure it out. Exhaustion and jet lag were doing him in. His legs felt numb, his tongue felt thick, and his eyeballs felt as if they'd been sandblasted.

  "Welcome to Paris, O'Neil," he muttered. He'd have laughed, too, if he'd had the energy.

  Conor picked up the cup and forced down another mouthful of coffee. What was he doing here, sitting in Miranda Beckman's apartment in the middle of the night? He was supposed to be in his place in Georgetown, snug and cozy in his own bed. Or was it only evening back home? At this moment, figuring out the time change seemed a challenge for a genius.

  Not that it mattered. Whatever the hour, he'd bet that Harry Thurston wasn't sitting around in a daze, with the floor spongy under his feet a
nd his stomach snarling and saying it couldn't remember the last time something other than coffee acid had been dumped into it.

  Thurston, the bastard, was eating dinner. Or watching a movie. Or sleeping soundly. Whatever he was doing, it was better than this.

  Conor's mouth thinned. Thurston, he thought grimly, Thurston, you no-good—

  Hell. Who was he kidding? He couldn't blame Harry for this mess. It had been his idea, and his alone, to fly to Paris. And why? To question Miranda Beckman, and to get a look at her.

  "Okay," Conor muttered, staring down into his cup where blobs of oil from the coffee floated like debris on the Potomac, "you got a look. And now you're sitting here at something o'clock in the morning, brain-dead, and you know, you know, you're getting drawn in deeper and deeper."

  Shit.

  He got up, dumped the contents of both his cup and the coffee pot into the sink and rinsed them out.

  He'd come here to ask Miranda a couple of questions, get her to admit what had seemed such a basic truth that he hadn't questioned it. She'd written the note, she'd acknowledge it under his prodding, and he'd go back to the States, the investigation concluded and his basic male curiosity satisfied.

  What was it Robbie Burns had said about the best-laid plans of mice and men?

  Conor puffed out his breath, took down the coffee canister he'd put away only moments before, and glared at it.

  All those best-laid plans had gone up in smoke. Miranda hadn't reacted the way she should have when he'd mentioned the note and then lied about its contents. Instead, her face had gone white and the next thing he'd known, he'd been standing in a bedroom that looked as if it had been sacked by the Huns.

  The closet was open and the clothing from it was everywhere, on hangers, off hangers, a tangled mess of stuff strewn all around the room. The doors of what she'd insisted on calling an armoire were open, too, and underwear as lacy and silken as a man's dream was spilling out of the drawers. The bed was messed up, the pillows dented in as if a head had laid on them.

  None of which proved anything.

  Conor filled the electric kettle with water and plugged it in.

  For all he knew, the woman always left her bedroom like that. He'd seen enough boudoirs in his time to know that not all females subscribed to the belief that neatness counted, especially when they were getting dressed to go out.

  As for the bed—so what if both pillows were dented? Miranda had made a big point of telling him that she slept only on the right-hand side of the bed, that she only used the right-hand pillow.

  That didn't mean her lover hadn't used the other one.

  Conor had had a sudden image of her naked on that bed in the arms of the Frenchman with the pretty face.

  He leaned back against the sink, arms folded and mouth thinned.

  That was the exact moment he should have turned to her and said, I'm out of here, but how could he?

  Either she was lying, trying to divert his attention and convince him she hadn't sent Eva that note, or she was telling him the truth, and somebody had been in the apartment while she was out.

  Maybe some poor, demented bastard had seen her wearing that come-and-get-me smile one time too many and had finally decided he just had to jimmy the door and sniff her underwear—and maybe not. Maybe she'd been paid a visit, but not by a sexual sicko. There could just be a connection between the note sent to Eva and whatever had gone on here tonight.

  It was Conor's job to find out.

  He'd checked the door. The lock was easy, the kind of thing you could open without raising a sweat, assuming you knew your stuff.

  Would a sicko have known his stuff? Would a nut-job have been able to slip the lock without leaving a scratch?

  Which meant, he thought glumly as the kettle sent up a shriek, which meant that there was a chance that Miranda was telling him the truth, that she hadn't sent the note, didn't know anything about it and that maybe, just maybe, she was the quarry in a scheme that was somehow connected to it, and to Eva.

  He was starting to think that she was. She could have faked the messy room but could she really have faked the way she'd looked at him as he'd set out to check every nook and cranny in the apartment? It was possible but he wasn't taking any chances. So he'd told her to calm down, make some coffee and they'd talk.

  And she'd looked at him with those big green eyes, with her soft mouth trembling, and the contrast between the frightened innocence in her face and the sexy voluptuousness of her body poured into the too-short, too-tight, too-everything dress had turned his brain to mush and he'd had all he could do to keep from taking her in his arms and saying that it was all right, he wouldn't let anything hurt her.

