by Barbara Daly
One look at his scores, and the University of Chicago Law School had snapped him up. What they didn't know was that he didn't know how to study, and that's where Mallory had turned his life around. He couldn't remember exactly how it had happened, just that he'd called her, admitted he was floundering and asked for her help. And she'd been his unofficial, unpaid tutor. He'd never even taken her out for dinner. He'd been afraid to ask.
Did she remember what a dolt he'd been?
Carter frowned. He'd better do a little more work, get familiar with the details, have a few intelligent questions to ask Mallory and, even better, a couple of intelligent comments to make. In short, he'd better get off this nostalgia trip and focus on the damned files.
The phone rang just as Mallory finished packing the flexible wardrobe her mother had been claiming for years would get a woman through anything for any length of time. True to form, when she finished, she actually had room to spare.
"Mallory? Carter," said the caller.
It was like a tummy punch, that deep, warm voice. "Hi, Carter." She kept hers cool as a waterfall. That was just how great an impact her mother's books had on her. A short session with that practical, unromantic voice had returned her to her normal, sane self. She would be fine on this trip.
"I'm calling with a question," he said. "Why pea-green? Why not just green?"
Mallory blinked. "Well—" She was confident there was a reason, but the sound of his voice, the very fact that he'd called, was making inroads on her normal, sane self. It was maddening. "There are numerous shades of green, lime-green, forest-green, Kelly-green…"
"Would you be less upset if your hair were lime-green instead of pea-green?"
"Um. No, I suppose not."
"Then the use of 'pea-green,' which has a negative connotation, instead of just 'green,' which is more neutral, is a deliberate attempt on the part of the plaintiffs to make the green sound as disgusting as possible." He sounded triumphant.
"But I just said it wouldn't matter if—"
"Just something to think about. Okay. See you at the gate tomorrow."
"Okay, I'll—" But he wasn't there anymore. It was the first time he'd called her since law school, and all he'd wanted was to discuss the impact of pea-green over plain green on a potential jury.
She whirled to stare at herself in the mirror. She might not be gorgeous, but why, exactly, didn't her colleagues think of her as a woman? Forget the colleagues. Why hadn't Carter ever seen her as a woman?
She had to admit she looked none too sexy with her teeth clenched together. She whirled back, and her gaze fell on her suitcase. She still had room. What could she take that was a little more exciting than black and more black and a touch of white?
With frantic fingertips she went through the sparse collection of clothes in her closet, wondering why she bothered. She knew what she owned. More black, more white, a small navy grouping and the thrill of one gray suit and one beige. No surprises were hiding in there.
It was too late to go shopping, but not too late to call her friend Carol the Consummate Clotheshorse down on the fifth floor. Carol had flown back early from St. John's, too, for a reason their friends understood, to make a raid on Marshall Field's post-Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas sales racks. She'd have something old she'd be willing to loan.
"Carol," she began, "I'm going to New York."
"Mallory the Jet-setter," Carol said. "Didn't know you had it in you."
Mallory clenched her teeth. "It's business," she said crisply. "I was wondering if I might borrow one extra jacket from you."
"Anything," Carol said fervently. "If you'd wear something besides a suit and midheel orthopedic pumps, I'd give you rights to my whole closet. All my closets," she corrected herself. "What kind of jacket did you have in mind?"
"Something that goes well with black," Mallory said, floundering in the alternatives and also realizing this wasn't the first time a friend had commented on her penchant for suits and dowdy shoes. It was just the first time it had upset her.
A dangerous thought ran through her mind. Herself in a low-necked, scarlet top, and Carter's fingertips edging the cleavage, then dipping beneath the fabric…
She stammered the words out. "I was thinking … red." There. She'd veered again. It was getting easier each time. Not processing her mail, then wine, now red.
"Ooh," Carol said. "I've got a red jacket that would look great on you. I'll bring it right up and hang it on your doorknob. I know you're busy packing."
Mallory was already having second thoughts, but a red jacket seemed like such a tiny veer that it hardly seemed worth worrying about. "Thanks, Carol. I'll return the favor as soon as possible."
"You can return it right now. Do you have any stamps?"
"Of course." She had every staple of everyday life in bulk, just as the efficient woman should. "I'll leave them on the foyer table. And Carol?"
"Um?"
"May I leave you a copy of my itinerary?"
"Sure. But you said New York. Just tell me where you're staying."
"The St. Regis," Mallory said, "but there's more information than that. Flight numbers, who to call just in case…"
"And the suit you'd like to be buried in," Carol said with a sigh Mallory had also heard from more than one of her friends. "I'll wait fifteen minutes before I bring up the jacket." She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice had taken on a new tone. "You're going to love this jacket."
Did Carol's voice have a sly edge, or was she imagining it? She hadn't been imagining it, a fact she learned when she unhooked the red jacket from her doorknob.
Mallory looked it over, and then, dismayed, tried it on. Had she gained weight? She and Carol had always been the same size. But this jacket hugged her waist, pushed up her breasts and flared out over her hipbones, ending much too soon to hide her rear end, which Mallory felt was the best reason to wear a jacket.
