"Are you hungry?" he asked.
"No." How could she be hungry? Her nerves were so tightly drawn that she didn't think she would be able to eat until they got out of here.
"Well, I am." He tore open the wrapping on the big blueberry muffin and began eating. "Tell me about your marriage."
She stiffened and glared at him. "It wasn't a good marriage," she said tightly. "It also isn't any of your business."
He glanced pointedly at the floor where they had so recently made love. "That's debatable. Okay, let's try it this way. I'll tell you about my marriage if you'll tell me about yours. No evasion tactics. I'll answer any question you ask."
She stared at him in shock. "Your marriage?"
He shrugged. "Sure. Hell, I'm thirty-seven years old. I haven't lived my entire life in a vacuum."
"You have your nerve!" she flared. "You jumped down my throat for not talking about my past marriage when you've only now mentioned your own?"
He rubbed the side of his nose and gave her a faintly sheepish look. "That occurred to me," he admitted.
"Well, let me put another thought in your dim Neanderthal brain! The time for heart-to-heart confi- dences was over a long time ago. We aren't involved any longer, so there's no point in 'sharing.'"
He took another bite of the muffin. "Don't kid yourself. What we just did felt pretty damn involved to me."
"That was just sex," she said dismissively. "It had been a while, and I needed it."
"I know exactly how long it had been." His blue gaze sharpened, and she knew he hadn't liked her comment. "You haven't gone out with anyone else since you walked out on me."
She was enraged all over again. "Have you had me followed?" He had, but he wasn't about to tell her that now. Instead he said, "Chickie worries because your social life, in her words, resembles Death Valley--nothing of interest moving around."
Elizabeth snorted, but she was mollified, because she had heard Chickie make that exact comment on a couple of occasions. Still, she would have to have a word with her about discretion.
"I've been busy," she said, not caring if he believed her or not, though it happened to be the truth. She had deliberately been as busy as she could manage in order to give herself less free time to think about him.
"I know. You've found a lot of lilies to gild."
Her teeth closed with a snap. "That's so people will have a reason to install your fancy security systems. I gild the lilies, and you protect them."
"I protect people," he clarified.
"Uh-huh. That's why you set up so many security systems for people who live in rough neighborhoods, where their lives are really in danger."
"I can see we aren't going to agree on this."
"You brought it up."
"My mistake. Let's get back to the original subject, namely our respective failed marriages. Go ahead, ask me anything you want."
The perfect response, of course, was that she wasn't interested. It would also be a lie, because she was not only interested, she was suddenly, violently jealous of that unknown, hitherto unsuspected woman who had been his wife, who had shared his name and his bed for a time, and who had been, in the eyes of the world, his mate. Elizabeth firmly kept her mouth closed, but she couldn't stop herself from glaring at him.
Quinlan sighed. "All right, I'll tell you the boring facts without making you ask. Her name was Amy. We dated during college. Then, when college was finished, it seemed like we should do adult things, so we got married. But I was away on my job a lot, and Amy found someone in the office where she worked who she liked a lot better. Within six months of getting married we knew it had been a mistake, but we held out for another year, trying to make it 'work,' before we both realized we were just wasting time. The divorce was a relief for both of us. End of story."
She was still glaring at him. "I don't even know where you went to college."
He sighed again. She was getting damn tired of that sigh, as if he were being so noble in his dealings with an irrational woman. "Cal Tech."
"Ah." Well, that explained his expertise with electronics and computers and things.
"No children," he added. "I should hope not!" It was bad enough that he had, for some reason, concealed all the rest of the de- tails of his life. "If you'd kept children hidden, I would never have forgiven you."
His eyes gleamed. "Does this mean you have?"
"No."
He gave a startled shout of laughter. "God, I've missed you. You don't dissemble at all. If you're grouchy, you don't feel any need at all to make nice and pretend to be sweetness and light, do you?"
She gave him a haughty look. "I'm not sweetness and light."
"Thank God," he said fervently. He leaned back and spread his hands, then stretched his long, mus- cular legs out before him in a posture of complete relaxation. "Okay, it's your turn. Tell me all the deep, dark secrets about your marriage."
Chapter Seven
"Show-and-tell was your idea, not mine." Her throat tightened at the idea of rehashing the details, reliving the nightmare even in thought. She just couldn't do it.
"You asked questions."
"I asked where you went to college, hardly the same as prying into your private life." Agitated, she stood up and longingly looked through the huge windows to the world outside. Only two thin sheets of transparent material kept her prisoner here with him, but it would take a car ramming into the glass at respectable speed to break it. The glass looked fragile but wasn't, whereas she was the opposite. She looked calm and capable, but inside she hid a weakness that terrified her.