The First Kiss

by Grace Burrowes

  He directed her to a conversational grouping and took the chair beside her. She appreciated that about him too—he didn’t take the trappings of his profession to heart, didn’t use the big, pretentious desk to put distance between him and his clients, didn’t ask his paralegal to sit in and take notes for him.

  “What’s on your mind, lady? And don’t try to pretty it up. James warned me you might make an appointment, but he didn’t give me any details.”

  “May I congratulate you on your recent nuptials?” Because simply being here, in this office, made Vera’s chest feel tight and her palms itch.

  “You may,” Trent said, his smile bashful. That smile—not one Vera had seen on him before—completely undermined his GQ legal-eagle look, and made him more closely resemble James. “Not only did I marry the woman of my dreams, but she’s provided Merle with the sister of her dreams.”

  “Blended families can be a challenge, but you sound very happy.” Why didn’t they call them chopped, pureed, or frapped families? Blended sounded calm and smooth, though Vera’s experience with Donal and his children had been anything but.

  “I didn’t know it was possible to be this happy,” Trent said, “but it seems in poor taste to toot my marital bliss horn when your situation is so…different.”

  Weasel words—of course, he’d excel at weasel words. “I was happy too, Trent, once upon a time, and I’m not unhappy.”

  “How’s Twyla?” He would remember. He was a dad too, not only a lawyer.

  “Thriving, complaining that school is boring, angling for a dog.”

  “A dog might be a good idea.”

  No. It would not. Donal, of all people, liked dogs. “Why do you say that?”

  “You’re not exactly in a crowded subdivision, Vera, and dogs deter intruders.”

  The small talk was abruptly over—how had Trent done that?—and it was time for Vera to once again entrust her private business to a man she paid to care about it. At least he did care—not all lawyers would.

  “I suspect Donal of breaking the restraining order.”

  “In what regard?”

  She laid it out for Trent, and he took notes, asked questions, and when she plugged in her answering machine and played the last five messages for him, he listened.

  “You’re sure that’s Donal’s voice?”

  “I’d bet my vintage Steinway on it, but not Twyla.”

  “Something about it sounds different from Donal, though. What kind of home security do you have?”

  “Very stout locks on every door.” Now Vera had stout locks on every door. “I thought I had a decent electronic system too, but I deactivate it during the day if I’m home. You’re not rattling off motions and petitions and other lawyer-speak, Trent. Why not?”

  “Because we need proof.”

  He set his yellow notepad aside, though Vera had heard the word “we.” We meant she wasn’t crazy—and it meant more legal fees.

  “Donal doesn’t fit the profile of a serial abuser,” Trent said. “You had one incident of domestic violence, Vera, right at the time of separation, when it’s most likely to occur to any couple.”

  God spare me from attorneys playing devil’s advocate.

  “But Donal wouldn’t turn my money loose,” she said. “He wouldn’t let me take anything from the house except my piano, my computer, and our clothes. He damned near got me sued, because he booked performances knowing full well I was taking a hiatus.”

  Even reciting that litany had Vera’s pulse rate accelerating. She didn’t hate Donal, precisely, but she had a healthy loathing for the havoc he’d caused in her life.

  Trent opened the tin of cookies and held them out to her.

  Vera took one to be polite, though she felt like upending the entire tin.

  “Donal’s a first-class horse’s behind,” Trent said, munching on a cookie. “That doesn’t make him a stalker. Anybody could have gotten into your garage, and we’ll have a difficult time proving he’s leaving these messages.”

  A difficult, expensive time was what Trent meant.

  “So you want me to get an unlisted phone number? Stop all contact with his children? They’re teenagers, Trent, and their own mother hardly gave them the time of day before her last round of rehab. They call me, and they come visit, and I don’t want Twyla to think I’ve tossed them over the transom.”

  Though Vera had done that exactly. Left a pair of nearly motherless adolescents to deal with a man who was a stranger to charm on his good days. She got up, crossed the office, and pitched her uneaten cookie in the trash.

  “All I want is for you to take a few precautions.”

  Trent sounded so damned reasonable, Vera wanted to bean him with the rhododendron thriving on the windowsill. The plant had grown at least half a foot wider and taller since the last time she’d been in this office, while Vera felt as if her life had only contracted.

  “The ray of sunshine here,” Trent said, “is that you know to within a three-hour window when your tire was slashed. I’ll send a letter to Donal’s attorney, asking him to prove Donal’s whereabouts during that window, and threatening all manner of mischief if he can’t.”

  “That might help.” Vera hadn’t thought about the timing. Hadn’t been calm or logical enough to think it through. She resumed her seat, and perversely, now she wanted a damned cookie.

  Also a glass of cold milk.

  “You can afford the security cameras and motion sensors,” Trent said. “I’m guessing you don’t want to go that route.”

  He had a point. Trent Knightley was a good lawyer because the legalities never outran his common sense, but Vera resented his honesty mightily.

  Of course, she resented everything these days, from the privacy of her home, to Twyla’s chattering, to memories of James Knightley, whispering about hugs and kisses.

  Life had been easier when Vera had limited herself to practice rooms and concert halls.

