"Um, how's your sister doing?" I gabbled quickly, in an awkward attempt at a save.

"Pigeon-free, last I heard," Colin said dryly.

I did what any sensible, adult person would do. I slapped him on the arm. Then I giggled. "You know that's not what I meant."

I'm sure I was batting my eyelashes, too, but fortunately it was too dark for him to see. In the space of five minutes, I had regressed straight to middle school. It could have been worse. I could have been wearing leg warmers and a My Little Pony sweatshirt.

"You've seen her more recently than I have," Colin pointed out.

"By about two hours," I protested. Pammy had invited us all to an expat Thanksgiving dinner at her mother's posh town house in The Boltons, a quiet crescent in South Kensington. Needless to say, there wasn't anything the least bit expat about either Colin or his sister, but Pammy knew Serena from the all-girls school where they'd both gone to high school together, or whatever they call high school on this side of the Atlantic.

As for Colin…well, let's just say that Pammy had gotten fed up with my attempts to organize my love life for myself, and had decided to barge in, more like a charging herd of water buffalo than a fairy godmother. Bless the girl. All I could say was that it had worked. After all, I was here, wasn't I? More importantly, Colin was here.

" — the rest of the dinner?" he was saying.

"Oh, it was the usual thing," I said blithely. "We all ate until we felt ill, and then we had dessert."

Next to me, Colin chuckled, and I felt the boost of it go straight to my head, like a shot of Red Bull on an empty stomach. I was clever, I was charming, I was Super-Date!

Thus emboldened, I informed him, "It's not a proper Thanksgiving dinner unless you have to roll yourself groaning out the door at the end of the evening, swearing that you'll never eat again."

"I'm so sorry I missed it," he said blandly.

Making a face up at him, I made a big show of trying to recall what happened next. "Aside from the indigestion, you missed out on a great bit of social satire. All the financial people stared fishily at the fashion people and the fashion people made fun of the financial people."

"Which camp did you join?"

"Neither. Serena and I slunk off into the parlor and drank all the rest of the gin. We had a lovely chat."

Suddenly, the hand at my elbow had gone as limp as last week's lettuce. Trepidation came off him in waves. "Did you?"

"Oh yes," I said. "Serena told me all sorts of interesting things."

She hadn't, actually. Mostly, we'd talked about her job at a gallery, and then Pammy had barged in, and it had been all about Pammy's latest boy, who had gone off to Hong Kong and didn't seem likely to return. What with all that, there hadn't been much time for pumping Serena about Colin's childhood peccadilloes. But I was enjoying making Colin squirm.

In the shadows, I could see Colin mentally cycling through his catalogue of potential disasters. I was just grateful my own sister was safely on the other side of the Atlantic.

"Weren't we going to get dinner?" Colin asked hastily.

I made a mental note to myself to pump Serena for information in the not-so-distant future. Even better, I could have Pammy do it for me. With Pammy at hand, there's no need for thumbscrews. She could wring information from a turnip.

Taking pity on him, I indicated the quiet street around us with a sweeping gesture. "We seem to be in a restaurant-free zone. There's not even a Pizza Express in sight!"

"Impossible," returned Colin. "They're everywhere. I even have one under my pillow."

I wondered whether the pillow he was referring to was a Sussex pillow or a London pillow. The only times I'd seen him in London, he'd been staying with his great-aunt in Onslow Square, which would seem to imply that he didn't have a London flat of his own. There was the huge old family pile out in Sussex, a lovely Georgian mansion with a late Victorian library that I coveted with every last breath in my body, but it was hard to imagine someone our age actually living full time out in the country, all alone, in a house meant for a large family and hot-and-cold running servants.

"Are you staying with your aunt while you're here?"

"I usually do when I'm in town," he said, which didn't answer anything at all. I wanted to know what he did in town, where he lived when he wasn't in town, and what his views were on long distance relationships. Did London to Sussex count as long distance?

"Do you live at Selwick Hall full time?" I realized how silly it sounded the minute the words were out of my mouth. "Sorry. It's just that you don't usually see people without a family living out in a big house in the country. I mean, at least not in New York. Is London different?"

