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"I've got her now, Mr. de Lasserre," he yelled, and someone ripped off her jeans and her panties and Edouard's face loomed over her, and his hands clasped her thighs and forced them apart—
The door crashed open. Miranda looked up and saw a miracle.
Conor!
She breathed his name, afraid to say it aloud, afraid it was a dream and not reality. But then he looked at her and said, "I'm here, baby," and she began to cry because he was real, and because she'd almost lost him.
She lost track of things after that. There was a lot of shouting and a blur of bodies, and she shut her eyes against it. When she opened them again, Edouard and Vince were both lying very still on the floor. Joey was on his knees in a corner, babbling incoherently.
And she was in Conor's arms.
"I love you," he whispered.
"I know," she whispered back, and she smiled through her tears and knew that she'd never have to be afraid again.
Epilogue
The house was big and old, and it still needed lots of repairs, even after almost five years.
You couldn't take a shower on a cold winter morning without running the risk of turning into an icicle, and the basement leaked if the rain was too heavy.
They'd put a lot of money into the place already and, as Conor sometimes said, they'd have to put in a lot more before it was all fixed up they way they wanted it. And Miranda would sigh and say, yes, he was right, and they'd look at each other and say, well, maybe they should sell this house and buy something newer, now that his law practice was beginning to do so well.
But each of them knew that they never would.
The house was big and old, and it needed work. But it rang with laughter and glittered with happiness, and it was the first real home either of them had ever known.
They loved it.
And they adored Susannah, who'd been born three years to the day after their wedding. Conor said it was a good thing their daughter looked like her mother because he'd feel sorry for any kid that looked like him, but now that Miranda was pregnant again, she lay in his arms in the dark of night, her hands lightly cupping her belly, dreaming of the little boy she carried, one she just knew would be the perfect image of his daddy.
Sometimes, on a summer's evening such as this, while she sat curled beside her husband on the creaky glider on the back porch, crickets chirping in the meadow and the baby tucked safely away in the nursery upstairs, she thought about what a miracle it was, that life had given her this chance at such happiness...
That it had given her Conor.
He was her passion and her strength, and his love had changed her life forever. Her past had faded away, even the kidnapping. Conor had made it happen, not just by loving her or rescuing her but by vanquishing all her ghosts. Edouard was dead and so was Vince Moratelli. Joey would be in prison until he was an old man.
As for Hoyt... she'd never seen him again. But Conor had, and a couple of days later, the papers had reported that Hoyt Winthrop had decided to decline the appointment offered him by the President and to sell his interest in his securities firm.
Winthrop, it was said, had decided to devote his money to good works and to lead a life of seclusion.
By some amazing coincidence, after Conor spoke with Eva, she, too, had opted to perform charitable deeds. The week after Hoyt turned down the ambassadorship, Papillon announced it was going to use the entire profit from its new cosmetics line, Chrysalis, to endow a fund for abused and neglected children.
"As a mother," Eva said, her eyes damp with emotion (but her mascara intact) during a Sixty Minutes segment, "I know how much it means to give a child a good start in life."
Miranda, who'd watched the televised interview from the safety of Conor's arms, had snorted with laughter.
"What an actress," she'd said. "She knows she couldn't buy this kind of publicity for Papillon at any price."
But tears had risen in her eyes and it had taken Conor to kiss them away.
Oh yes, Miranda thought as the old glider creaked and swayed, Conor O'Neil had surely changed her life.
She smiled, thinking how she had changed his.
Conor wasn't running around the world anymore, playing those dangerous games for Harry Thurston and the mysterious members of the Committee. Days after he'd rescued her, Conor had stumbled through an explanation of what it was he really did for a living and she'd let him, trying to look stern while she'd watched him blush, but it hadn't been much of a rev
elation. By then, she'd begun to figure things out and, to tell the truth, learning the man she loved was a man who worked just outside the law had delighted her—once he assured her he was giving it up.
