Every Breath You Take by Judith McNaught

table and offered it to him.
    “Are
you
being honest and direct?” he inquired with amusement, taking a roll from the basket. Despite his affable attitude, Kate had a sudden, inexplicable sensation of an undercurrent. He was playing cat and mouse with her, she knew, and he was obviously a world-champion “cat,” but she sensed that he wasn’t actually enjoying the game. Since her goal was to repay his wonderful kindnesses by making the rest of the evening as pleasant for him as she could, she put an end to the whole charade.
    Meeting his gaze, she said with quiet sincerity, “I didn’t do it on purpose. I was only pretending I did in order toget even with you for teasing me twice about the Bloody Mary.”
    Mitchell heard her words, but the softness in her eyes and the expression on her lovely face were interfering with the pathways to his brain, and he decided it didn’t matter if she’d done it on purpose. Then he realized she hadn’t, and that mattered much more than he thought it should. What sort of family, he wondered, in what city, on what
planet
, had yielded up this jaunty, prim, unpredictable woman with a wayward sense of humor, a heart-stopping smile, and a fierce passion for wounded mongrel dogs?
    Mitchell reached for his butter knife. “Where in the hell are you from?”
    “Chicago,” she said with a startled smile at his tone.
    He looked up so sharply and with such narrowed disbelief that Kate felt compelled to reaffirm and amplify her answer. “Chicago,” she repeated. “I was born and raised there. What about you?”
    Chicago
. Mitchell managed to smooth his distaste for her answer from his expression, but his guard was up. “I’ve never lived anywhere long enough to be ‘from’ there,” he replied, giving her the same vague answer that had always satisfied anyone who asked. The question was perfunctory anyway, he knew. People asked because it was a convenient conversational item among strangers. People never really cared what the answer was. Unfortunately, Kate Donovan was not one of those people.
    “What places did you live in when you were growing up—” she persevered, and teasingly added, “but not long enough to actually be ‘from’ any of them?”
    “Various places in Europe,” Mitchell replied, intending to immediately change the subject.
    “Where do you live now?” she asked, before he could.
    “Wherever my work takes me. I have apartments inseveral cities in Europe and New York.” His work occasionally took him to Chicago too, but he didn’t want to mention that to Kate, because he wanted to avoid the inevitable discussion about whom they might know in common. There was little chance she actually knew anyone within the Wyatts’ lofty social circle, but the Wyatt name was known to any Chicagoan who read a newspaper. Since Mitchell’s last name was also Wyatt, there was a chance Kate would ask him if he was related to those Wyatts, and the last thing he wanted to do was admit to that relationship, let alone discuss what it actually was.
    Kate waited for him to offer a clue as to what cities those apartments were in, or what his “work” was. When he didn’t, she assumed he wanted to skip those specific topics. That struck her as odd. In her experience, men loved to talk about their work and achievements. She didn’t want to pry into information Mitchell didn’t want to offer, but she couldn’t gracefully switch immediately to another topic, so she said instead, “No roots?”
    “None at all.” When she looked at him strangely, Mitchell said, “From the expression on your face, I gather you find that a little odd?”
    “Not odd, just difficult to imagine.” On the assumption that if she offered personal information freely, he might be inclined to follow suit, Kate said. “I grew up in the same Irish neighborhood I was born in. My father owned a little restaurant there, and for many years we lived in an apartment above it. At night, people in the