by JoAnn Ross
"Shame on you for talking that way," she scolded lightly. "Why, you're not at all old, Teddy." She took hold of both his hands, allowing her slender white ones to rest in his blue-veined ones slightly longer than necessary. Arthritis had swollen his knuckles, but his grip remained firm and sure. "On the contrary, you are just reaching your prime."
A pleased flush rose from his white collar. "That's a vast exaggeration, Miranda," he said, "but since, like most men, I plead guilty to being highly susceptible to feminine flattery, I won't argue with you."
"It isn't flattery at all. It's true," she lied deftly. "And I know it's very naughty of me to call you on such late notice, but I must be returning to London soon, and I'm so very concerned about Aunt Eleanor."
He frowned. "I do hope she hasn't had another occurrence of that heart problem."
"Oh, no, nothing like that, thank goodness," Miranda hastened to assure him. "But she has been behaving quite strangely lately. I felt it prudent to obtain advice."
His fuzzy white eyebrows lifted above the rim of his reading glasses. "Legal advice?"
"Not really." She lowered her eyes to the faded carpet, as if trying to frame her answer. "Actually," she murmured as she met his waiting gaze again, "I came to you, Teddy, because you're her dearest friend. And I'm terribly afraid Aunt Eleanor is going to need all the friends she can get."
"Oh, my. This does sound ominous."
"Wait until you hear the entire story."
They lunched at the Polo Lounge, where it was apparent that the attorney enjoyed being seen in the company of a much younger, attractive woman. Miranda knew he'd been widowed for nearly as long as he'd been running the office without a partner. Her spies had also told her that for the past decade, he'd been living a scholarly, celibate existence more suited to a Trappist monk than a rich attorney in Lotus Land.
Well, that would soon change. Teddy Galbraith didn't know it, she thought with an inward smile as she refilled their glasses from a second bottle of Tattinger champagne, but he was about to get lucky.
They were both slightly tipsy when her driver finally returned them to his office. Teddy more than her. But she'd been careful that he hadn't gotten too drunk. She definitely hadn't wanted to render the elderly attorney impotent.
"I can't believe Eleanor's involved in the mumbo jumbo spirit world," he said for the umpteenth time. He'd been upset by Miranda's description of the séances, not to mention the suspicious circumstances surrounding the deaths of Clara Kowalski's former husbands. "She's always been such a sensible woman."
"I know. That's what makes her behavior all the more bizarre," Miranda agreed earnestly.
It was late afternoon. His secretary had gone for the day, leaving them alone in the office. Miranda sat down on the leather sofa and crossed her legs.
For a moment he seemed tempted to join her on the couch. She smiled to herself as he overcame the temptation and chose the high-backed chair behind his desk, instead. If he thought that wide expanse of oak was going to protect him, she mused wickedly, the old dear was sadly mistaken.
"I do wish there was something, anything, we could do," she murmured.
He ran a hand over his head, ruffling his wispy white hair, torn between dual loyalties. "I agree this is worrisome, Miranda." Unaccustomed to drinking in the middle of the day, his tongue felt thick and awkward, forcing him to speak slowly.
"But as I've already explained, what you've told me this afternoon, as upsetting as it admittedly is, is simply not enough for a judge to rule in your favor."
She leaned forward, giving him an unrestricted view of her cleavage. "But what if that horrid Mrs. Kowalski has convinced Aunt Eleanor to change her will? What if Eleanor's going to give the old witch control of Lord's? What if Clara is plotting to kill my aunt?"
Sexual feelings he'd successfully locked away in cold storage long ago stirred. With obvious effort, he dragged his gaze from those perfect white globes.
"Miranda, I'm sorry." His voice was strained. Even with the extra effort, he knew he was slurring his words. "You know I can't discuss your aunt's will."
"I understand all about attorney/client privilege." She rose and crossed the room with a smooth, pantherlike stride. "But you have to understand how very, very important this is to me, Teddy."
