Until You (37 page)

Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia

Spring, 2011

Tucked back against a stand of old-growth oaks, the log cabin sat snugly protected from the late March wind that swooped and whistled just outside.

Harry Thurston, seated at one end of the rough pine table that marked the boundary of what he called the kitchen, looked up from the brook trout he was filleting and smiled.

"Weather can't make up its mind," he said.

Conor, who was trying to scale their catch without also removing all the skin from his hands, nodded in agreement.

"Spring in the East. One minute it rains, the next the sun's out."

"We had snow in these mountains this time last year."

"You better hope history doesn't repeat itself," Conor said wryly. "A day's fishing is one thing, Harry, but a snowbound weekend with you doesn't exactly turn me on."

Harry chuckled. "Relax, my boy. They're predicting clear skies through tomorrow. We'll fry our trout, open a couple of those beers you so thoughtfully provided, sit around the fire and relax, then head back to town. You done with that fish?"

Conor nodded and shoved the trout towards the older man. Then he bundled up the newspaper that held the messy results of the past hour's work, dumped it into a bag of trash, wiped his hands with a couple of paper towels and leaned back against the wall, arms folded, watching as Harry deftly filleted the last of their afternoon's catch.

"There," Harry said, "that'll do it. Now we're ready for some of Thurston's Magic Dust."

"Magic Dust, huh?" Conor grinned. "Sounds like something left over from the sixties."

Harry laughed as he began taking canisters from the shelf behind him.

"There's nothing hallucinogenic about this recipe, though I guarantee the end result will make your head spin. Open that ice chest, will you? There should be a container of cream inside. Get out the bacon and eggs, too. Good. Now, pay attention, please. There are fishermen who'd kill for the Thurston recipe."

"From the looks of it, the recipe would kill them first. You've got to be kidding. Cream? Eggs? Bacon?" Conor shook his head. "Why don't we skip the preliminaries, just mainline the stuff straight into our arteries and get it over with?"

"I'm surprised at you, Conor, worrying about such things at your age." Harry broke three eggs into a chipped enamel bowl, poured in the cream and began whipping the mixture to a froth. "Besides, risk puts the spice in life. Isn't that what you always say?"

Conor's brows lifted. "Is it?"

"Well, maybe you don't say it but it's the message you always seem to send."

"Amazing," Conor said with a little smile. "Here I've been all these years, doing the job I was paid to do, while you were doing armchair psychoanalysis."

"We all like a little element of danger, or we wouldn't have gone into our particular line of work." Harry set the bowl aside, pulled another one towards him and began opening the canisters. "Lay half a dozen slices of bacon in that cast-iron skillet and set it in the embers on the hearth, please. Just make sure there's no flame underneath." He dumped cornmeal and flour into the fresh bowl, then reached for an array of spice jars. "Am I right?"

Conor, kneeling before the stone fireplace, looked up.

"I wouldn't know," he said with a lazy smile. "This is your recipe, remember? Not mine."

"I'm talking about risk. Danger. The stuff that gets the adrenaline pumping."

"My adrenaline's pumping just fine." Conor got to his feet and dusted his hands on the seat of his jeans. "And so will yours be, once you finally get around to telling me what we're doing here today."

The older man looked up, his expression one of total innocence. "You know what we're doing. I told you, I thought it was time I introduced you to the peaceful joys of fishing."

"Fishing for what? And please, don't tell me the answer is trout."

Harry Thurston dipped the last filet in the batter, rolled it carefully through the cornmeal and flour mixture, then lay it in the now-sizzling skillet.

"Such distrust, Conor."

"Such subterfuge, Harry. Come on, let's have it. Why'd you ask me to come up here?"

Thurston looked at him. Then he plucked two bottles from the case Conor had placed against the wall and handed one over.

"Let's sit down, have a beer and talk."

"It's ale," Conor said with a little smile. Harry eased into a maple rocker that stood facing the fireplace; Conor sat down on the edge of the hearth. "Calling what's in this bottle beer is about the same as calling a trout a sunfish."

Harry shuddered. "Point taken." He twisted the cap from the bottle, lifted the bottle to his lips and took a long swallow.

"An excellent brew. And you were right, room temperature's best. Is it always, or is it just this particular brand?"

Conor put down his ale. He leaned back, his hands on the hearth behind him, stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankles.

"Harry," he said softly, "we have discussed the best way to catch trout and to clean them. We've discussed how to cook the fillets and how to serve them. If you really think that now I'm going to get sidetracked into discussing the relative merits of chilled ale versus ale at room temperature, you're crazy. I want to know why we're here."

The older man sighed. "All right, I admit, I did have an ulterior motive in asking you up here today."

"Which was?"

Harry's eyes locked onto Conor's.

"Miranda Beckman."

The name, unspoken between them for weeks, seemed to echo through the little cabin.

"I'm finished with that assignment," Conor said coolly. "Had you forgotten? I turned in all my reports and handed the file off to Bill Breverman, as per your orders."

"You gave me little choice in the matter. You brought the girl home and announced that you were signing off."

"I didn't bring her home," Conor said, even more coolly, "I set it up so she had no choice but to decide to go home."

"Look, if you want to split hairs—"

"I'm not splitting hairs, I'm simply being accurate." Conor got to his feet, crossed the room and exchanged his empty ale bottle for a full one. "And," he said, wrenching off the cap, "there's nothing about Miranda Beckman for us to talk about."

Harry cleared his throat. "I'm afraid there is."

Something in Thurston's voice made the hair lift on the back of Conor's neck. He swung around, his face suddenly pale.

