OU’RE IN LUCK,” Kate said. “The lights are still on in the kitchen.”

“Why is that lucky?” Mitchell asked, following her down the wide, oak-paneled hallway, lined with offices, at the bottom of the staircase.

“Because it means that someone else may be preparing our meals, which means they’ll be edible,” she said with a laughing glance over her shoulder.

As she spoke, she shoved open a pair of wide stainless-steel doors concealed behind an antique oak screen inlaid with ebony parquet, and Mitchell saw a small group of men and women who, he surmised, were still celebrating Danny’s return. Rather than going in there with Kate, he retraced his steps to the hallway so that he could look at the assortment of framed photographs, plaques, and magazine and newspaper articles he’d noticed a moment before.

It was a very impressive display, he noticed as he looked at the various awards Donovan’s had received and the articles written about it. The items were arranged in chronological order, so he didn’t come to Kate’s accolades until he neared the far end of the hallway. She’d enhanced the restaurant’s reputation, he realized, and when he came to the last, most recent item, he felt a strange burst of pride that Kate had just been named Chicago’s Restaurateur of the Year.

She returned from the kitchen while he was still reading the Tribune article, walking toward him in tan-colored jeans and a soft cashmere sweater that was the same green as her eyes, with an open cowl neck that threatened to bare her shoulders. With her long flowing red hair and her hips swaying gently as she walked, she looked feminine, regal, and sexy at the same time.

Mitchell tipped his head toward the Tribune article and said, “I remember when you were terrified you wouldn’t be able to keep this place open, but look what you’ve accomplished.”

“I made a mess of things the first few months, and I would have given up back then if it hadn’t been for Danny. I needed to make a success of things for both our sakes.”

As she spoke, she led him to the front of the restaurant, walking past the maître d’s desk and through a doorway. She flipped on a light switch, and mellow lights illuminated a stylish lounge with an ornate bar lining two walls; despite its size, the room was cozy and inviting. “I asked Tony to bring our meals to us in here,” she explained, walking toward the bar. Mitchell suddenly remembered the way she’d looked presiding over a candlelit table in a villa by the sea. Now as he watched her, he understood why she’d seemed so sure of herself and self-possessed that night.

From beneath her lashes Kate watched him studying the room. She couldn’t believe he was actually standing just a few feet away from her. This day had begun as the worst of her life, and it was ending as one of the very best. He’d taken off his tie and jacket upstairs and folded his shirtsleeves back over his forearms, and she was well aware of the subtle attraction and relaxed camaraderie springing to life between them again. She was equally aware that it was a very fragile, tenuous thing now, created out of illusion and nostalgia for Danny’s sake and carefully maintained by an unspoken agreement to avoid any discussion of the past.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked from behind the bar.

He nodded, looking around.

He drank vodka, Kate remembered very well, but she hid that knowledge behind the safe veil of pretense they were keeping up. “What would you like?”

His gaze swung to her. “You know the answer to that.”

With those six words, he deliberately tore away the veil and shoved both of them into the treacherous quicksand that was their past. Kate was stunned. “You’re still very sure of yourself,” she chided, turning to reach for a bottle of Donovan’s best vodka.

“And you’re still very beautiful.”

Kate’s hand froze on the neck of the bottle, then she took it carefully down and reached for a glass. “I wasn’t aware that you thought I was beautiful.”

“The hell you weren’t.”

This was an entirely new tone, not one from their past at all. Kate fixed him a vodka and tonic with lime, as she’d done in Anguilla, and then decided—considering the direction he seemed to be heading—that she ought to have something to drink, too. Painful questions were popping up in her mind, questions she didn’t want to ask, with answers she didn’t need to hear and probably wouldn’t believe if she did. She was so grateful and happy about the things he’d done today... so amazed at the tender way he’d looked at his son that she wanted to freeze their emotions right where they were.

“Will you do me a favor?” she asked with a smile as she came around the bar and handed him his drink.

“That depends,” Mitchell said, already knowing what she was going to ask. Her eyes were candid and appealing, and part of him was willing to agree to what she was going to ask. The other part of him was adamantly opposed to doing anything of the sort. “What’s the favor?”

“Will you please not say anything at all that brings up the past?”

In answer to that, he looked straight into her eyes and said bluntly, “How in the living hell could you ever have considered marrying an asshole like Evan Bartlett?”

“Is this going to be another one of those conversations we used to have, where you do all the asking and I’m the only one giving answers?” she asked darkly.

An inexplicable smile touched his lips, and his voice gentled. “No.”

“Then you go first,” she replied.

He nodded, took a sip of his drink, and leaned his right elbow on the bar. “What’s your question?”

Kate didn’t want cooperation; she wanted to maintain peace between them. “I don’t have one,” she lied.

“Then answer mine. How in the hell could you ever have considered marrying Evan Bartlett?”