She knelt beside his chair, wrapping him in a cloak of obsession as she gazed up into his round, red-cheeked face, her green eyes gleaming with implied sex.
"If I could only have a teensy little peek." She ran a seashell pink fingernail up his leg. "To reassure myself."
"Miranda, dear." His voice was rough, choked. "I'd like to help you, but I truly can't."
"I'd be ever so grateful." Her stroking touch grazed the fly of his very un-Californian chalk-striped trousers, kindling embers he'd thought long dead. Her eyes locked on his as she deliberately unfastened his belt. "You've no idea how extremely grateful I can be." Her tongue slid wetly over her glossy lips.
She slowly lowered the zipper. When her palm brushed against the front of his baggy, old-fashioned boxer shorts, he jumped as if she'd touched a hot wire to his flesh.
"I can't," he tried again, clearly torn between dual needs. "It would be a breach of ethics."
"I promise no one will ever know." When she began stroking the flaccid flesh beneath the white cotton fly, he leaned his head against the back of his chair and closed his eyes.
"Miranda…" He wanted her to stop. He wanted her never to stop. His head spun, his body burned.
With a deft, practiced touch, she freed his semierect penis. "Just a glimpse, Teddy." She bent her blond head and kissed it lightly, making him groan. "That's all I want." Her tongue darted catlike across the tip.
"Oh, God." It had been years since he'd known a woman's touch, and Theodore Galbraith was loath to stop the glorious feeling flowing through his veins, like a hot, wet summer storm after a long season of drought.
His arthritic hands curled around the wooden arms of his executive chair. He thought he'd burst into tears when she suddenly stopped her sweet torment.
"I'll make you a deal, Teddy."
"What kind of deal?" he croaked.
His head spun, his body throbbed, and at that moment he would have done anything she asked. He would have crawled naked to Bel Air and back over broken glass. He would have betrayed every client he still had. He would have committed murder for such rapturous ecstasy.
"I'll be nice to you." She licked her glossy lips. "And you be nice to me in return. It will be our little secret."
"Our little secret," he echoed, watching her pink tongue with fascination.
It was an astonishing performance. Theodore Galbraith hadn't always been a celibate sixty-eight-year-old man. Indeed, in his salad days he'd sampled some of the best sex Hollywood had to offer.
But never had he experienced anything that equaled Miranda Lord. He'd heard rumors over the years that she was a woman of uninhibited sexual appetites. Those rumors, he was discovering to his delight, were absolutely true.
"I won't whisper a word to anyone." She bent her head and touched her lips to his dry ones, kissing him with little licks and nips that promised so much more. At the same time, she pressed her palm against his throbbing shaft.
Yes, a truly remarkable performance, he thought. And ultimately irresistible. "You'll have to read it here."
His surrender was rewarded with a satisfied, feline smile that told the attorney she'd never expected any other outcome.
"Whatever you say, Teddy, dear."
She kissed him then. A deep, wet, soul kiss that took his breath away. Although he was trembling with hunger, with need, Theodore grew frustrated when his penis remained only semierect.
That wasn't about to deter Miranda. "Don't worry," she crooned silkily. "I'll take care of everything." She ran her fingers through his thin hair and treated him to a warm, intimate smile. "You just relax, Teddy, dear. And enjoy."
With those confidence-building words ringing in his ears, she went to
work, alternating gentle bites and long licks, covering his shaft with saliva, sucking the tip, while massaging his testicles with cleverly wicked fingers.
His blood began pounding in his veins, his ears, his now straining cock. It crossed his mind that although his penis had risen to the challenge, his galloping heart was still that of an old man.
It didn't matter, he decided as she finally placed her wet mouth fully over him, taking him in deeper than any woman ever had. As he bucked furiously, thrusting himself into that glorious, moist cavern, he decided that if this turned out to be his time to die, he couldn't think of a better way to go.
Coherent thought disintegrated, and with one final mighty spasm he exploded.
When he could think again the room was redolent with the raunchy scent of sex and he felt reborn.
Miranda left him sprawled limply in the chair and walked over to the bank of filing cabinets.
