ichael tossed another log onto the fire he'd built in the fireplace and used the poker to move it back farther on the grate. In the dining room, Hilda was setting the table for dinner. Straightening, he brushed off his hands and stood up just as Leigh walked into the living room wearing a long, belted cream wool dress with large covered buttons down the front, a wide collar, and full sleeves.

It reminded him of a dressy robe until he realized that was purely wishful thinking.

"You've built a fire," she said as he handed her a glass of champagne.

Her auburn hair was loose at her shoulders, shiny in the firelight, more red than brown in that light.

"Champagne?" she asked, lifting questioning eyes to his.

"It seemed appropriate for such a special occasion," Michael said.

"What occasion is that?"

In answer, he touched his glass to hers and made a toast. "To a new beginning. To fighting back—Phase One."

"To Phase One," she declared with a brave smile, and took a sip of champagne. "What was Phase Two again?"

"That's the getting-even phase."

She didn't ask for the details of Phase Two, and he was glad, because she wasn't ready to hear them, let alone put them into practice.

"I've been thinking," she said.

Michael looked at the luminous eyes that had mesmerized him fourteen years ago, and he watched her reach up and comb her heavy hair off her forehead with her fingers. He remembered the gesture as clearly as he remembered that in bright daylight her eyes were aquamarine, but in other light—like now—they turned the deep blue-green of zircons. He remembered the attentive way she listened, with her head tipped slightly to the side, as it was now. His gaze dropped to her lips, and he remembered the way she looked a month ago, coming toward him in that little red dress—leggy and sophisticated and gracious. "What is it that you've been thinking about?"

"I'd like to make a deal with you," she said as he raised his champagne glass to his mouth.

He paused warily. "What sort of deal?"

"I would like us to agree that tonight we will not talk about Logan. If I start to do it, I'd like you to stop me. Agreed?"

The night was looking better and better. "Agreed."

"Can I choose what we talk about instead?"

"Absolutely."

"And can we agree we'll talk completely openly and honestly?"

"Yes."

"Promise?"

Michael's guard went up again, but it was way too late. He'd already agreed. "When I said 'yes,' that constituted a promise."

She took a sip of champagne to hide her smile. "You look awfully uneasy."

"Because I am uneasy. What is it you want to talk about?"

"You."

"That's what I was afraid of."

"Are you going to back out?"

He looked at her and said firmly, "You know I'm not."

She glanced around him at the dining room table, where Hilda was lighting clusters of candles. "What are we having for dinner, Hilda?"

"Lasagna. It's in the oven. I've made a fresh Caesar salad to go with it."

"We'll serve ourselves," Leigh told her. "There's no need for you to do anything else when you're finished setting the table." To Michael she added, "Hilda's lasagna is divine. She must have made it in your honor because you're Italian."

"I made it for you, Mrs. Manning," Hilda said bluntly, "because it's the most fattening dish I could think of. Mr. Valente?"

Michael turned. "Yes?"

"Be sure that fire is out when you leave," she warned him. "And don't get any ashes on the carpet."

Michael was both startled and amused by her tone, and Leigh understood why. As soon as Hilda made another trip to the kitchen, Leigh lowered her voice and said, "Hilda does not abide dirt in any form, and she bosses us all around. She is also totally loyal to me."

She was worried about his feelings, Michael realized, and he wanted to pull her into his arms. Even with her life in shambles, she was thoughtful and kind and courageous. He wanted to tell her how proud he was of her. Instead he made small talk with her until Hilda announced that they could eat whenever they wished and that she was going to her room for the night.

"Shall we go into the kitchen?" Leigh suggested.

On the center island, Hilda had put out a bowl of cooked jumbo shrimp in an icy nest, surrounded with lemon wedges and parsley. Leigh pulled two wrought-iron stools out from beneath the island and perched on one. "Hilda is out of earshot, and your reprieve is officially over," she warned him, smiling. "Let's talk about you now."

The champagne he'd been pouring for her was having the effect he'd hoped it would. Her smile came more readily, and her eyes no longer had a wounded look. "Where do you want me to begin?"

"Begin when they started calling you Hawk."

"You already know how I got that nickname," Michael told her bluntly. "I was the lookout. Are you trying to find out about my early life of crime?"

She hesitated, and then nodded. "Yes," she said simply. "I guess I am."

He walked to the other side of the island and leaned his hip against the counter behind him. "In that case, I'm going to add an amendment to our bargain." Nodding toward the bowl of shrimp in front of her, he said, "I'll talk about all that, but you have to eat while I do it."