“This is going to go very badly,” Kate asserted, pointing to a table by the windows across the room and answering his question as she walked toward it. “I’m not certain there was any one reason as to why I got engaged to Evan. It was a combination of things I discovered about you, actually, that led to our engagement.”

“About me?” he asked skeptically.

“Yes, you,” Kate replied. “Tell me something,” she added, turning around and looking at him with baffled sorrow. “What possible delight will you derive from my telling you that I was completely duped by you? How can you be so extraordinary in so many different ways, and yet be so... so heartless and egotistical?”

“I’m not sure what the answer to that is, but I promise to give it serious thought once I understand what you’re getting at. What are you getting at?” he added curtly.

Sickened, Kate decided to tell him what he evidently needed to hear. “Okay, Mitchell, here’s the way it went: The day I left you at the Enclave in St. Maarten, I went straight to the villa and packed my suitcases like a good little fool, then I waited for Evan. When he arrived, I told him I’d met you and that I thought we had something special.”

“And he said what?” Mitchell bit out.

“Without trying to list the revelations in the order of their heartbreaking effect, Evan told me that he’d met you at Cecil Wyatt’s party, that he’d told you my name and that I was going to be at the Island Club with him. He also told me about your childhood and the reasons you hate his father and him. Then he asked me if I knew you were staying on Zack Benedict’s yacht, building a house on Anguilla, and living in Chicago with Caroline Wyatt.” Shaking her head at her stupidity, she finished, “I was so insane about you that none of that mattered, except for the one thing that I couldn’t invent an excuse for.”

“What was that?” he asked tautly.

Kate paused to center a candle on the table and then said, “The one thing I couldn’t ignore was that you’d let me talk about Chicago while you acted as if you’d never been here. You even asked me how long it takes to fly from Chicago to St. Maarten. As far as I know, there are only two reasons why a man hides from a woman the fact that he lives in the same city she does: either he’s married, or he has no intention of seeing her again when they’re both back in that city. I wanted to believe that you might have a third reason, so do you know what I did?”

He put his hands on her shoulders to stop her from sitting down and drew her back against his chest. “What did you do?” he asked, his lips against her hair. Refusing to struggle, Kate stood there, looking straight ahead. “I called you at the Enclave to ask you why. They told me you’d checked out. I thought that had to be a mistake, because I remembered the way you stood on the balcony and told me to ‘Hurry back.’ ” Trying unsuccessfully to keep her voice steady, Kate went on, “So there I was, with my suitcases all packed, standing in the villa, facing the ugly truth: You seduced me to get even with Evan, then you sent me back to the villa to break up with him, reminding me to hurry back to you. And then you checked out of the hotel.” Drawing a shaky breath, Kate said, “I cried my heart out on Evan’s shoulder. I cried so hard that I finally fell asleep, and when I woke up the engagement ring Evan had brought to St. Maarten was on my finger.”

Mitchell’s hands tightened, turning her around almost roughly and pulling her tightly against him. “Right after you left for the Island Club, Billy called me and told me my brother’s body had been found. I checked out of the hotel, then I made arrangements with Zack for you to cruise the islands on his yacht during the day.” He laid his jaw against the top of her head, his hand drifting soothingly up and down her spine as he continued, “I have my own plane, and I intended to fly back and forth every night to wherever the yacht was docked so we could spend the nights together. I waited for you at the wharf in Philipsburg until it got dark, then I called the vet and he told me that you and another man had picked up Max hours before. I couldn’t believe you’d left me waiting there.”

“When I was four months pregnant, I went to Gray Elliott’s office and saw pictures of you waiting for me,” Kate said. “It meant everything to me to see that. At least I knew you’d never intended for me to go back to the hotel and learn that you’d checked out.”

His hand pressed her cheek to his chest as he asked, “When did you find out you were pregnant?”

“A couple of weeks after I saw you at the Children’s Hospital benefit. You must be wondering how I got pregnant—”

“I know how you got pregnant,” he said huskily. “I even know, to the minute, when it happened.”

“I was on the pill, but I’d taken some migraine medicine that interfered with it,” Kate added, taking shameless pleasure in being held in his arms even if he was only telling her half-truths. “Why did you treat me the way you did when I saw you at the benefit?”

His laugh was short and grim. “I told you exactly why that night, without meaning to. I felt like a jilted, heartbroken lover. I had no idea until a moment before you walked up to me that Evan Bartlett was your boyfriend.” His hand curved around her nape, his thumb forcing her chin up, and he looked at her with tender solemnity. “We lay in bed and watched the sun come up though we could hardly hold our eyes open, because neither of us wanted to miss out on a minute of being together.”

Lowering his head, he touched his mouth to the corner of hers. “I missed you so much, for so long,” he whispered. “I missed our magic.”

Kate was lost.