She bent down to open the drawer marked L-M, giving him a provocative view of shapely buttocks that would have made him hard again if he'd been ten years younger. As it was, he was content to enjoy the view.
She murmured the client names to herself as she flipped through the manila files.
"Aha!" She retrieved one thick file, then turned, flashing him a brilliant smile over her shoulder. "Eureka."
As he watched her green eyes avidly skim through the pages of legalese, Theodore Galbraith's head began to clear.
The mists gradually parted. His body cooled.
Too late he thought of his longtime friend and client, Eleanor Lord. And what he had done.
Chapter Nine
It was healing work, which kept Alex from regretting the loss of her dream of a life in Paris couture. It was exhausting work, which allowed her to fall into a deep and dreamless sleep each night. And it was exciting work, which encouraged her to greet each new morning with optimism.
As for men, the debacle with Debord had made her take a long hard look at her past relationships.
It was her sophomore year at Phoenix's Thunderbird High School that she'd finally—at last!—gotten her period, and her body, as if anxious to make up for lost time, had sprinted into womanhood. Adolescent boys began falling all over themselves, trying to lure this dazzling wonder of femininity into the back seats of their Dodge Chargers and Ford Mustangs.
Alex had found their juvenile, unsubtle seduction attempts admittedly flattering. She liked them buzzing so intently around her, like a hive of drones around their queen bee.
However, wise beyond her years, she realized they only saw her attractive packaging. Those boys had absolutely no interest in who she was inside, in her hopes and dreams and goals. That being the case, while she might permit a bit of heavy breathing and some harmless groping in the back row of the movie theater, she steadfastly refused to "go all the way."
It was during her first year at the Fashion Institute that she willingly surrendered her virginity to a fashion photographer twenty-five years her senior who'd come to L.A. to shoot a spread for Vogue and had agreed as a favor for a friend—an instructor at the institute—to give a lecture while in town.
Alex had not been surprised when he asked her to dinner that night. Nor was she surprised when dinner melded into breakfast. She was ready to make love; she'd only been waiting for the right man.
Max Jones had been funny and kind and sexy, and when he returned to Manhattan, as she'd known all along he must, Alex had not harbored a single regret.
A pattern she hadn't even realized she'd been setting continued. Indeed, if Alex possessed a fatal flaw, it was her unfortunate habit of getting involved with domineering older men.
Her last lover before leaving for Paris had been a Seventh Avenue district sales representative nearly twice her age. But unlike the man to whom she'd joyfully given her virginity, Herb Stein was overbearing and possessive.
Which was why, when he began employing every emotional trick in the book to keep her from going to Paris, she'd broken off the affair and concentrated on making her mother's last days as comfortable as possible.
Irene Lyons, outspoken to the end, had always argued against Alex's romantic choices. "Of course, you don't need to be Freud," she'd say, whenever Alex returned from dinner with one of these cookie-cutter characters, "to realize that you're looking for a father figure, Alexandra, dear."
And although she'd steadfastly denied her mother's claim, Alex's experience with Debord had stripped the blinders from her eyes, forcing her to face a bitter truth about herself.
Her mother had been right. All her lovers had been cut from the same cloth. Such an unpalatable revelation made her realize it was time for a drastic change.
Other women may have vowed simply to modify the self-destructive pattern by turning toward men their own age. Not Alex. Never one to do anything in half measures, with a determination a Carmelite nun might have envied, she vowed not to even think about sex.
With the same tenacity she'd used to gain employment in Paris, Alex set about changing her image, too. Although it was not easy, she purposefully dimmed the glowing aura of vibrant energy in which she usually moved. She narrowed her normally animated gestures and muted her voice. She even went so far as to eschew her usual flamboyant colors, opting instead for more somber hues.
"We waited for you," Sophie complained late one November afternoon, "until the turkey turned as dry as shoe leather."
Sophie had invited her to Thanksgiving dinner with a group of friends. "I'm sorry. I really intended to come…."
"But you got sidetracked. Again."
