Always a Thief - Kay Hooper [50]
“Yes. And you were right to be doubtful of it.” They had reached the coffee shop by then, and Quinn stopped on the sidewalk and turned to look down at her with a faint, rueful smile. “It was nothing so . . . romantic or quixotic, sweet, not a decision made in the heat of some painful emotion. I made a conscious, carefully thought-out, cold-blooded choice. No apologies. No regrets.”
Morgan sighed and let go of his arm. “I need a cup of coffee.”
His smile went even more crooked. “I'm not making it easy for you, am I?”
“No. But then—you never said you would.” She tried to sound humorous about it.
Quinn gazed at her upturned face for a moment, then bent his head and kissed her. It was a brief kiss but by no means light, and Morgan would have melted against him except that his hands were on her shoulders holding her still. When he lifted his head rather abruptly, she had the dazed impression that he said something a bit profane under his breath, but she didn't quite catch it.
He turned her briskly toward the door of the coffee shop and said, “You may not have realized, but it's nearly eleven.”
Morgan allowed herself to be steered, but she heard the telltale frustration in her voice when she said, “Can't you take a night off?”
“Not this night—but I'll see what I can do about the future.”
Once they were inside and seated at a small table in the crowded shop, Morgan wasn't quite sure which way the conversation would go, but Quinn was definite. To her surprise, he wanted to talk about her.
“My family?” She looked at him bemusedly. “Why do you ask?”
“It's all a part of the boy-meets-girl stuff,” he told her in a grave tone. “I just realized I know practically nothing about your background.”
So, still a little mystified, Morgan briefly described a life that, to her, had always seemed quite ordinary. A middle-class upbringing as an only child; her parents' deaths in a car accident when she was eighteen and the modest inheritance that had put her through college; summer archaeological digs in various parts of the world; the jobs and positions she'd taken over the years.
“You've been alone a long time,” he noted.
She nodded. “I guess—six years since college.” Gazing at him steadily, she added in a deliberate tone, “I was briefly engaged once, the summer before graduation.”
“What happened?”
Morgan had never told anyone about this, but she found the words coming easily now, so easily that it startled her. “He was another archaeology student, we seemed to have everything in common. I thought so, anyway. But there were warning signs—and I should have paid attention.”
“Warning signs?”
“Mmm. He liked to see me dress a certain way—in clingy sweaters, for instance, and short skirts. His thoughts and opinions seemed to be more important than mine. In fact, he never wanted to talk to me about anything that mattered to me—even archaeology. He was always telling me I should wear my hair up or use more eye makeup or a different perfume.”
Morgan shook her head and managed a smile. “Eventually I realized that who I was didn't matter to him—just what I looked like. And how I looked on his arm. He thought all his friends envied him because I looked . . .”
“Sexy?” Quinn supplied quietly.
“I guess. It was something I didn't want to believe about him, that he could be so . . . superficial. But, when we went back to school in the fall for our senior year, they gave us an I.Q. test.”
“And you scored higher than he did?” Quinn guessed.
Morgan looked down at her coffee cup, frowning a little as she remembered. “Twenty points higher. At first, he didn't believe it. He kept saying somebody must have screwed up the test. I finally lost my temper and told him I'd scored high before and that the results were accurate. Then he—he just looked at me in shock. His eyes moved up and down over me in total incredulity, and he couldn't seem to say a word. So I did. I gave him back his ring and said good-bye.”
“Morgana?”
She looked across the table at Quinn.
“Any man who could look at you