  He hadn't done that, thank God. He might be jet-lagged but he wasn't crazy. Not completely. They'd moved into the kitchen, he'd perched on a high stool at the central island counter while she made coffee. Then she'd opened a box of cookies, sat down beside him and they'd drunk all the coffee and munched most of the cookies while he'd asked her half a dozen questions half a dozen times.

  Finally, she'd said she couldn't think straight anymore.

  Hang in just a little bit longer, he'd said.

  What he hadn't said was that not thinking straight was the general idea.

  If she couldn't think straight, her tongue might trip her up. She might begin changing the answers she gave him. She might slip and admit she'd written the note to Eva or that she'd thought fast, lied about someone having been in her bedroom.

  But she hadn't. What she'd done, eventually, was groan, bury her face in her hands and say she had to splash cold water on her face or she'd fall asleep where she was.

  Conor had yawned.

  "Go on," he'd said wearily, "and I'll put up another pot of coffee."

  Another bit of volunteerism gone bad, he thought, glaring at the coffee maker.

  It wasn't a pot you plugged in. It wasn't one you put on the stove. It wasn't a filter job or a damned near antique percolator.

  The coffee maker was what she'd called an infuser. He'd never used one, never even seen one before except when a smaller version had been plunked down at his elbow in a little place in Cornwall, or maybe Normandy. He didn't remember, didn't care, didn't give a damn about this thing Miranda used to make her coffee except to know that he'd need to be Betty Crocker to figure out how to work it, which probably explained why the coffee he'd brewed a while ago had looked and tasted more like ink than—

  "O'Neil?"

  He looked up. Miranda was standing in the kitchen doorway and if the way she was staring at him meant anything, he looked as bad as he felt. Worse, maybe, though he didn't know how that could be possible.

  She, on the other hand, looked fine. Better than fine, he thought, as his sandblasted eyes took in the picture she presented.

  She'd done more than splash cold water on her face. She'd showered. He could tell by the way her hair hung down her back, loose and damp and curling around her shiny, scrubbed-clean face. The dress that wasn't a dress had given way to shapeless grey sweats with a pair of fuzzy pink slippers peeping out from under the pants.

  All she needed was a backdrop of flowering dogwood.

  Something of what he was thinking must have showed in his face because she frowned uncertainly and made a little fluttery gesture with her hand.

  "What?" she said.

  He was just tired enough to think of giving her a real answer.

  I'll tell you what, he'd say. I don't know who you are or what you are. I don't know if you 're guilty of screwing with your mother's head and maybe now with mine or if you're as innocent as you look right at this minute. I'm not even sure I know what I'm doing here. So the way I'm going to sort things out, Miss Beckman, is to haul you into my arms, carry you into the bedroom and make love to you until one of us—hell, until both of us—collapse with exhaustion.

  "O'Neil? Is something wrong?"

  Conor dragged air into his lungs.

  "Yes," he said. He turned away from her,
stared at the coffee pot he still held in his hands, then carefully set it down on the counter. "I can't figure this mother out."

  She laughed.

  "It's simple." Her arm brushed his. "Sit down," she said. "I'll take care of it. Although I don't know why I'm bothering." She yawned. "All the caffeine in the world won't keep me awake much longer."

  Why bother arguing? He felt exactly the same way.

  "One last go-round," he said. "Then we'll quit for the night."

  Miranda hitched her lip onto a stool. "I've already told you everything I know, O'Neil, ten times over."

  Conor nodded. He leaned back against the counter and stuffed his hands into his trouser pockets. Sometime during the past hours, he'd peeled off his coat and tweed jacket, unloosened his tie and rolled up his shirt sleeves. He felt rumpled and weary and in desperate need of a long, hot shower, especially now that Miranda had come sailing back into the room smelling of lilacs and soap.

  God, he was more tired than he'd realized. He cleared his throat, frowned, and looked at her.

  "Let's go over your day again, Beckman. You did the show this morning, you stood for some photos afterwards. Right?"

  She sighed, shut her eyes and let her head droop. Her hair fell forward, slipping over her shoulders like silk.

  "Right."

  "And?"

  She sighed again. "And then I had lunch."

  "Who with?"

  "Nita. I told you that. We were going to order in but Nita said she was desperate for some fresh air so we went around the corner to that bistro."

  "What bistro?"

  She groaned, lifted her head and ran her hands through her hair.

  "I don't remember the name. I told you that, too. It's just a restaurant, for heaven's sake. You want to know the name, go check it for yourself."

  "How come you didn't have lunch with Pretty Boy?"

  "Who?"

  "The Frenchman. Lunch, maybe a quickie. Wasn't he interested?"

  She sat up straight and glared at him. "His name is Jean-Phillipe Moreau. He's an actor. And do you always go out of your way to be offensive?"

  "Me? Offensive?" His smile was all innocence. "I'm only stating the obvious, Beckman. From the way you and Pretty Boy went at each other, I figured you had afternoon plans. Was I wrong?"