Alex's answering smile was sheepishly apologetic. "I thought of a new idea for Tiffany's wedding gown."
A newly devised plot twist now had the stripper marrying the oil tycoon's son while continuing her affair with her groom's father. A perfectionist by nature, Alex had discarded three gown ideas Sophie had found delightful.
"By the time I was satisfied with the sketch, it was too late to call."
"Peter was disappointed."
Peter Collins was an Australian actor who'd come to the States and gotten his start in Sophie's daytime drama, "The Edge of Tomorrow." Since the stunningly profitable release of his first major adventure film three months ago, he'd shot like a comet to the top of the A-list of every hostess in town.
"I'm sure he'll survive," Alex murmured dryly. She had no interest in meeting any man. Even one who was being touted as an Australian Harrison Ford.
"Besides," she argued, "didn't I see his picture on the cover of People with Debra Winger? The caption said they were about to become engaged."
"That was a publicity date for their new picture. Peter doesn't date actresses. He believes they're too self-involved."
The older woman frowned with well-meaning concern. "You know, darling, as much as I appreciate your devotion to 'Blue Bayou,' you're in danger of becoming an workaholic."
"This from a woman who's been known to sleep in her office to save the commute time," Alex said. "Besides, you don't have to worry about me. I'm happier than I've ever been in my life."
Despite Alex's profession of happiness, it had not escaped Sophie's notice that the light that had shone so brightly in her eyes in Paris had been snuffed out like a candle in an icy wind. Sophie had remained quiet the past five months, waiting for Alex to come to her for a heart-to-heart talk. She realized, with her unerring ability to get beneath the surface of a character, that Alex's metamorphosis had been purposefully planned and executed.
But what Alex didn't realize, Sophie mused now, was that her subterfuge wasn't working. Because all she had to do was walk into a room and it was instantly illuminated by her talent, her independence, and her natural beauty of face and spirit.
Although she was willing to grant Alex her secrets, Sophie had not reached such high echelons in a male-dominated business without being persistent. "You say you're happy. Even so, how do you know Peter wouldn't be the icing on the cake?"
Unwilling to discuss her love life, or lack of it,
even with this woman who'd become her best friend, Alex decided it was time to change the subject. "Don't you want to see what I was working on?"
She handed Sophie the sketches. The diversion proved successful. As the producer oohed and aahed over the billowy white vision of crystal-studded tulle and lace, ideas of matchmaking were immediately forgotten.
* * *
After convincing Eleanor she should be given the job of organizing the Yves Debord boutiques in all the Lord's stores—after all, who knew the designer's genius better than she?—Miranda threw herself into the task, traveling all over the United States. Although her work was time-consuming, she was careful to fit in regular trips to California.
She and Zach spent Thanksgiving in Santa Barbara with Eleanor. Although Miranda was far from pleased that Clara was still in residence, after reading her aunt's will, she did not feel as threatened by the witch's presence. Especially after paying another visit to Theodore Galbraith, ensuring his promise to notify her if Eleanor decided to revise her will.
The day after Thanksgiving, they returned to Zach's Los Angeles apartment. And to his bed, where they proceeded to ravish one another with a hunger that had not lessened since that first electrifying meeting. Two days later, they were still there.
"Have I ever told you how magnificent you are?" Miranda purred with satisfaction. Her head rested on his damp chest, her fingers playing in the pelt of hair, and her long legs were entwined with his.
"I believe you've mentioned it," Zach murmured drowsily. After two days of ravenous and near-continuous sex, he was finally satiated. "Occasionally." On this late November day, it was still warm enough for air-conditioning. When the cool breeze blew over their sweat-moistened flesh, he pulled the sheet up to cover them. "But it's always nice to hear."
Miranda smiled at him. "I've never met a man like you."
Zach returned the smile with a lazy, satisfied one of his own. "Nor I a woman like you." It was the truth. From the first moment he'd seen Miranda, he'd wanted her. And the need, rather than abating, grew stronger each time they were together this way.