  “I don’t want to put that much energy into squashing a bug,” she said. Or that much money—that much more money. “Even in that analogy, I’m thinking and talking like Donal does, in scarcity and survival terms. If I let that mindset take over, then I’ll have nothing left for my music.”

  Trent sat back and considered her, and Vera knew the urge to squirm. God help his daughter’s eventual boyfriends if they brought the young lady home ten minutes late.

  “Are you playing again?”

  “I practice.” Vera busied her hands with packing up her answering machine. “I teach as many as a dozen lessons some weeks. I haven’t booked any performances, and I don’t know if I ever will again. Traveling and being a single parent don’t mix.”

  Being a single parent and being broke didn’t mix well either, though for now, Vera was doing well enough.

  “You’re a pianist, Vera. I can’t imagine you being content without occasionally making music for an appreciative audience. DC, Baltimore, Richmond, Philly, Pittsburgh, even New York—they’re all within driving distance and full of concert halls.”

  “You didn’t push this before.” Vera’s decision to take a hiatus from performing didn’t come anywhere near qualifying as a legal issue, and yet, she’d had no one to discuss it with save Olga. “Why bring it up now?”

  Trent put the lid back on the cookie tin. Vera had chosen the Winnie the Pooh tin for this batch because Trent often wore whimsical ties.

  “A performance,” he said, “even one booked two years in advance, will give you something to look forward to and take your mind off Donal’s stupid maneuvers. Anticipating a professional future will make you stronger, in a sense, and less vulnerable, like a good security system.”

  “Very subtle, Trent, but you forget: Donal was my agent, and I wouldn’t know the first thing about booking a gig. I was the talent. I came. I sat down. I played. All the contractual baloney,
the fine print, the business details were beyond me, and I liked it that way.”

  She got to her feet, because the legal discussion was over, not because her lawyer was being too damned perceptive about matters outside the courtroom.

  “So make a few phone calls,” he said, rising. “Or I can make them. James is bound to know somebody in DC who does entertainment law, and they can hook you up with a new agent.”

  James could hook her up? “That’s a very kind offer, but no thank you. I’m not ready.”

  He escorted her to the door—or followed her. “Your fans won’t care if you play the ‘Maple Leaf Rag.’”

  “I like the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’—it’s tricky, in its way, but I mean I’m not ready inside.” She tapped her chest. “My technique is benefiting from time working on the basics, but the rest of me…”

  The rest of Vera, as had been made clear over the weekend, was a nervous, cranky, ungracious, defensive wreck. She’d even gone so far as to draft a note of apology to James, then realized she’d have to send it to him at the office, where a secretary might open it.

  “Yours was not a cordial divorce,” Trent said when she trailed off. “Give it time, and then give it more time. I’ll let you know what Donal’s lawyer says, and thanks for the cookies.”

  He held her coat for her, held the door, and walked her out toward the reception area, but they took a left when she was used to taking a right, passing through a suite of offices she didn’t recognize.

  “Beulah, is James in?” Trent asked an older lady at a secretarial station.

  “He’s working on some indemnity language for those doctors, Trent. He worked through lunch, so approach with caution.”

  “Trenton Edwards Knightley—” Vera began.

  “That will teach me to leave my diplomas hanging where anybody can see them. Come along.” He took Vera gently by the wrist and towed her into James’s office.

  “Greetings, James, it’s time you took a break from the dreaded indemnity clause.”

  “Damn it, Trent—” James slapped some fat volume closed and was on his feet before Vera could beat a retreat. “Vera Waltham. Hello.”

  This was his jungle, his briar patch, and he looked right at home in it.

  The steel-blue suit had to have cost a pretty penny, the tie was silk, possibly Hermès—blue with an abstract pattern of intersecting red snaffle bits—and the loafers looked like Gucci’s. Vera recognized the same scent she’d picked up on in her driveway. Sage with notes of smoke and spice, a masculine do-me fragrance if ever she’d inhaled one.

  Expensive, maybe even a custom blend.

  “We have a question,” Trent said, his fingers around Vera’s wrist still, preventing her from pelting out of the office at a dead run.

  “Shoot,” James said, settling back against the front of his desk. “I might have an answer.”

  “Vera needs to talk to somebody who handles entertainment contracts. Any ideas?”

  From the gleam in Trent’s eyes, Vera had an awful suspicion that James was an expert on entertainment law.

  “Let me give it some thought. I’m in touch with half my law school class, and several of them had their sights on entertainment law. It’s an interesting field.”

  “You have Vera’s number?” Trent asked.

  “I can get it from the file.”

  “Great. Vera, I’ll be in touch, and you should consider that security system. It could get you the proof you need much more quickly than we’ll find it otherwise.”

  Just like that, Vera’s attorney, her zealous advocate, the man she entrusted with her dirty laundry and her personal fortune shamelessly deserted her in enemy territory.

  “He means well,” James said, closing the door after his brother. “I’d apologize for him, but I can’t recall Trent pulling a stunt like this before.”

  So Trent had ambushed them both. Maybe that explained why they were both smiling.

