LITMIR.BIZ

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smoke and leather and a hint of that cologne he always wore.

      The huge living room was cloaked in shadows and darkness, the only light coming from the embers still glowing in the fireplace. She could see Conn sitting in the massive armchair back in the shadows, head dropped back, eyes closed, one foot on the edge of the raised stone hearth. There was a bottle of Scotch beside his foot, open, maybe a quarter gone. A half-empty glass sat on the brass-and-hardwood table near his right hand. And there were papers scattered on the floor around him, the kind of rich, heavy velum that lawyers are so fond of using when they’re telling you bad news.

      She stood there for a moment or two, simply looking at him, feeling the pain emanating from him. Then she slipped off her jacket and draped it over the nearest chair and walked around behind him, reaching down to gently massage his temples.

      He gave a groan of pleasure and smiled, not opening his eyes. “My angel of mercy. I didn’t know if you’d come or not.”

      “You knew damned well I would come,” she told him bluntly. “I always come.”

      “True.” He reached up and caught her left hand in his, pulling it down and kissing her inner wrist. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, darlin’. You’re the only thing that makes sense in my world half the time. And by God the only thing I can count on.”

      “Best friends, remember?” Andie said it lightly as she walked around the chair and sat on the hearth, her fingers still meshed with his. He looked tired and slightly haggard in the dim light, and his smile was only halfhearted, obviously the best he could come up with. “You look like hell, Devlin. Have you had anything to eat tonight with that quarter bottle of Scotch?”

      Conn had to smile. Opening his eyes, he turned his head to look at her, liking, as always, what he saw. Even at five-thirty in the morning, in jeans and sweater and without a hint of makeup, she looked bandbox perfect, skin glowing, that mane of thick chestnut hair spilling around her shoulders brushed and gleaming. But that was Andie, always calm and serene and in control, never letting things get to her. Not even a jackass for a best friend.

      He gave her fingers a squeeze, then dropped her hand and leaned forward to brace his elbows on his knees, scrubbing his stubbled cheeks with his hands. His eyes were gritty and his tongue resembled flannel. He felt old and tired and worn around the edges, like an old sofa that’s been around too long.

      “I grabbed a sandwich this afternoon, I think....” His neck was stiff and he massaged it wearily. “Or maybe that was yesterday.”

      “Ah, the booze-and-self-pity diet,” Andie said dryly. “I have an idea! Maybe I can find some she-broke-my-heart-and-done-me-wrong music on the country station and you can sing along with it. That would be fun.”

      “Sure glad you came over,” Conn muttered, wishing his head would stop pounding. “I love it when you get all supportive and sympathetic like this.”

      “Hey, I’m here, aren’t I?” She gave his knee a rap with her knuckles. “How many other people do you know who’d get out of a warm bed at four-thirty in the morning to come over here and listen to you moan and groan?”

      “I’m not moaning and groaning,” Conn said through gritted teeth. “I’m celebrating. Every man has the right to celebrate a little when his divorce comes through. I’m a free man again. If that’s not reason to celebrate, I don’t know what is.” Except he didn’t feel like celebrating, Conn thought. He felt like crawling into a deep hole. And sleeping. Sleeping for about three months straight.

      “Oh, Conn.” Her voice was just a whisper, and he felt the touch of her fingertips on his cheek, his temple. Then her arms slipped gently around his neck and she knelt in front of him, holding him tightly, and Conn found himself hugging her ferociously, burying his face in her neck and breathing in the warm, female scent of her as if it were a healing nectar.

      “Conn, I’m sorry it didn’t work out, I really am,” she whispered. “I know you’d hoped it would this time. That everything would be perfect.”

      Conn smiled ruefully. “I’ll live, darlin’. And I feel like a damned fool, dragging you over here. When I read the papers this morning I figured, hey, I’m cool—it’s over and done with, and it’s what we both wanted. It’s not like it was some big surprise or anything. Then...” He shrugged, then kissed the side of her throat. “Hell, I don’t know. I just sort of crashed, I guess. Don’t ask me why. It’s not as though I loved her or anything.”

      “You did once,” Andie said softly, pulling back gently to look at him.

      “Did I?” Conn heard the bitterness in his own voice.

      “Well, you must have thought you did. Same thing.”

      “I’ve been sitting here for hours, trying to remember just what the hell I did feel back then. There must have been something. I mean, a man doesn’t marry a woman without feeling something, right?” He looked at Andie seriously. “It scares me a little sometimes. This is the second time, Andie. I can live with one divorce—when I married Liza, I was still young enough to figure all you needed was spectacular sex to keep you together.”

      He managed a fleeting smile, as much at Andie’s expression as at the memories. “But when I married Judith, I thought it was for keeps. I figured I knew what I was doing. That what we had was something that would last.” Another smile, slightly bitter this time. “Three years later she was gone. And I still don’t know what the hell went wrong. It just...faded. I remember waking up one morning and looking at her lying beside me and wishing I’d never even met her.”

      “But the sex was spectacular.”

      Conn had to grin. “Oh, yeah. The sex was spectacular. Right up to the end.”

      Andie’s gaze held his for a fraction of a second too long; then she looked away quickly, coloring very slightly, and stood up. “I’ll, um, make you some breakfast. I hope you put the coffee on like I told you.”

      “Yeah.” Conn nodded absently, watching her as she started gathering up the papers scattered around his chair. “Yeah, the coffee’s on.” Remembering, with sudden, unexpected vividness, of what it had been like with her.

      One weekend of heaven...that’s how he’d always thought of it. Three days of a kind of closeness he’d never experienced before or after. It was supposed to have been a getaway ski weekend up to Mount Baker. Just the four of them—Andie and her boyfriend, he and Sharon Newcombe.

      Then Andie and her boyfriend had split up two days before they were all supposed to leave. Conn had said there was no reason why she shouldn’t still go, considering there was plenty of room in the cabin they’d rented, and Sharon had exploded, shouting something about three being a crowd just before she stormed out, doors slamming.

      So he and Andie, both smarting from love gone wrong, had gone by themselves, although neither of them had anticipated the outcome. They’d come together like gasoline and flame and even now, twelve years later, he could feel his body stir slightly with just the memories of it.

      It had been a weekend of magic. But then they’d gotten back to the city and college and somehow—he never was sure why—the magic had vanished in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Sharon had turned up, contrite and apologetic, and it had been Andie’s turn to go storming off in a flurry of door slamming. He’d gotten that all sorted out about the time that college had let out, and Andie had headed down to San Francisco to take a summer job with her brother’s investment firm.

      He’d planned to go down after her and talk things out. But he and his college buddy, Bill Soames, started playing around with a new idea they’d had for a prototype computer, and pretty soon the summer was gone. When Andie came back, things seemed stilted and awkward between them. And then, out of the blue, she’d decided to move to New York and they’d all but lost touch with each other for almost a year.

      There was a hiss of sparks in the fireplace as a log settled, and Conn blinked, impatiently shaking himself free of

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