Carol had undoubtedly meant well, but Mallory was sure she could never bring herself to go out in public in this jacket. Still, she didn't want to appear ungrateful. She folded it in the "Ellen Trent fold" and used it to fill the empty space in her roll-on bag. If this insane craving for red lasted, she'd buy a proper blazer in New York.
She closed her mother's book and held it in her hand for a moment, then slid it into her suitcase. Having it with her would be like wearing garlic to ward off illness or holding a cross to shield herself from the devil.
The devil being Carter.
Carter drummed on his desktop with the pen he held the same way he used to hold a cigarette. He'd thought the pea-green query had been a good question for Mallory, but he could tell from her hesitation that she'd thought it was a damned silly question and she would probably have said so if she weren't such a well-brought-up girl.
She wasn't a girl anymore. She was all woman.
Feeling as if he'd regressed ten years, he threw everything into his briefcase and went home to his Lake Shore Drive
apartment. It was a mess. He was glad to be leaving it, and his cleaning service would deal with it before he got back. He'd forgotten to pick up the pizza and had to order one in. It didn't arrive until he'd finished packing, so he ate it in bed while he watched the news. He reflected that he still had that spoiled rich kid inside him, and every now and then, he had to let him out.
Feeling that the smell of pepperoni might follow him all the days of his life, he picked a thread of mozzarella cheese off his favorite pillow, pounded it into a comfortable configuration and tried very hard to get a good night's sleep.
Good luck. But exhaustion took over, and next thing he knew, he was at the airport waiting for Mallory.
So where the hell was she?
He'd arrived at the gate at a time he thought was a polite compromise between the airline's ridiculous demands and the reality of the situation, but he'd been there fifteen minutes now with no sign of the woman.
Maybe she was there and ignoring him, the way she did at work parties where he'd ca
ught an occasional glimpse of her but could never seem to catch up with her.
With more relief than he wanted to admit to, he saw her aiming toward him, tall, elegant, dressed all in black with that silver-blond hair swinging forward on her shoulders.
As far as he knew, it was her natural hair color, and he assumed that as she grew older, it would go gently from silver-blond to silver-gray. You would hardly notice. Especially since you hardly noticed Mallory in the first place.
He stood up, started to smile at her, then felt his eyebrows drawing together in a frown as he wondered why his heart had speeded up a little. He really had to cut down on the caffeine. He had so much adrenaline pumping through him all the time he didn't need caffeine at all.
She was, in fact, a great-looking woman. The man across from him was giving her an appreciative gaze as she moved between them, pulling a roll-on briefcase behind her.
Damn. She'd checked her luggage. Collecting it would take an extra thirty minutes at LaGuardia. His frown deepened, but whether it was because of the luggage or the appreciative male he was suddenly unsure.
"Hi," was all she said.
The word came through full lips of the palest pink, and her voice was rich and throaty. Something about it, or maybe it was the look that man across from him was giving her, made him put his arm around her, nothing more than a cocktail party-type hug, but his heart did an even more violent flip-flop. This was absurd. He removed his arm in a hurry and said, "Mallory. What kept you?"
He was thinking about talking to his doctor about that little aortic thing when she said, "You're here so early! How can you work here? You must be able to focus better than I can. I always wait until the very last second to get to the gate, because…"
As the appreciative man finally dropped his gaze to his newspaper, Carter had a cooling memory of the reason he hadn't tried to make love to her during their law school years. It was clear she didn't want him to. Although her voice sounded a little breathless, it was probably from hurrying, because everything else about her said, "Don't touch."
"I just got here myself," he said, and this time he managed a smile. "I guess you got held up checking bags."
"No," Mallory assured him. "This is it." She gestured toward the roll-on, and her ice-pale hair swung forward on her shoulders in a perfect, shining arc.
Carter gazed at the bag with new curiosity. What did she have in there, freeze-dried outfits that expanded when dipped in water? He'd taken Diana to Acapulco last weekend—Diana and four matched pieces of tapestry-covered luggage—where he'd discovered that looking at beautifully dressed Diana was all he would ever care to do. A wasted weekend, and he had so few free ones.
"Planning a shopping spree?" he asked Mallory.
With a single glance through blue-green eyes as ice-pale as her hair and lipstick, she made him feel like the worst and most odious of male chauvinists. "Of course not. I'm going to New York to work, not shop."
Was she always that way? Or just with him? That made her the only woman in the world who was like that with him.
"Welcome to United Airlines flight four-oh-three," an agent piped up. "We are now boarding First Class and Premier members."
Carter chewed on his lower lip while they joined the line to board. He was afraid he knew why Mallory acted this way with him, and it didn't bode well for their working relationship, which, he could easily see, was the only kind of relationship she cared to have with him.
But with so many other women in the world, why should he care?
* * *
3
« ^ »
As soon as they were settled on the plane, she was going to let herself breathe. As soon as they were settled side by side in the generous first-class seats, she began to fear she might never breathe again.