  “I have two brothers,” Vera said. “They get odd notions, brothers do. Your office is different from Trent’s.”

  “Different how?”

  “Sleek where his is cozy, a little intimidating where his is comforting.” Her gaze lit on a small colorful painting on the wall beside his desk, a luminous image of flowers adorning a country porch. “That’s a signed original?”

  “I inherited it, so don’t ascribe any good taste to me. I do like it, or I wouldn’t hang it.”

  When a student wasn’t prepared for a lesson, they found endless ways to talk about the pieces they hadn’t spent enough time working on. Vera had no patience with their prevarications, or with her own.

  “About the entertainment law thing? You can forget it.”

  “All right,” James said, without an instant’s hesitation, which should not have been a disappointment.

  “Just like that? Your brother came close to browbeating me over it.”

  “Trent’s in love. He wants everybody to be as happy as he and Hannah are. Give it a few years, and he’ll be as grumpy as the rest of us.”

  “Is that why you’re not married?” Vera peered at James, past the French designer tie, the Italian shoes, and Savile Row tailoring, to the shrewd country boy—hiding?—beneath. “You don’t believe in romance?”

  “I believe in romance,” he said, uncrossing his arms. “Sometimes I think I’m the last man standing who does, but marriage is hard, and I don’t have to quote the divorce statistics at you. Trent’s department turns away business.”

  “So you’ll not even make the attempt? Do you ever intend to marry?” Why did his answer matter, when Vera wouldn’t see him again after today?

  “I don’t know,” James said, touching a corner of the painting’s frame. “I haven’t thought much about it. I assume you’re soured on the whole marriage thing?”

  “Your assumption is in error.” Vera’s answer surprised her and had one corner of James’s mouth kicking up. “I had a good marriage the first time out. We weren’t passionately in love, by any means, but we were a team, and we respected each other. Donal was a bad choice made out of grief and inexperience. I’m older and wiser now.”

  And buckets less confident.

  James left off fussing his inheritance. “So it’s me you don’t approve of? You intend to get back on the horse. I’m simply not a suitable mount?”

  Had he set her up for that question, as if she were a hostile witness on cross-examination? But, no, Vera had put her own foot in her own mouth.

  “I don’t disapprove of you. I…someday, I might remarry, but not… I’m not ready.” Not ready for even a hamster, for God’s sake.

  James blatantly watched while a blush spread up Vera’s neck and across her cheeks. When she was well and truly mortified, he offered her a shameless smile and winged an arm at her.

  “While I’m enjoying this conversation immensely, I have three pages of insurance clauses to get through by midnight. I’ll walk you to your car.”

  She took his arm, as if they were mincing up the aisle at some society wedding, and let him lead her through the building and out to her truck.

  “I will not ask you if you’ve replaced your spare yet, and I will not ask you why Trent wants you to get a security system, and I will not point out that a dog would be a lot cheaper and more fun,” he said as she stowed her gear.

  “Good of you.”

  James leaned close again, exactly as he’d done in her driveway. Vera studied his gold tie tack—a rearing lion—rather than close her eyes and inhale through her nose.

  “But, Vera, I will tell you I’ve been thinking about that hug I didn’t cadge, and that kiss I didn’t steal.”

  Vera had thought about them too. She continued to think about them all the way to the tire shop, all through the afternoon’s lessons, and then all the way home.

  Chapter 5

  Donal Ma
cKay considered himself a patient man. He’d waited years to snatch Veracity Winston from Alexander Waltham’s overprotective managerial clutches, and the wait had been worthwhile, at least for a time.

  Waiting for his attorney to finish reading some damned letter was not worthwhile.

  “What does it say?”

  Aaron Glover, Es-damned-squire, shoved the letter under Donal’s nose.

  “I swear, Donal, if you’re tormenting that woman, I will drop you flat, and that will send a signal to any lawyer you attempt hire in this town. They will ask first if you’ve paid off my bill, and when you say yes, they will call me to catch you in the lie. They will ask next if you and I parted on tolerable terms, and when I hem and haw and say everything but yes, the lawyers willing to touch your domestic troubles will be rubes fresh out of law school or the nearly disbarred and suspended.”

  Donal tuned out the sermon—what was it that made lawyers feel like they alone, of all God’s flawed creatures, were entitled to lecture and remonstrate?—and scanned the letter.

  “It isn’t me,” Donal said, passing the letter back. “Tell her pet barracuda to back off. The last thing I want to do is antagonize that woman.”

  Aaron Glover stood and glared down at his client. “Don’t hand me a line of bull, Donal. You want to intimidate the hell out of her, push her around, and generally act like you own her, but I’m tired of telling you slavery was outlawed in this country some time ago.”

  Slavery had been outlawed in Scotland long before the colonials took an entire war to settle the matter.

  “I was her agent,” Donal replied quietly, though he wanted to shout. “Everything I did was to further her career. You think classical music is big money, Glover? You think the concert halls fill up like they did fifty years ago?”

  “Stow it,” Glover said, pacing to the office window and turning his back on his client. For that alone, Donal would have fired him.

  Would have, back when he was agenting the hottest classical musician to take the stage in twenty years.