She picked up a shrimp and dipped it in cocktail sauce, and he kept his part of the bargain…

"I was about eight and my parents were still alive when Angelo tagged me with the nickname. He was eleven and a born leader with a devoted group of followers, including me, and also my best friend, Bill, who lived next door. Bill and I started out with hubcaps, but within three or four years, we were helping Angelo and his guys heist anything on the street that was moveable and saleable. We spent the rest of our time helping them 'protect our turf,' with fistfights at first, but by the time we were in our teens, knives were the weapon of choice—among other things."

When he paused, Leigh leaned forward. "Go on with your story."

"Have another bite of shrimp."

She obeyed automatically, and Michael stifled a grin at how intent she was on hearing the tale. "When I was about sixteen, we made a little foray into the turf of another, much bigger gang, and in the fight that followed, I got cut up pretty badly. Angelo pulled two guys off me, and he nearly died from the wounds he got. We were the only ones. there when the cops arrived, and of course, we both got busted."

"Was that the first time you were arrested?"

"No, but it was the first time I nearly got killed, and I didn't like it. I was supposed to be the 'idea man,' the brains behind Angelo's operation, but," Michael admitted, "I was not cut out to be an active participant."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because I hated the sight of blood, particularly my own, and I didn't see the point of wasting it."

Leigh giggled in spite of herself and took a sip of champagne and another bite of shrimp. "You were living with your aunt and uncle by then. What did they think about the trouble that you and Angelo were getting into?"

"My uncle died of a heart attack a year after my parents were killed, and my aunt couldn't control Angelo or me. She didn't even believe we were doing the things we were getting busted for doing. She thought the cops were persecuting us."

"What about Bill's parents? What did they do when he got busted?"

"They called Bill's uncle, who was a lieutenant with the NYPD, and he got Bill off, and also made sure there was no record of the bust. Bill was the only one of us without a police record, thanks to his uncle. What made that so ironic was that Bill was probably the meanest hothead in the neighborhood, but he was very small and slight, so neither his parents nor his doting uncle could believe he was as bad as the rest of us.

"As time went on, it began to infuriate Angelo that we all had rap sheets, except for Bill, and Angelo started cutting Bill out of everything we did; then he put the word out on the street that Bill was a snitch."

"How did you feel about Bill getting off?"

"I wasn't nearly as hostile about it as Angelo."

"Because you were—what?—more reasonable?"

"No, because in the early years, Bill's uncle also saved my ass along with Bill's several times. Remember, before my parents died, Bill's family and mine were friends. Bill's uncle still harbored sentimental memories of Bill and me in the same playpen while the two families had dinner together."

Leigh leaned her chin on her hand and came up with a heartfelt explanation to justify what he'd been in those days. "There were very good reasons for the way you were and the things you did."

"Really," he said, fascinated. "What were the reasons?"

"Well, you lost your parents at an early age, and you came from a disadvantaged neighborhood. There was poverty, bad schools, bad companions; you were disenfranchised—"

"Leigh—" he interrupted. "Yes?"

"I was a thug. I was a thug because that's what I chose to be."

"Yes, but the point is, what made you choose that?"

"I chose it because I wanted things for myself, but I wanted to get them my way, not the system's way."

"Go on with your story."

"After my near fatal brush with death, I decided to limit my excursions with Angelo's gang to an occasional one that would be unlikely to get me killed or arrested. I also did a little research and discovered that the moronic teachers at my high school were actually telling the truth: Without an education, I didn't have a shot at the big bucks."

"Yes, but why did you still do some illegal things with Angelo and the gang after that? Why didn't you just give it up and—" Leigh faltered, trying to think of the right term.

"And stick to the straight and narrow?" he suggested.

"Exactly."

He feigned a look of horror. "I had a reputation to maintain! Anyway, it all ended one night in June when I was seventeen."

"How?"

He reached for the bottle of scotch on the liquor tray and poured some into a glass; then he took a long swallow as if to wash away the taste of what he was saying—or about to say. "Bill was pushing drugs by then, but he was using, too, and my cousin Angelo was just as high as he was that night. They got into a fight, and Bill killed him."

"My God."

"The cops came to tell my aunt, and she went crazy with grief."

"What did you do?"

"I went looking for Bill. I found him within an hour, still high. He hadn't washed his hands, and he held them up and showed them to me. They were covered with Angelo's blood."

"And?" she whispered.

He shrugged and took another swallow of his drink. "And I killed him."

Leigh gazed at him in stricken silence, unable to assimilate that he could have done that, that he could have told her this so unemotionally, and then shrugged and taken a drink. Except—she realized—he had taken the drink before he told her. He put down the empty glass and folded his arms over his chest, looking at her as if waiting to hear her conclusion and not particularly interested in it, one way or another. He was no longer the compassionate, civilized man he'd become in her imagination lately; he reminded her of someone else…

He reminded her of the cold, hostile young man she'd known fourteen years ago—a rude, indifferent man who wouldn't give her the time of day. Except he'd evidently cared enough about her even then to remember now that she liked pears and shrimp pizza.