One little hug and the lectures she'd given herself the night before had flown from her mind. All these years she'd done the right thing to hide on the other side of the room when she glimpsed him at professional meetings. At a cocktail party he might have kissed her! The kiss wouldn't have been any more passionate than the hug had been, but her libido didn't seem to care what state his was in. One kiss and she would have poured herself over him like a spilled Cosmopolitan. That first touch of his hand had brought back all the young, yearning feelings in full force—way too full, way too forceful.
His eyes, so darkly blue they were almost black, still advertised the passion in his body and soul—a passion for women, for life, for the law. Those eyes, and the expressive brows above them, were the key to his magnetism. Without those eyes he'd be a mere mortal—a tall, magnificently built mortal whose hair commanded you to touch it. If possible, while sitting on his lap. Straddling him. A heavy ache settled between her thighs. Not possible. Never would be possible, because…
"Something to drink before takeoff, sir?" asked the flight attendant. Her liquid hazel eyes slid smoothly over the entire and considerable length of Carter.
"Mallory?" Carter turned his gaze on Mallory rather than on the flight attendant with the roaming eyes.
"Hemlock." It came out like a soft moan. Carter and the flight attendant both stared at her. "Hazelnut," she said hastily. "Hazelnut coffee if you have it."
"No hazelnut," said the attendant.
"Plain is fine," Mallory conceded. "Decaffeinated." She couldn't take another jolt. Of anything.
"Orange juice," Carter said after a brief pause. "No, make it tomato."
You can make it with this tomato anytime, the attendant's eyes answered back.
Mallory spied on Carter out of the corner of her eye, waiting to see his flashing smile, his unspoken promise that he found the woman beautiful, and if things worked out, well, maybe. There it was, the start of a smile, followed amazingly by a frown.
That was new, Carter frowning at a flirtatious woman. And it didn't bear thinking about, because it might get her hopes up, and she had no hope of having a personal relationship with Carter. She'd just have to be content with relating to him in the one area in which she felt secure—the Green case.
"Could we use the flight time to talk about the case?" she asked him, knowing she sounded prim and stodgy next to the sexpot in uniform. "I'll boot up my laptop as soon as we're in the air so we can refer to the interrogatories."
"Oh, sure," Carter said, "the sooner we get to work the better."
Truer words had never been spoken, he thought. The plane took off smoothly, but he felt as if he'd been sucked into a tornado funnel. He only hoped the funnel would drop him somewhere safe. He had an odd feeling he wasn't safe with Mallory anymore.
He sneaked a sidelong glance at her. It wasn't her clothes. Her pantsuit looked like a good one, but it was definitely a working suit, prim and proper. Wasn't her makeup, either, even though at Sensuous, he suspected, makeup samples were among the perks of the job. Not that he knew much about makeup, but it looked as if all she'd done was darken her brows and lashes a little, put a smudge of powder on her nose and the shiny pink lipstick on her mouth and let it go at that.
They were long. Her eyelashes. He'd never noticed before. She hadn't darkened them in law school, or he hadn't been looking at anything but her grade point average. She'd gotten him through Constitutional Law, that was for sure. But now he couldn't imagine how she'd done it without his noticing her eyelashes.
"Do you think that's an approach we could use? I know it's a little unorthodox, but it might work in this particular case."
What the hell had she been saying while he was admiring her eyelashes? "Ah … um … I'll have to think it over," Carter said, tumbling out of the tornado cloud into extremely dangerous territory.
Directly onto solid ice, in fact. The ice of her blue eyes as she glared at him. "You weren't listening."
"Mallory, Mallory." He assumed the hurt, bassett hound look that had always worked when he was supposed to be romancing a woman and was instead thinking about a case. Except this time it was the other way around. "When have I ever not listened to you?"
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"Just now," Mallory said, looking at him as if he were a bit of dog poop on her sturdy, sensible-looking black pump.
He guessed she'd never forget that without her help, he would have failed that Con Law exam and probably flunked out of law school. The night he studied with her had started him off on the road to respectability, but she would never be able to respect his intellect. That's why she'd never come on to him. Mallory would have to respect a man in order to feel an attraction to him.
Well, he'd just have to do something to change her image of him. He also knew it would take time to win her over. For now, he would do the only thing that seemed appropriate.
He smiled at her.
One minute she'd been flying on a horizontal line high above the clouds, and the next minute, transported by his smile, she was rocketing toward outer space. That smile said "woman," not "lawyer." The oddest little sensation started up in the region of her abdomen—well, lower than that—and buzzed out in all directions. Her body felt hot, damp and twitchy, while her mouth went dry.
It had also fallen open. She snapped it shut, then opened it again. "What I was suggesting was a touch of irony in the proceedings," she said from her position high above the clouds. Her voice sounded thin and high to her own ears, probably due to the lack of oxygen. "As in, 'What's so bad about pea-green hair and nails? Teenagers are paying big bucks to have green hair.'"
That smile of his widened. While it was a little less suggestive now that it was wider, it only increased its effect on her. The newspaper report flashed through her head:
Lawyer Assaults Colleague On Cross-Continental Flight
"I don't know what came over me," said Mallory Trent in her confession to the airline security squad. "I must have experienced a moment of insanity to have done something so out-of-character as to rip off my stockings and panties and fling myself on top of the plaintiff."