Janet raised one over-plucked eyebrow and gave Susan a pointedly sympathetic look. "Oh, I'm sorry, dear. I think you must have misheard me when I made that comment."

"No, I'm pretty sure I didn't," Susan replied with perfect aplomb. "But let's just say that perhaps you mis-spoke, and leave it at that, shall we?" She returned her concentration to her cake and began to eat.

Janet, who had eschewed the waiter's offer of cake, took a moment to reload her guns and then turned toward Alex. "What did you say your name was? Alex? Hmm, that sounds rather mannish, but I guess in your life of work . . ." she broke off, having gotten her point across.

"You can call her Alexandra if it really bothers you that much, Janet," Bobby said politely. Alex just gave the woman the ditzy smile she usually saved for chauvinistic suspects.

"Thank you, Bobby. Now," Janet said, deliberately injecting a note of false excitement into her voice and continuing to look at him rather than Alex, "tell us all about your engagement! I'd just love to hear the story of who proposed to who."

Around the table, eyes widened and then fell on the couple under Janet's fire.

The two detectives froze and looked at each other. They had forgotten that Alex had gone overboard on Janet and presented herself as Bobby's fiance, and now it was coming back to haunt them. After a second, Alex moved her head slightly to the left, a signal that only he would pick up: their signal that said Go on and make up a story, I'll follow your lead, a signal that they often fell back on while undercover.

Bobby smiled slightly and looked back at the table. Under the table, he pulled Alex's hand, palm up, onto his knee and began tracing random letters and shapes on her skin; above the table, he gave her his best attempt at a besotted smile and said, "It was . . . it was the, uh, end of the hundredth case we solved together and we had pulled an all-nighter to close it. We, uh . . ." He stopped and tried desperately to think of how he would propose to his partner if he were ever to actually do it.

"We went to my place for a celebratory breakfast, didn't we?" Alex supplied as he faltered.

"Yes, right! We went to Alex's apartment and I told her I would cook." Good, Bobby. Stick with the truth as much as possible, and keep the rest simple. "Uh, pancakes. That's what it waspancakes. She likes, uh, whipped cream on hers . . ."

"Lots of whipped cream," she agreed, wondering where the hell he was going with this story and how he was going to spin a tale to explain the lack of a ring.

"I swore off cream products when I turned thirty," Janet broke in. "They're just horrible for the . . . middle-aged figure, don't you think, Alex?"

"I eat 'em all the time, and I haven't put on a pound," Alex said brightly. It wasn't entirely true - who has a baby without putting on at least a few pounds? - but it seemed to shut Janet up quite effectively.

Bobby waited a second longer to see if Janet had any other remarks, then went on with his story: "So I made the pancakes and, uh . . . wait, I have to back up. I forgot the ring. That's important."

"Damn right it is!" Susan said. "The women need details."

He blinked. "Right. Well uh, see, when I was in the Army I spent some time in Italy, and I happened to make friends with a retired master jeweler there. So when I, uh, decided to do it - this, with her - I asked him if he'd come out of retirement just that once."

Alex, with half her mind on his finger stroking her palm and the other half on his story, wondered how much of that was true. Given his predilection for languages, she was inclined to believe at least the part about him being in Italy, and meeting a jeweler wouldn't be that farfetched given the circles he probably socialized in. She made a mental note to ask him later.

"So he and I worked out the, uh, design of the thing and he started working on it. But it, uh, he wasn't ready by the time I needed it, so I, uh . . ." He glanced at Alex, thinking fast. "I hijacked one of the rings we use when we go undercover as a couple and decided to use it as a stand-in." He paused. "I washed it really well before putting it in her food."

Alex would have spit her mouthful water across the table if she hadn't been lucky enough to have just swallowed it when he made that statement. As it was, she shut her eyes and made a sound somewhere between a choke and a laugh. Bobby took his hand out from under the table to pat her on the back. "Sorry," she choked. "Just the way you said that . . ."

He kissed her temple casually, as if he did it every day. "Glad to brighten your day. So," he said, turning back to the group that was watching them and returning his hand to Alex's under the table, "I, uh, put the stand-in ring on top of her pancakes and then covered it with whipped cream."