She stared at him, searching his inscrutable features and hard face, and a thought suddenly occurred to her. Hesitantly, she said, "Did you actually mean to kill him?"

Instead of answering, he asked her a question, but there was a barely perceptible softening of his jaw. "Why wouldn't I have meant to kill him?"

"You said he was your best friend. You shared a playpen. You said Angelo was high on drugs and so was Bill. You didn't sound like you thought Angelo was innocent."

"You're right," he said with an odd expression in his eyes. "I didn't intend to kill him. But I didn't intend to make nice with him either. I probably would have beaten him half to death if I'd have been able to get the gun away from him."

"But you couldn't?"

"I should have been able to do it. I was a hell of a lot bigger and stronger than he was, but he was high and I was in a blind rage. He waved the gun at me, and I went for him. The gun went off in the struggle. He died in my arms."

"And that's why you went to prison? "

He nodded and poured more scotch in his glass. "Angelo's funeral was the same day as Bill's. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend either one of them."

"But what I don't understand is why you went to prison for what you did. It was self-defense."

"Bill's uncle disagreed, and by then he was a precinct captain. He had a good point—I was a lot bigger than Bill and almost a year older. He held me completely responsible for the death of his namesake and his sister's only child. He told me he was going to spend the rest of his life making sure I never enjoyed mine, and he meant it. William Trumanti is a man of his word."

"William Trumanti!" Leigh exclaimed, leaning forward. "You killed Commissioner Trumanti's nephew?"

"That's right."

"My God…"

"I went to prison for four years for it, and I spent every minute of my free time in the library, studying."

"Studying what?"

"Law," he said. "I figured that since I kept running into the law, I needed to find out how to get around it. Later, I decided there were more interesting things to study. When I got out of prison I enrolled in college, and then I went to graduate school."

Leigh got up and uncovered the Caesar salad Hilda had made. "And then what?" she asked.

"I discovered I had a knack for making money—legitimately—particularly in construction at first. I'd grown up on the streets, and I could deal with construction workers on their level, but I also knew how to put together a profitable deal and keep it profitable.

"For the first few years, everything went fine; in fact, it went even better than that. And then my business started getting big, and Trumanti heard about it. The next thing I knew, I was being arrested for 'attempted bribery of a city inspector.' The rest is history. The bigger I became, the bigger and more damaging were the accusations."

He paused, and looked at her hands. She had scooped salad out of the bowl and was holding it in midair, riveted. "Are you planning to put that on a plate?"

"What? Oh. Yes. Go on—then what happened?"

"You know the rest. Trumanti has influential friends on the state and federal level, too, and with my history of arrests, he has no problem convincing a federal prosecutor or a district attorney to look into my affairs. I've spent millions of dollars in legal fees alone defending myself in various courts. It's become a game he and I play—an ugly one. He's dying of cancer now, but it hasn't softened his attitude one bit. Vendetta is an Italian word, and he believes in it. Now," he said finally, "have I kept my part of the bargain?"

Leigh gazed at him in silence and nodded, trying to assimilate what he'd said. She had no reason to believe he'd told her the whole truth, but she did believe it. For some reason, she believed it completely. Suddenly she remembered how eager Trumanti had been to help her, how willing to commit all of the NYPD's resources to hunt for Logan. At the time, she'd been too demented with fear to question her entitlement or his actions, but now she wondered if Trumanti had known that Logan had been meeting with Michael Valente, and if that had anything to do with his willingness to help her.

"Wordlessly, she picked up the salad plates, and he reached for the open bottle of red wine that Hilda had left on the counter. As Leigh put the plates on the dining room table, she belatedly realized that he hadn't asked her if she believed what he told her.

She watched him pouring wine into goblets, his proud, hard face an expressionless mask in the candlelight. He wasn't going to ask if she believed him, she realized. He would never stoop to that or try to persuade her to believe him. She remembered the incredible things he'd said to her when she first got home and walked into the kitchen. When she couldn't put her own feelings into words, he'd sensed it and done it for her…

"I ache all over, but mostly inside. Everything I believed in turned out to be wrong, and the people I trusted betrayed me." He'd forced her to cry, because she needed to cry, and then he'd held her in his arms while she did, cradling her face against his chest, his hand drifting soothingly over her back. He'd held his best friend in his arms when he died, too, and she had a feeling he'd been as tender then as he'd been tonight, with her.

He stopped in front of her, waiting to pull out her chair for her, and Leigh gazed up at him, shaken by a myriad of emotions. "Leigh?" he said, his brows drawing together into a frown. "Are you crying?"

Dishonestly, she shook her head; then she said fiercely, "I hate Trumanti!"

He burst out laughing and snatched her into his arms.