"Has something happened to her? Goddammit, Harry—"

"No, no, it's nothing like that. The girl is fine... so far."

"So far?" Conor stomped towards the older man and glared down at him. "What the hell's that supposed to mean?"

"Take it easy, please."

"Take it easy? You shanghai me, drag me to the middle of nowhere—"

"I did no such thing," Thurston said with righteous indignation. "I invited you to learn about the fine art of angling, and this is hardly the middle of nowhere."

"Save that crap for somebody else, dammit! Tell me what's going down and what it's got to do with me."

"This is—was—your assignment, Conor."

"Yeah. It was. That's past tense, in case you hadn't noticed. I haven't so much as thought of the Beckman broad since I got back from Paris."

There was a hiss from the fireplace. Thurston turned, saw flames dancing beneath the skillet and muttered something under his breath. He plucked the skillet from the embers, picked up a spatula and began rearranging the fillets.

Conor watched him, his eyes and mouth hard.

What was this shit? Whatever was going on with Miranda didn't have a thing to do with him. As he'd just told the old man, he hadn't even thought of her since...

Oh, what a liar you are, O 'Neil.

Hadn't thought of her? Hell, he hadn't been able to
stop
thinking of her. Day after day, night after night, Miranda was in his head. He couldn't get her face and that mysterious smile out of his mind. Not that she'd been smiling the last time he'd seen her, when she'd confronted him at his hotel in Paris.

"I hate you, O'Neil," she'd said, her eyes flashing fire. "And if I ever see you anywhere near me again, I swear to God, I'll kill you! You got that?"

Yeah. Oh yeah, he'd gotten that. And he didn't much care. She wanted no part of him; he wanted no part of her. End of story. What had happened in her bedroom that night hadn't meant a thing to either of them, it had been nothing but what she'd called it, a good fuck...

"Conor?"

... and there wasn't a damn thing extraordinary in that. The world was full of women who felt right in a man's arms, whose kisses tasted of honey, who could sigh his name in a way that made him feel, if just for a second, that he was the only man who'd ever mattered.

"Conor?"

Conor looked up. Harry was standing beside the table, the skillet in his hand. The fish were done to a soft, golden hue; the air in the cabin smelled delicately of spices and frying bacon—and crackled with electricity.

"The girl is a problem, Conor."

"Tell me something new," Conor said coldly.

"She's modeling for her mother's cosmetics firm—"

"How nice for them both."

"—but other than that, she's leading a life much like the one she led in Paris."

Conor's jaw tightened. "She's over eighteen."

"She goes to those clubs that spring up overnight in lower Manhattan and she's with a different man each night."

"Sleeping around isn't against the law," Conor said, though the words all but stuck in his throat.

"I don't know that she's sleeping with anyone." Harry set the skillet in the center of the table. "Breverman says she always comes home alone."

It was stupid to feel a sense of relief but that was exactly what Conor felt. He covered it with a careless shrug.

"How touching. Maybe she's being faithful to Moreau. Hell, stranger things have happened."

"Stranger things, indeed," Harry said. He drew a chair to the table and motioned Conor to do the same. "We did some deeper checking on Moreau, as you'd requested."

Conor reached for the skillet and dumped a couple of fillets on his plate.

"Looks good," he said. "Pass the salt, will you?"

"Taste it first."

"Harry..."

"As I was saying, we dug around a little, as you'd asked."

"I asked when I was still interested. Now, the only thing I'm interested in is the salt."

"Aren't you the least bit curious to know what we came up with?"

Conor sighed, put down his fork and leaned his forearms on the table.

"Tell me," he said, "because I can see, if you don't, I'm not going to be allowed to eat my meal in peace."

Harry Thurston took a mouthful of fish. "Mmm. Delicious."

"Harry, goddammit..."

"He's gay."

"Who's gay?"

The older man smiled. "Miss Beckman's lover. Her supposed lover. Jean-Phillipe Moreau."

Conor stared at Thurston. "You're crazy," he said flatly.

"He's been very, very discreet. And extraordinarily cautious. But there's no doubt about it. The man is a gender-bender."

"He can't be. I saw him with Miranda. I saw..."

What? What had he seen, really? Miranda clinging to Moreau like a honeysuckle vine to a fence post, that was all. But it had been enough. More than enough. She'd said—she'd made it clear...

"We checked thoroughly, Conor." Thurston forked more fish into his mouth. "In fact, you know that producer he's working with, out in Los Angeles?"

"Harlan Williams," Conor said wryly. "How could I forget that name? The guy's probably still trying to figure out how twenty million bucks suddenly dropped into his lap so he could ask Moreau to make that movie."

"Well, Williams and Moreau have taken up housekeeping. Cautiously, of course."

"Suppose I buy Moreau being gay. Why would Miranda lie about their relationship? It doesn't make sense."

"Indeed it does. She's provided the cover Moreau needs."

"And what does she get out of it?"

"She's a beautiful, much-desired woman. Being thought of as Moreau's lover would be an enhancement to her career." Thurston pointed his fork at Conor's plate. "You want to dig into that while it's hot. The coating loses its crispness as it cools."

"Try again, Harry. She doesn't need to enhance her career."

"Well, perhaps it's the other way around. Perhaps she enhances his. Conor, I do wish you'd eat."

Conor picked up his fork and glared across the table.

"You're turning into an old woman, you know that, Harry?" He stabbed his fish, then shoved a forkful of it into his mouth. "Delicious," he said, and let the fork clatter against his plate again. "Did you ever consider that whoever got this information made a mistake?"