"He's lucky I have a tendency to let the whipped cream melt before I eat it, or I might have swallowed the damn thing," Alex added. Apparently I also have a tendency to melt, myself, when kissed by my partner...

He flushed slightly. "Well you know I, uh, don't have a lot of practice at this."

"That's not what I've heard," Janet murmured. All nine of the table's other occupants studiously ignored her.

Alex couldn't help it; she reached up and ruffled his hair. "You're blushing, Bobby."

He gave her a dirty look, pulled her hand off his head, and held on to it. "Why don't you tell them the rest of it?" he told her, a hint of smugness in his smile. "I'm sure you can describe your reaction better than I can."

She gave him a glare that told him he was serious danger of losing a body part or two, but managed to plaster on a smile for their audience. "I thought he had dropped something into the pancake batter by accident," she began slowly, starting to pick up steam as she went. "So I pulled it out of my whipped cream and wiped it off and saw it was one of our work rings. I believe my exact words to him were 'What the hell's this doing here?' And he did that kind of head-down-kicking-at-the-dirt thing he does when he doesn't want to answer a question . . ."

She had to pause when Annie and Dan looked at each other and started laughing. "What?" she asked, giving them a curious look when they started to calm down.

Annie shook her head. "It's just . . . we know that look, but we could never describe it, and you just did. Perfectly."

"Oh." She glanced at Bobby, who was, in fact, doing a fair imitation of that look at the moment, except without the dirt-kicking. "Guess it's true that men never change," she said with a grin. "Anyway, so he did the avoidance thing and turned red and I thought about it for a second and figured out for myself what it was doing there."

He sighed loudly. "And then she looked over at me, stood up, held the ring up in front of my nose, and said, 'Are you trying to propose to me with a used bronze ring that doesn't even belong to you?'"

It was Alex's turn to blush; that was probably very close to what she would have done in such a scenario.

Bobby, noticing this, squeezed her hand and smiled. "Like you said earlier, Oli," he said, looking up at his friend, "she's a hardass, but a pretty one. But so I, uh, I think I . . . I stammered something about Vincenzo and the ring still being made and she just stared at me."

"Then he just turned around and left the room," Alex said, "leaving me standing there wondering whether I'd just crushed all his hopes and dreams." He'd called her pretty? Or had Oli called her pretty? She needed to run this lead down later.

Bobby glanced at her, easily guessing what she was setting up, and picked up the description where she left off: "But I'd actually gone to get the sketch of the ring and when I got back to the kitchen she was sitting back at the table stabbing at her pancakes . . ."

"Searching them for any other debris," she corrected him primly.

". . . ok, 'searching for debris' in her pancakes, and I put the sketch down in front of her. She promptly, uh, dropped her fork on it. Her sticky fork."

"Well, you caught me by surprise!"

"That was the point of the whole thing," he reminded her. "But after the fork was disposed of, and I convinced her that she wasn't going to have to wear the ugly thing from work for the rest of her life, she . . . she, uh . . ."

"Said yes," Alex supplied.

He nodded. "Right."

There was loud silence at their table for a moment, and then Oli looked around at the group. "Did anyone else notice that they were finishing each other's sentences?"

"What's wrong with that?" Alex asked.

"There's nothing really wrong with it, Alex," Susan said with a grin. "It's just that most people don't know what he's saying even after he finishes the sentence."

Alex glanced over at him, noting that he had stopped his usual fidgeting and was staring at his hands. She looked back up at Susan and reminded herself that the woman had meant no harm, so it would do no good to snap at her. "Bobby's perfectly comprehensible," she said calmly. "It's just that you have to listen to him to understand him, and a lot of people don't bother."

Janet snorted.

Annie looked thoughtful.

Dan whispered something about "expensive chocolates" to Oli.

Bobby blinked and looked up at Alex, who gave him a tiny smile and squeezed his hand under the table. When he opened his hand, she allowed her fingers to slide between his and his hand to swallow hers.

As the dinner plates were cleared from around them, Bonnie Green took the microphone and reminded everyone that there would be dancing in the adjoining room, beginning in five minutes.