Damn. Open mouth, insert whole leg. Now I'd made it sound like he was some weird sort of family-less freak.

Fortunately, he took it in the spirit in which it was intended. "I used to live in London," he said easily. "Up until two years ago. I had a flat in Crouch End."

"I haven't been there," I said, just to say something.

"You aren't missing much. It's very modern, very trendy." He shrugged, in cynical commentary on life's little vagaries. "It seemed the thing to do at twenty-two."

"And then?" I asked.

"When my father died — " was it just me, or did his lips seem to pause over the words? "When my father died, someone had to look after the old place."

I touched a hand lightly to his forearm. "I'm so sorry."

"Don't be," he said lightly. He didn't make any effort to pretend that he didn't know what I was talking about. "It was a long time ago."

Two years ago. Not that long, in the grander scheme of things. I wondered if that had to do with why he was so inexplicably single — and why his sister was so painfully thin. Had there been a woman in the picture two years ago, back when he had the flat at Crouch End?

I couldn't even begin to imagine what sort of impact the death of a parent might have. Mine were both alive and well, back in New York, to be argued with over the phone, commiserated over with my little sister, and called whenever I needed reassurance, money, or both. I made a mental note to call them when I got home. Not because I needed money or reassurance. Just because.

"What did you do in the city before you moved?"

"I was in the City."

Hmm. I thought we'd already established that I knew he was in the city. "But what did you do there?"

"I worked in the City," Colin repeated. Then, as I stared blankly at him, his eyes crinkled at the corners in comprehension. "Not the city, as in London," he clarified. "I meant the City. The financial district. Like your Wall Street."

Who was it who said that Americans and Brits are divided by a common language? Well, whoever it was, they got it spot on.

"Oh," I said, feeling like an idiot. "Right. I knew that."

And I did — at least, I'd seen the term before, in books and magazines. The papers were always going on about scandals in the City. It's just that it's very hard to realize the difference when you don't have that convenient capital letter to clue you in.

"I never realized just how American I was till I got to England," I confessed. "So you did financial stuff?"

"Stuff was my specialty," teased Colin.

"Come on. That's not fair. How much do you ever really know about what other peoples' jobs are?" Warming to my theme, I waved my free hand in the air for emphasis. "I mean, my best friend's a lawyer, but I have no idea what she actually does, other than that she's always stuck in the office late, and her desk looks like it was eaten by a giant paper monster."

Colin looked bemusedly down at me. "A paper monster?"

"You know, big piles of paper." I sketched them out with one hand, like a mime with a nontraditional box.

"You have a very vivid way of putting things."

"Thank you. I think."

My compliment fishing went unrewarded. Instead of assuring me that I was the most amusing raconteuse he'd ever met, Colin said, "I know what you do."

I shook my hair back and said, just as archly. "Not all of it."

"Your secret life of crime?" speculated Colin. "Or are you undercover for the CIA?"

Considering that it's what I'd been wondering about him, it made me go redder than I'd otherwise have gone. I did notice that he had very cleverly routed the conversation away from his putative job in the City, and whatever it was he had done since. I'd have to get back to that once we'd had something to drink.

"Double-O Eloise? I don't think so. I'm just a humble Ph.D. student, trying to cobble together a dissertation before my committee kicks me out."

"Do you enjoy it?" he asked. He sounded like he meant it, like he really wanted to know.

"Sometimes more than others," I admitted.

We had been meandering quite slowly, along a quiet residential street lined with identical white-fronted town houses. Now, Colin slowed entirely to a stop, turning so that he was facing me.

He smiled right down at me in a way that made my graduate career seem like a purely academic topic. "And right now?"

"Right now I'm enjoying myself quite a lot," I murmured.

Anything louder than a murmur might have broken the fragile shell that surrounded us, that edged out the houses and the parked cars and the bustle of Bond Street just a few blocks away. We stood alone in the glow of a streetlamp, in a moment as round and perfect as the interior of a snow globe. It seemed perfectly natural when Colin reached out a hand to brush a strand of hair away from my eyes and tuck it behind my ear, and even more natural for his hand to linger against my cheek after the hair was safely tucked.